A massive caravan with hundreds of migrants left this Saturday from Tapachula, a Mexican municipality on the border with Guatemala, with the purpose of marching to Mexico City. The group, made up mostly of Central American and Haitian refugees, seeks to reach the capital to try to process a document and regularize their situation in the country. Many aspire to later reach the United States, but the force that pushed them away from the southern border has now been the conditions they suffer in the city, in which many have spent months trapped waiting for papers that never arrive.
During its journey through the State of Chiapas, the column has overcome a first blockade by agents of the National Guard, who act in support of the National Institute of Migration (INM). This caravan, organized by activists Irineo Mujica, from the NGO Pueblo Sin Frontera, and Luis García Villagrán, from the Center for Human Dignification, has been formed almost two months after the last attempts, when the uniformed men stopped four groups that had left the same city. The goal is the same: to get to Mexico City and get papers.
Tapachula has become a kind of prison for thousands of people who come in search of opportunities, expelled by the misery or violence of Honduras, Guatemala and other countries in Central America. But in recent months the number of Haitians has multiplied, who often have not set foot in their country for years, where today the State has lost control in the face of the push of criminal gangs. In many cases, these migrants have documentation from a South American country such as Chile or Brazil, where they settled as refugees.
However, there was a pull-back effect in August when Washington extended the deadlines to qualify for a temporary protection program known as TPS. The measure only affects Haitians who are already in the United States, although as happened at the end of 2020 after Biden’s victory over Donald Trump, it had a direct impact on migratory flows. In September, thousands of migrants were trapped on the border between Ciudad Acuña, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, and Del Río, in Texas. On the US side there were chilling scenes of chases and arrests by the mounted police, for which Biden apologized. On the Mexican side, the authorities forced the deportations with a return that they called “voluntary” and that in practice became the only option for hundreds of people to avoid arrest.
Between January and August, the National Migration Institute identified 147,033 people who “were passing through the national territory in an irregular condition.” Unprecedented figures like that of a week ago, when agents redoubled controls in 22 states and intercepted almost 2,000 people in a single day. The Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (COMAR), a public body linked to the Ministry of the Interior, also estimates that this 2021 asylum requests will be more than 100,000. Most of these migrants live crowded together in Tapachula and other towns on the southern and northern borders.
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