The premature deployment of the National Guard in trouble spots in Tapachula reveals that there is still a certain confusion of who is who in their ranks. With almost identical uniforms, in pixelated greens, the Army and Navy troops are not distinguishable at first sight, because although not scrambled, they arrive together, and except for the color of the boots and some insignia, even they have to be justified if they are Question. First of all, they are distributed in the 12th-century station, usually the hottest place in terms of migrants and their affairs.
The federal police that used to stay in downtown hotels, this Thursday were concentrated in the Mesoamerican Fair to settle in conditioned trailers. This location is another enclosure for undocumented immigrants. As the migra say, there are the extracontinental ones.
In recent days, the authorities opened a new confinement site in the Tapachula Center of Coexistence, a well-equipped municipal gymnasium where nuclear families are held and will most likely be deported. The place, as hermetic as those who protect it, is inaccessible to the press.
This weekend was recurrent the picture, somewhat strange and peaceful, federal police under an awning, troops of sea and land in their vehicles, not far from African and Caribbean migrants surrounding a pick up from which members of the group Missionaries of Jesus Christ Risen distributed modest food: bobbin, bags with some rice, cookies and water poured into their own containers. A doctor-driver gives quick consultations at the foot of the vehicle to women and children. All this is simultaneous and runs against the white walls and the entrance arch to the private cemetery Prados del Descanso.
▲ It is common for the streets of the Chiapas municipality of Tapachula to wander undocumented from different countries in search of food or a place to spend the night.
The city was always a frontier, but now its human appearance has changed. Through the central streets, the wandering of migrant people continues, who may stay there or look for food, see the taquerias and seafood restaurants beyond their reach, fill the convenience stores to load their cell phones. They are and they are not, they are and they are not.
The asphalt river that separates Haiti from Africa in Tapachula is also a beautiful human river. People of clean color and dressed with style even in extreme precariousness. The tones of the rainbow. The stellar shirts of the men, the 10 of Neymar or Maradona, of Bob Marley. Women go lightly on rags and steps. Reuben has been sleeping in the forest for two months , here close by, with his wife and son; They come from Cameroon and their shirt is Messi’s.
Reality puts the soundtrack. Crossing the road, a bower spits Desmond Dekker with Shantytown, a song so literal here that it would seem that the chronicler is inventing. On the other side, those from the Congo reverberate their powerful music downloaded from the Internet right here. The importance of clothing, hairstyles, and music has a lot of meaning. Between fear and the need to know oneself visible, between the silence of the illegal and the urge to shout from the sufferer, they are people sending us signs of existence.
If the Mexican State does not increase the capacity of migratory infrastructure, with trained personnel and quick responses to the hundreds, thousands of migrants that arrive in the country, the acts of violence in the stations where they are housed. they will gradually become more acute. We are one step away from some incidents and tumults turning into a real tragedy , said Javier Urbano Reyes, a professor-researcher at the Universidad Iberoamericana and a specialist in migration issues.
For more than a year now we have been warning about this type of tendencies , said the academic, who also pointed out that the different levels of government have been overtaken by the great growth that the migratory flow has had in recent years, in which Central Americans have now joined Venezuelans, Cubans and people from several countries in Africa.
For some time now, the Collective of Observation and Monitoring of Human Rights in Southeast Mexico – where the Jesuit Network with Migrants from Central and North America is located – has questioned the actions of the Mexican government and pointed out several human rights violations against migrants , among them the temporary closure of the regularization offices and the lack of clear information on the processes that each of the people would have to carry out in order to legalize their stay in Mexico, generating serious uncertainty among those groups in transit and taking them to the limit of their emotional stability, a fact that is considered cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
In an interview, Javier Urbano Reyes considered that the absence of the capacity of the Mexican State to meet and respond to this population is generating a violent response from the different groups of migrants.
I am not justifying the reaction and behavior of these groups or people; What I am saying is that, to a large extent, violent behavior has to do with a decades-long backlash in the Mexican government’s migration management policy, which was only shaped by containment, deportations and to see the migration in transit that we still have .
Trump aggravated the situation
The specialist explained that the anti-immigrant policy in the United States, aggravated by the arrival of President Donald Trump, has generated a mobilization by default , where migrants arrive at a place they did not want, either on the migratory route or at the borders. say, they have arrived in Mexico.
This is what is causing serious problems of management to the Mexican immigration authority, because we were accustomed to a certain migration flow that was only transit, (but) now they are staying and beyond the asylum-refuge, today they are asking for settlement permits , to obtain the residence, and also for temporary or definitive stay , said the researcher of the Ibero .
All this, in a context in which the Mexican authority has never, in contemporary history, had neither trained nor professionalized personnel, much less has it made the necessary investment in infrastructure to meet a demand that could have initially been 200 people a day, to 1,000 or 1,500 different profile applications that are currently presented.
Source: La Jornada
The Mazatlan Post
