Mexico City The bottleneck is the Río Suchiate. The river flows sluggishly and brown. At this point in the Mexican state of Chiapas, it is barely a hundred meters wide. Over there is Guatemala. Guatemalans wait there for customers with their rafts made of pallets and truck tires, which they steer like Venetian gondoliers.
Depending on the luggage, five to ten refugees fit on the wobbly vehicle. Women, children, young people and men sound out the situation on the bank. People from many countries. The short crossing to the new country costs 75 Guatemalan Quetzales, a good eight euros. This is a lot of money for the refugees.
On the Mexican side, the “Guardia Nacional”, the new paramilitary police unit of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is watching the goings-on. The head of state actually created the force to fight organized crime. But so far the Guardia has mainly been border police.
Here in the southwestern tip of the country, it is supposed to prevent migrants from entering Mexican territory. In the north, thousands of kilometers away on the border with the United States, they are supposed to do exactly the opposite. A grotesque and increasingly impossible undertaking.
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Between January and August, Mexico counted 147,000 undocumented migrants, three times as many as in 2020. The US immigration authorities arrested around 212,000 refugees in July alone. Since Joe Biden took office in the US and the situation in Central America continued to deteriorate, they have been coming back in droves. Sometimes there are a thousand in a day who want to cross the Suchiate.
Recently, there have been an increasing number of Haitians coming from their country or from Brazil and Chile. And the Guardia Nacional? For 300 quetzales, they close their eyes when the people on the Mexican side leave the raft.
From here, the refugees, exhausted and scared, want to go further north, most of them up to the United States, where they have relatives or friends. But more and more people want to stay in Mexico, find work in the capital, Mexico City, or get hold of one of the coveted “humanitarian visas” that Mexico’s left-wing government promised when it took office, but which it rarely issues.
Most of them leave their old lives behind out of fear and despair
Many also want to apply for asylum. So far this year, 77,559 people have submitted an application, a historic record, almost a quarter of them were Haitians.
Nobody who undertakes this odyssey across many countries and exposes himself to the dangers of the drug cartels and corrupt authorities does it out of a thirst for adventure. Most of them have left their old lives behind them out of fear and despair or poverty. Sometimes together for all reasons.
Like Wendy from Honduras, who is traveling with her twelve-year-old daughter. A month ago, Wendy was raped at her home in San Pedro Sula by a “Pandillero,” a member of one of the feared youth gangs. That same afternoon she grabbed her daughter and set off. Just get out of Honduras, because the gangs have threatened to abuse the daughter next time.
Haitian refugees block a street in Tapachula to draw attention to their plight.
(Photo: AP)
The next stop after crossing the river is Tapachula, 50 kilometers away on foot. The city of 300,000 has become America’s largest immigration gateway. The wall that Donald Trump once dreamed of now stands in the very south of Mexico. More than 35,000 migrants wait and hope, hide and try to get further north from here.
Her first way in Tapachula leads her to the “Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid” (Comar). Here is the document that protects them from immediate deportation. But bureaucracy, budget cuts, the lack of staff and a good deal of indignation prevent Comar from even rudimentarily meeting the onslaught. There are no dates until December.
Nevertheless, people without the appropriate papers are not allowed to leave the border town to apply for asylum elsewhere. And so Tapachula has turned into an open-air prison with hardly any work, hardly any accommodation or medical care. The city is the Mexican equivalent of Del Rio in Texas, where more than ten thousand Haitians have been stranded.
Wendy from Honduras also knows that there is no going back or forth. She got an appointment with refugee aid for the beginning of December. She is only protected from deportation by a doctor’s certificate attesting that she was raped. Now she works for a telephone company and sells SIM cards. If she is lucky, she earns three dollars a day, but mostly she is unlucky. Then nothing comes in.
Many refugees, especially from Haiti, are stuck in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula.
(Photo: AP)
This is what happens to almost everyone stranded in the city, where anger and despair have been simmering for weeks. Haitians castigate the racism of the locals, women complain of sexual assault. Anyone who has money for a hotel is annoyed by the prices for lodging that exceed those of hotels in Mexico City. And everyone is furious with the authorities and the Guardia Nacional, who will hunt them down as soon as they try to leave the city.
“Tapachula is at the limit and in no way prepared for the protection needs of the people”, criticizes Enrique Vidal from the human rights center Fray Matias de Córdova. There is a lack of money and the will of the government at all levels to create the conditions for adequate care for migrants. “Instead of looking for real solutions, migration policy is being militarized,” says Vidal.
In the meantime, despite the restrictions in Tapachula, around 500 Haitians have made it to Mexico City, mostly families with young children. Many of them have almost completely crossed the American continent and come from Brazil or Chile, where they previously lived. People sleep outside on cool nights in front of the Comar refugee agency or camp in ruins.
The capital is also overwhelmed by the rush. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum promises a quick and comprehensive solution. But actually she also knows that there is no quick and, above all, no simple answer to this problem.
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