Another migrant caravan set off from the Mexican city of Tapachula in southern Mexico on Thursday, while Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador began immigration talks with his US partner, Joe Biden, in Washington.
According to the Mexican authorities, the new march is about two thousand immigrants, mostly from Central America and Haiti. People withdrew from Tapachula with backpacks on their shoulders or other bags on their heads. Young children were traveling on their parents’ shoulders or in rattling strollers.
Alex Leyva of Honduras said he was trying to travel north for the second time in a caravan. He first left with a group on October 23, but fell ill and had to move out. He was returned to Tapachula by Mexican immigration agents, where he had already submitted documents for asylum procedures in Mexico.
„My country suffers from the worst economic and criminal conditions and famine“
Leva said. “There is no education for children. That’s why my wife and I decided to try to reach our goal of living a better life.he added.
Traffic was regulated by the local police as the migrants were heading to the outskirts of the city. The authorities did not try to stop them. The previous caravan with which Leva traveled for the first time is now in the southern part of the state of Veracruz on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, but it fell a few hundred earlier, that is, about four thousand.
According to Luis Garcia Villagran, of the Center for Human Dignity in Mexico, migrants require documents that allow them to remain throughout Mexico. The Mexican government is pursuing a policy of trying to keep migrants in the far south of the country to ease pressure on the US border.
However, these southern states are the poorest, and there are many opportunities to find work in the northern states of Mexico. That’s what Garcia Villagran said
Immigration agents even arrested Tapachula immigrants and returned Tapachula immigrants who had obtained a humanitarian visa allowing them to travel to Mexico.
Migrants forced to travel to Tapachula near the Guatemalan border are deeply disappointed by the slow pace of their asylum cases. They complain that they cannot find work to support their families.
A few years ago, the march of caravans began, made up of people who did not have the money to pay for human traffickers, and their goal was to allow the crowd to travel safely towards the US border. Recently, however, the Guatemalan and Mexican authorities are increasingly determined to eliminate the marching columns.
Lopez Obrador set addressing immigration in the region as one of the priorities for a summit of North American leaders on Thursday. He urged the Biden government to invest in expanding a tree-planting program that pays farmers to plant certain types of trees on their land. The money allows the rural poor to stay on their land and not feel the economic pressures of migration.
