Next step: Northward

Katie D.

July 22, 2011 - 2:49 PM

On Saturday morning, I will be leaving for a week of activism on the Guatemala/Mexico border. I am going with a group of feisty Honduran activists (mostly women) to ask the Mexican government for changes in migration policy, to respect the rights and needs of Central American migrants. We will be taking a bus to Tecún Úman, on the Guatemalan side of the border, where we will be holding some kind of demonstration. Then, in Tapachula, Mexico, we will hold a press conference about issues regarding migration in Mexico.

I am thrilled to be a part of this caravan north. I feel really lucky to have been welcomed by these groups who are so dedicated to human rights and the overarching theme of migration. This trip will include several mothers who have lost contact with their children somewhere along the migrant path. One of our goals is to search for "desaparecidos," or migrants who have disappeared.

This is an aspect of immigration that most Americans probably never think about: that Central Americans must cross all of Mexico before ever arriving on our border. And although Mexico is a source of a huge number of immigrants living in the United States, it is not a friendly throughway for other migrants seeking the American border. In fact, in my interviews I have heard that Mexico is the worst part of the journey: worse than the border fence, worse than the desert, and worse than American detention centers.

Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans can move freely between their four countries, using their local national ID cards. But to enter Mexico legally requires a passport, which is expensive and takes a great deal of time. So if a Honduran plans to arrive in the United States, he or she rarely has the proper documents in Mexico. This leads to incredible problems, in both the official and extra-legal sense.

One powerful example is deportations. Between 2001 and 2007, the United States deported 472,956 migrants from these four countries. In that same time, the Mexican migra deported 1,128,256 from the same countries. While it is the right of the Mexican state to deport individuals who enter without the proper documents, there is a sense of mismatch between the massive numbers of Mexicans crossing the US border, and the efforts to expel Central Americans who are passing through.

In an extra-legal sense, the fear of all Central Americans has to do with organized crime in Mexico. Robberies and extortion are common on the trail, and many lose all their money and documents before arriving at any particular destination. But there is a constant fear of kidnapping by Mexican gangs, including and especially the Zetas, who were originally formed by ex-military Mexicans trained at the US School of the Americas. Hundreds of Central Americans are kidnapped off the trains each year, and their families are forced to send hundreds of dollars in ransom money. The news here is always full of kidnappings, deaths, and mass graves in Mexico.

And so we are going North to ask the Mexican government to better protect the migrants from Honduras and its neighboring countries. We are asking for the support of police to crack down on gangs, and on enforcement of humane treatment policies in Mexican detention centers. We are asking the Honduran consulates to step up in providing resources to migrants who are imprisoned or hospitalized, and that they aid in the search for missing migrants.

There is a depth to these issues that I never imagined and a complexity in every facet of the journey North. As discussed in one of my Conflict Resolution classes, sometimes you have to create more conflict to arrive at a system of justice. More and more, I see systems of injustice entrapping the people of Honduras, and the Hondurans who travel to the United States. This week I hope to stand in witness to these issues, and to do what I can to bring about a change.