Dozens of Haitian migrants took to the streets of the Mexican municipality of Tapachula, in the southeastern state of Chiapas, on Monday to ask the Mexican government to provide them with documents so that they can legally move north.
With banners, music and dancing, the Caribbeans marched about 2 miles for an hour and a half to the facilities of the Mexican Refugee Aid Commission (Comar), where they intensified their claims to expedite their appointments and to initiate its electronic procedure for a humanitarian visa.
The foreigners ruled out cavananas as have other groups of several hundred who have left in recent days, but have been repressed by the authorities who have prevented their passage.
Haitians who left on Monday argued that they do not want to risk their relatives on this long voyage.
“If they go 10 or 15,000 people if I go out in a caravan, but if they go a thousand we will not travel,” one of the Haitians told reporters.
Foreigners said they are afraid of security officers who are conducting road operations.
They warned that they will protest every day so that the Government of Mexico can provide them with documentation so that they can travel on a regular basis.
In addition, another migrant complained that he had been arrested recently, preventing him from advancing north, despite carrying his humanitarian visa.
The region is experiencing an unprecedented wave of migration in years and, as proof of this, the United States arrested last July at its southern border 212,672 undocumented, the highest figure in 20 years.
The Mexican authorities disintegrated this Sunday a new migrant caravan – the fourth in the last week – that left from the Chiapas municipality of Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, and whose destination was the north of the country.