A fourth group of several hundred migrants, made up mostly of families with children, left the border town of Tapachula on Saturday determined to try to reach the north of the country to move to the United States.
After a tense week in which three other groups of migrants tried unsuccessfully to cross the southern state of Chiapas where they were arrested and some beaten, some 500 migrants, including Central Americans and Haitians, left Tapachula on Saturday morning with destination to Huixtla.
Neither the fear of running with the same fate that other groups have faced during the week or the intense heat contained the hundreds of migrants to leave the city near the border with Guatemala, where thousands of them have lived in precarious conditions between two and three years waiting for the immigration authorities to hand over the documents so that they can travel to northern Mexico and move to American territory.
Hours after the departure of the fourth group, the National Institute of Migration (INM) announced in a statement that this morning four agents of this body and seven elements of the National Guard who had been detained for five days in a wooden cage in a well in the village of Frontera Corozal called “el Chikle”, in Chiapas. Authorities have not specified who detained the officials.
In the previous days, federal forces have allowed migrants to walk for several hours or even all day and have taken advantage of their fatigue or rain to disperse them, usually with riot gear and, in some cases, with excessive use of the force.
The government has insisted that the beating suffered by a Haitian migrant over the weekend, which was recorded on the cameras of various media, was an isolated fact and that the two INM agents involved in the done.
“The human rights of migrants have not been violated,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in the middle of the week during the presentation of his report on the third year of government, adding that it was an “exceptional case”. “and that the two officials involved in the event” were discharged and made available to the relevant Internal Control Body. “
“The institute maintains a safe, orderly and regular migration, in accordance with the Migration Law and its regulations. It also has the obligation to act under humanitarian principles and respect for human rights,” he said. on Friday the INM in a statement in which he defended the actions of the body and assured that it is made up mostly of qualified personnel.
Faced with the large agglomeration of migrants in the south of the country, which is estimated to exceed 50,000 people, and the increasingly frequent cases of groups trying to walk the roads and are blocked and detained by security forces, López Obrador expressed this week his frustration with containment measures and said he would send a letter to his American partner Joe Biden to insist on the need to invest in state development plans and address the economic and social problems leading to thousands of people to migrate to the United States.
“It is not advisable to just put the migration plan at the foot of the containment, it is lame,” he said, announcing that he would remind Biden of his proposal to extend the so-called Northern Triangle – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – The state plans “Sowing Life” and “Youth Building the Future” which, he said, would create about 330,000 jobs in six months in these countries.
UN agencies and NGOs have warned of the urgency of taking new decisions to decongest the current Mexican asylum and asylum system.
Giovanni Lepri, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ representative in Mexico, said in an interview with The Associated Press that migration containment is not a measure “that responds to human rights, to the needs of people,” nor is it an “effective response” to resolving migratory flows.