Migrants, including women with children and men with suitcases and water
A caravan with hundreds of Cuban, Central American and Venezuelan migrants left Mexico’s southern border on Friday to put pressure on the eve of Sunday’s elections.
The migrants, including women with children and men with suitcases and water, left Tapachula, the largest city on the border with Central America, to rush along federal highway 200 before the elections.
Honduran Cristian Sierra told EFE that they are going without activists or accompanying guides, unlike other caravans that leave in an organized manner.
“The decision to leave was made for many reasons, because permits are being delayed and, the truth is, there are already many people in the same place and it is not convenient, we made the decision to leave because it is the only hope we have,” he said.
The foreigners expressed their concern about possible arrests by agents of the National Institute of Migration (INM) and state police, although they said they are going in a peaceful and orderly manner.
Orlando, from Cuba, said that he spent a year in Tapachula to process a paperwork at the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (Comar), but preferred to leave with his compatriots with a cart with his belongings.
He reported that the authorities lost his documents and only notified him of the absence of his papers with an email.
“Imagine that I have been there for a year, nothing, not even denied, my papers disappeared and they notified me by email, when I went and worried they told me: ‘your papers are expired. ’ And that was it, I have never left Tapachula,” he told EFE.
“Now walking is the only way, man, they don’t let you take a car, nothing,” he added.
Mexican authorities are stepping up security operations on highways and along the southern border ahead of Sunday’s election, which will be the largest in the country’s history because more than 98 million voters are called to renew more than 20,000 positions, including the presidency and Congress.
The Mexican government increased its detection of irregular migrants by almost 200% annually in the first quarter of 2024, when it intercepted more than 360,000.
During the campaign, opposition presidential candidates Xóchitl Gálvez and Jorge Álvarez Máynez accused the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador of “bending” to the immigration requests of former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021).
Meanwhile, the official candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, promised continuity in immigration policy, although she acknowledged that the INM and the Comar must be reformed and offered an industrialization project on the southern border of Mexico that includes employment opportunities to turn Tapachula “into the capital of Central America.”
Source: newsinamerica
