January 29, 2011
On January 26, Mexican authorities rescued a group of 219 immigrants in the southern state of Chiapas. Four of them were from Nepal. The group included 177 men, 33 women and 9 children – all of them stuffed into the back of a truck like livestock. The police chased down the truck when the driver refused to stop for inspection at a checkpoint.
After the discovery of human cargo in the back of the truck, the immigrants told the authorities that that they had been threatened into submission and silence by the men who were supposedly transporting them to the United States border. In Guatamala, they had paid $7319, per person, for the dangerous ride. All of them were deported on January 27.
Being caught by the authorities may have been the luckiest thing that happened to the Nepalis. In the following days, they could have easily died from suffocation or heat stroke inside the cramped locked quarters of the truck. And it’s not just the quality of transport that should have concerned the Nepalis.
Here’s the hard reality: Hundreds of thousands of migrants travel illegally through Mexico each year in the hopes of reaching the US, but a substantial portion of them never reach their destination. Illegal aliens passing through Mexico are routinely robbed, raped, kidnapped and murdered, sometimes with the collusion of government authorities.
Kidnapping, in particular, is on the inrise. Gangs search the migrants for scraps of paper with their relatives’ contact information, which provides the criminals with the means for demanding ransoms. Exact numbers are impossible to produce, but Amnesty International estimates that approximately 20,000 illegal aliens are kidnapped annually in Mexico.
The number of irregular migrants who simply disappear is incalculable.
The increase in organized crime and gang-related violence is the main reason some human rights organizations are now calling the immigration problem in Mexico “a humanitarian disaster.”
The Mexican state of Chiapas, where the Nepalis were captured and deported, is the state that shares the longest border with Guatemala. It is also Mexico’s poorest, most illiterate state and rife with organized crime and corrupt officials. If migrants are lucky enough to move further north without becoming victims of violence, they must still run a very dangerous gauntlet.
As Amnesty International puts it:
On their journeys through Mexico, migrants continue to face abuses at the hands of criminal gangs, including kidnapping, extortion and torture. Sexual violence is widespread and every year an unknown number of migrants are killed or go missing. These abuses are often carried out with the complicity or acquiescence of federal, state or municipal officials. Furthermore, despite some improvements in recent years, reports persist of excessive use of force and arbitrary detention by public officials carrying out migration checks. The vast majority of these abuses are never seriously investigated and perpetrators rarely held to account, fostering a climate of impunity.
Bottom line: Mexico is not worth the risk.
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