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Tapachula, in southern Mexico, is not exempt from being an ugly and unfriendly border city. It is a corridor for thousands of migrants who beg for money on the streets, desperate to amass capital that will allow them to reach the United States. Some better informed stay in shelters waiting for a humanitarian visa. This is the case of Marcos Amador, a Honduran who recently escaped gang violence in his country.
They wanted to recruit his 17-year-old son by force. Either he joined the ‘Barrio 18’ gang, one of the transnational criminal gangs in Central and North America, or he would be killed along with his family. Faced with the threat recorded in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Marcos and Axel decided to flee their country on June 8, 2022.
There was barely time to pack a simple suitcase. Two bags, a blanket, two changes of clothes, medication for headaches and toothaches, the “sword of God” as it is called in the Bible, and toiletries that favor deodorant and Vaseline. All wrapped up in a backpack that weighs less than 5 kilos for two people.
After fleeing Tegucigalpa, Marcos and his son left Honduras through the northern border of this Central American country and crossed Guatemala on buses. According to reports, both the Guatemalan police and military extorted them repeatedly at checkpoints along the road. “They asked for 100 quetzales for each one,” says Marcos. And so, from time to time, the $200 with which they had escaped evaporated.
Tapachula, the border city where migrants have only two options to continue their journey
With no money in their pockets, but with their faith intact, Marcos and Axel managed to cross Guatemala and arrive in Tapachula, the first Mexican city on their journey to the United States. There the information is clear and translucent: you can only leave Tapachula in two ways.
The first and riskiest is through a migrant caravan, a massive phenomenon in which thousands of refugees march en masse, with no danger of being apprehended and deported by agents of Mexico’s National Migration Institute. But these caravans form like a hurricane, out of the blue. Nothing is written and we would have to wait. The second option to emigrate from Tapachula to the north of Mexico is through the ‘classic’ way, that is, requesting asylum status before the Refugee Aid Commission, Comar.
The process before the Comar poses two moments: the first corresponds to the asylum application, for which a queue of at least six hours must be made. Once the diligence is completed, Comar delivers a document in which the date of an appointment is recorded, which is generally two months from the date of the appointment. And after this appointment is completed, the same institution will take an estimated time of between 3 and 6 months to analyze the case in question and determine whether or not to issue a humanitarian visa for the applicant.
In the case of Marcos and his son Axel, the odds are favorable. For Hondurans, according to statistics, the majority of asylum applications are approved, in contrast to the negatives for Haitians, to cite an example. The sad thing is that the Comar offices throughout the Mexican territory, and more so in Tapachula, are overwhelmed.
In 2021, the Comar offices registered 130,863 asylum applications, of which 38,005 were processed, which corresponds to less than 30 percent. For the United Nations Office for Refugee Assistance, UNHCR, it is the third region in the world with the largest refugee crisis.
Despite the scarcity, Marcos and Axel aspire that from the hand of “the sword of God” -the Bible- and the support they receive from the shelter ‘El Buen Pastor’ in Tapachula, their transit in the south of Mexico will be successful. In their aspirations is that before the end of 2022 they can obtain a humanitarian visa to leave for the United States, where a relative awaits them with open arms in Houston, Texas. Because they never plan to return to Honduras, their country of origin.
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