“ENEMY MENTALITY”: MEXICO CRACKS DOWN ON MIGRANTS AND ASYLUM-SEEKERS AT ITS SOUTHERN BORDER – By Sandra Cuffe (The Intercept) / May 4 2021
Driven by U.S. pressure, militarized immigration enforcement continues in southern Mexico.
NELSON LEANED A flattened smart TV box against a tree, adjusting it to provide shade for his wife, who was lying down on the sidewalk to rest. It was pushing 100 degrees, hot even for Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico 11 miles from the closest official border crossing with Guatemala. The couple had been living in the streets since arriving in late January, but they were homeless before leaving Honduras too.
Nelson and his wife, Maura, are from Puerto Cortés, a Caribbean port city in northwestern Honduras. Along with other migrants and asylum-seekers interviewed for this story, they requested that only their first names be used to avoid risks to their security or immigration status. Nelson and Maura owned their modest home in Honduras, but it was near the edge of a large lagoon. When hurricanes Eta and Iota swept through Central America in November, the swollen Chamelecón River fed the lagoon faster than it could empty into the sea, flooding their neighborhood.
“The flooding took everything away,” Nelson told The Intercept. They were able to stay temporarily in a makeshift shelter in a kindergarten but eventually ended up living on the side of a road under a plastic tarp. Between the hurricane devastation and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, there was no work available to alleviate their situation and very little humanitarian aid. “We lived in the encampment in the street until we came here,” said Nelson.
The couple made it to Mexico 12 days after a significant and much publicized deployment of immigration officials and military and National Guard troops to the southern border, but none were in sight. The Suchiate River separating Guatemala and Mexico was low enough that Nelson and Maura could wade across, and it was not until later in Tapachula that they witnessed Mexico’s militarized immigration enforcement.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2021/05/04/mexico-migrants-asylum-seekers-border-crackdown/
