TAPACHULA— A new caravan with some 1,500 migrants left a border city in Mexico with Guatemala on Thursday, at a time when another group advances through the southeastern state of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico, and when US and Mexican authorities seek to strengthen binational cooperation to stop the arrival of foreigners to the United States.
With a banner that reads “immigration is not a crime, a government that represses migrants is a criminal,” several hundred foreigners, mostly from Central and South America, left Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, where some claim who had been trying for months without luck to regularize their situation before the Mexican immigration authorities.
Overwhelmed by the long wait and economic difficulties, Salvadoran Alexander Girón left in the caravan, who decided to leave his native country because his income as a bottled water seller was not enough to cover the basic basket.
“Security is not enough; If there is no work, there is not enough money for anything, everything is very expensive there. We are going to look for a job and be able to give a better life to our children,” said Girón, 46 years old, who migrated from El Salvador with his wife and his two teenage children, ages 16 and 18.
Until noon, the contingent of migrants had safely crossed two checkpoints on the international highway that connects Mexico with Guatemala before agents from the National Migration Institute and the National Guard.
The departure of the group of foreigners takes place a month after another caravan of about 6,000 people, called the “exodus from poverty,” which left on Christmas Eve also from Tapachula., and which was dissolved at the beginning of the year. Days later the caravan regrouped, greatly reduced, and resumed its path towards the north of the country.
Several hundred migrants left this week on buses from the southern state of Oaxaca bound for the municipality of Tierra Blanca, in the state of Veracruz. There they were detained by the authorities who arrested the ten drivers of the units that transported them. The group decided on Thursday to follow the path on foot to the town of Joachín, in the center of Veracruz.
Migration crisis
The formation of this new caravan comes a few days after a working meeting held on January 19 in Washington by US and Mexican authorities to seek joint solutions to the immigration problem.
The meeting was preceded by a meeting on December 27 in the Mexican capital, after a phone call that the US president, Joe Biden, made to his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to express his concern about the migratory wave that had overwhelmed the southern border of the United States.
Up to 10,000 irregular crossings were reported daily, which caused temporary closures of some border crossings. After that meeting, the number of daily crossings dropped sharply to around 2,500 in the first days of January.
The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, admitted in the middle of the month that it was too early to know if the reduction in crossings was due to the fact that Mexico had reactivated its operations to transfer migrants from the north to the south of the country at the beginning of the year and repatriations — paralyzed at the end of 2023 due to lack of funds — or if they were also caused by the season of the year.
Flight reactivation
However, the United States has recognized that Mexico has intensified its actions to stop the flow of migrants to its border. One of them was the reactivation of return flights for Venezuelan migrants in an irregular situation to their country of origin.
In the third week of January, Mexican authorities detained 1,095 migrants in the center and south of the country. A first group of 726 foreigners, mainly Central Americans, was located in an abandoned warehouse in the central state of Tlaxcala. On January 19, 313 migrants who had been abandoned in two buses and another 56 who were traveling in a cargo truck were found in the state of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico.
Source: AP
