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This Saturday, thousands of migrants, mostly from Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, set out in a new caravan from southern Mexico in Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, with the aim of reaching Mexico City, to apply for asylum and refugee status. Without success, the forces of order tried to stop the massive march.
Some 3,000 people, including families with young children, began marching from the city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, to the Mexican capital in protest of the government’s non-attendance in the south, where officials have tried to contain thousands. of migrants, and require legal documents that allow foreigners to move freely in the country.
The migrant march “For Freedom, Dignity and Peace” started this Saturday at 8:00 am (13:00 GMT) from Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, and seeks to travel about 1,160 kilometers to the Mexican capital.
400 riot control officers on the Tapachula highway tried to contain the crowd, but the group of migrants carrying backpacks and children on their shoulders pushed the officers past the blockade to head north. In the struggle, a family, including a woman and small children, fell to the ground in the crowd.
In September, the Mexican authorities thwarted the advance of four migrant caravans from Tapachula, a city where thousands of foreigners of at least 12 nationalities have arrived in recent weeks. International human rights organizations and the UN criticized the brutal treatment by Mexican officials, and the government’s National Migration Institute condemned the incidents of violence captured on video.
US authorities arrested more than 1.7 million migrants at the US-Mexico border during this fiscal year, a number never before recorded.
Migrants intend to arrive in the Mexican capital to regularize their situation
The strategy of this great march of migrants, supported by the NGO Pueblo Sin Fronteras, will be to walk in groups and without leaving anyone behind, avoiding the authorities, from whom they will ask for respect for their walk, they said.
Human rights activists Irineo Mujica and Luis Rey García Villagrán brought 46 packages with petitions to federal judges to allow migrants to leave Tapachula on this walk.
The region has experienced an unprecedented migratory wave since the beginning of the year with a historical flow of 147,000 undocumented persons detected in Mexico from January to August, triple that of 2020, and a record of 212,000 migrants detained only in July by the Customs and Protection Office. Border (CBP) of the United States.
With Reuters and EFE
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