A caravan of some 5,000 migrants left the southern metropolis of Tapachula, Chiapas, on Monday, starting a journey by way of Mexico that they hope will take all of them the best way to the northern border and into the USA.
Migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba made up the majority of the big group, in response to the newspaper La Jornada. They intend to journey to the northern border and search asylum in the USA, El Common reported.
The migrants set off from a park in Tapachula at about 6 a.m. and deliberate to stroll about 15 kilometers to the city of Álvaro Obregón. On Tuesday, they hope to get to Huehuetán, the executive middle of the municipality of the identical title.
The Mexico-United States border at Matamoros, Tamaulipas, is over 1,600 kilometers from Huehuetán, whereas Tijuana, Baja California is nearly 4,000 kilometers away.
Migrants sometimes stroll, hitch rides on vehicles and bounce aboard freight trains to realize their objective of attending to Mexican border cities.
The journey is a harmful one. Migrants are often preyed upon by prison teams, whose members have been recognized to forcibly recruit males and rape ladies. Touring in a big caravan would possibly make the journey safer, however such teams sometimes break up as they transfer by way of the nation.
Numerous migrants have been detected by authorities touring in scorching and cramped situations inside tractor-trailers, whereas many have been killed in freeway accidents. Different migrants have died or sustained critical accidents after falling from freight trains collectively often known as La Bestía (the Beast).
Irineo Mújica of the immigration rights group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (Individuals With out Borders) mentioned that the migrants who departed Tapachula on Monday morning despatched a letter to Nationwide Migration Institute (INM) director Francisco Garduño to ask for permits that might permit them to journey legally by way of Mexico to the border. However they didn’t get a response, Mújica mentioned.
He mentioned that the migrants determined to start their northward journey as there aren’t any jobs in Tapachula and getting paperwork from the INM and the Mexican Fee for Refugee Help (COMAR) can take so long as a 12 months.
Quite a lot of migrants are pressured to dwell on the streets in Tapachula, Mújica mentioned, explaining that rents and meals are each costly.
Carlos Eduardo Martínez, a Honduran, advised La Jornada he determined to affix the migrant caravan as a result of he couldn’t discover a job in Tapachula and his appointment with COMAR was three months away.
“I couldn’t preserve ready with out cash, sleeping on the road, it’s not life,” he mentioned.
“We’re higher off making our means up [north] and hoping that the federal government helps, doesn’t cease us,” Martínez mentioned.
The caravan handed by way of a migration checkpoint manned by Nationwide Guard troops in the neighborhood of Viva México “with none restriction,” Milenio reported.
José Alberto María mentioned he determined to depart Guatemala as a result of he was a sufferer of extortion whereas working as an assistant on public buses. He mentioned he was pressured to pay round 500 quetzales (about US $64) per week to members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, leaving him with simply 200 or 300 quetzales to cowl the bills of his five-person household.
El Common reported that there are numerous households, together with infants and younger kids, among the many members of the caravan, which was accompanied by police automobiles and ambulances.
Enormous numbers of migrants have traveled by way of Mexico to the USA over the previous 12 months as components equivalent to crime, poverty and political issues push individuals out of a number of Central American, South American and Caribbean international locations.
President López Obrador hosted a regional migration summit in Chiapas on Oct. 22, after which the governments of 10 international locations agreed to attract up “an motion plan for improvement … to take care of the structural causes of irregular migration within the area.”
With experiences from La Jornada, Milenio and El Common
