Mexico began requiring visas for Peruvians on Monday in response to a large flood of migrants from the South American country, after taking identical measures for Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Brazilians. In practice, that measure eliminated the option of traveling by plane to a Mexican city near the U.S. border, as Paredes, 45, did just before it was too late.
“I left like it was an emergency,” said Paredes, who worked serving meals to miners in Arequipa, Peru, and borrowed money to fly to Tijuana, Mexico, across from San Diego. Last month, smugglers guided her through a remote hole. along the border wall to a vacant lot in California, where she and about a hundred migrants from around the world tried to warm themselves at bonfires after a morning drizzle and waited for overwhelmed Border Patrol agents to take them by road. to a center to process them.
Speaking to reporters this week before a meeting in Guatemala of top diplomats from some 20 Western Hemisphere countries, Senior U.S. officials praised Mexico’s restrictions on air travel from Peru and described the visa requirement as an important tool to jointly combat illegal migration.
For critics, cutting the air route only encourages more dangerous options. Illegal entries by Venezuelans plummeted after Mexico imposed visa requirements in January 2022, but the lull was brief. Last year, Venezuelans accounted for almost two-thirds of the record 520,000 migrants who trekked through the Darien jungle, which covers parts of Panama and Colombia.
More than 25,000 Chinese citizens crossed the Darien last year. They typically fly to Ecuador, a country known for its few travel restrictions, and illegally cross the U.S. border in San Diego to seek asylum. With a backlog of 3 million immigration cases, processing those applications takes years, during which people can obtain work permits and put down roots.
“People are going to come no matter what,” said Miguel Yaranga, 22, who traveled from Lima, Peru’s capital, to Tijuana, and was released by Border Patrol on Sunday at a San Diego bus stop. He is ordered to appear in immigration court in New York in February 2025, which puzzled him because he had told agents that he would settle with his sister on the other side of the country, in Bakersfield, California.
Jeremy MacGilliveay, number two of the delegation in Mexico of the United Nations International Organization for Migration, predicted that Peruvian migration would decline “at least at the beginning” and rise as people chose to cross the Darien Gap on foot towards Central America and Mexico.
Mexico said last month it would require visas from Peruvians for the first time since 2012 in response to a “considerable increase” in illegal migration. Large-scale Peruvian migration to Mexico began in 2022. Between January and March of this year, Mexican authorities have stopped Peruvians on an average of 2,160 occasions per month, compared to the monthly average of 544 occasions in all of 2023. .
Peruvians also began arriving at the U.S. border in 2022. The U.S. Border Patrol detained Peruvians an average of 5,300 times a month last year, before the number fell to a monthly average of 3,400 between January and March, when there was a broad campaign against migration in Mexico.
Peru immediately responded reciprocally to the visa requirement in Mexico, although it rectified after protests from the country’s tourism sector. By withdrawing its measure, Peru recalled that it is part of a regional economic bloc that includes Mexico, Chile and Colombia.
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that Peru and Mexico’s membership in the Pacific Alliance allowed their citizens to travel freely without visas longer than those of other countries.
It is unclear whether Colombia, another major source of migration, will be next, but Isacson said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is in a sweet spot with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, while his relations with the government of Peru are more rugged.
Colombians remain one of the largest nationalities of migrants arriving at the Tijuana airport. Many stay in hotels before a guide takes them through the rocky mountains east of the city, where they cross through gaps in the border wall and then walk to areas of land that the Border Patrol has identified as waiting areas.
Bryan Ramírez, a 25-year-old Colombian, arrived last month with his girlfriend in the United States, just two days after leaving Bogotá for Cancún, Mexico, and continuing on another flight to Tijuana. He waited with others through the night, in the cold rain and wind and hearing the hum of a high-voltage power line, for Border Patrol agents to pick them up.
The group waited near Boulevard, a small, scattered rural town. Among them were several Peruvians who said they were looking for economic opportunities, as well as escaping violence and political crises.
Peruvians can still avoid the Darien jungle by flying to El Salvador, which authorized visa-free travel in December to match a similar measure by the Peruvian government. But they would still have to travel overland through Mexico, where many are robbed or kidnapped.
Ecuadorians, who need visas to enter Mexico from September 2021, can also travel to El Salvador, but not all do so. Oscar Palacios, 42, said he had crossed the Darien on foot because he could not afford the flight.
Palacios, who left his wife and one-year-old baby in Ecuador and hopes to support them financially from the United States, said it had taken him two weeks to travel from his home near the violent city of Esmeralda to the Mexican border with Guatemala. It then took him two months to cross Mexico because the immigration authorities turned him back three times and took him by bus to the south of the country. He said he had been robbed several times.
Palacios finally managed to reach Tijuana and, after three nights in a hotel, crossed into the United States. Border Patrol agents spotted him when he was with migrants from Turkey and Brazil and took him to the empty lot so he could wait for a van or bus to take him to a center to process him. Thinking back on his journey now, Palacios said he would rather cross the Darien Gap 100 times than cross Mexico even once.
Source: With information from AP
