MEXICO CITY.- The caravan of migrants who left Tapachula, the Mexican state of Chiapas, at the end of last December is being reorganized, after they considered that they were “deceived” by the immigration authorities.
The coordinator of the Center for Human Dignification, Luis Rey García Villagrán, who led the caravan, announced this Saturday that they will resume their path to Oaxaca.
“The intention is to walk next Monday towards Los Corazones, a community that belongs to the Oaxacan municipality of San Pedro Tapanatepec,” he said.
García Villagrán stated that the migrants were “deceived by the immigration authorities,” which is why they are reorganizing. He indicated that the families are going to concentrate in the city of Arriaga, reported eluniversal.com.mx.
On January 3, the Mexican government dissolved the migrant caravan that had been in Chiapas since the end of December, after committing to process its members and eventually grant them some type of document that grants them legal stay in the country.
When reporting the terms of the agreement reached with the migrants, Roberto González López, head of the office of the National Institute of Migration (INM) in Chiapas, explained that the cases of foreigners would be channeled to the National System for the Comprehensive Development of the Family (DIF), which provides social assistance services.
Shortly after the agreement was reached, authorities began transferring most of the migrants to a DIF shelter located at the customs office in the town of Huixtla, near the border with Guatemala, amid misinformation and confusion.
At that time, García Villagrán asked the immigration authorities to expedite the procedures to deliver legal stay documents to migrants so that they can continue on their way to other cities in Mexico or the border with the United States.
The caravan, made up of about 6,000 migrants, left on Christmas Eve from the town of Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, and for five days traveled about 100 kilometers in the state of Chiapas until reaching the town of Mapastepc, where it stopped with the half of its members.
The region is experiencing an unprecedented migratory flow that has not been controlled despite the United States’ attempts to open new channels to reach the country legally, while at the same time harshening the consequences of doing so irregularly.
More than half a million migrants, many of them Venezuelans, crossed the Darién jungle this year, on the border between Colombia and Panama. Mexico detected more than 680,000 foreigners in an irregular situation from January to November, according to official figures. In addition, a record of almost 137,000 people requested refuge in the country.
Source: With information from eluniversal.com.mx
