Mexican caravan migrants question López Obrador's declining numbers

Juan Manuel Blanco

Mapastepec (Mexico), December 29 (EFE). – The caravan of thousands of migrants that set off from Mexico's southern border on Christmas Eve questioned this Friday the numbers of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who confirmed that they had dispersed and there are about 1,500 left.

At a meeting at the soccer field in the municipality of Mapastepec, the coordinator of the Center for Human Dignity (CDH), Luis Rey García Villagrán, who accompanies the caravan, explained that there are still 5,000 people in the largest group that went with about 10,000 members Tapachula, the largest of the year.

The migrants have been identified mainly from Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Peru, Colombia and Nicaragua, but there are also countries such as Thailand and Azerbaijan that will wait 24 hours for a response from the National Migration Institute (INM) or we will Leave for Pijijiapan on Saturday.

“We feel abandoned and have to expose ourselves to politicians. We are neither a plague nor a pandemic, but we want a better life for my children and all migrants,” Haitian Edrice Roman told EFE.

The migrant said he walked more than a hundred kilometers from Tapachula, on the Mexico-Guatemala border, to Mapastepec, where he set up camp on a soccer field to wait for a response from the government allowing him entry status . in the country.

“Yesterday it was more than 20 miles, my wife is tired, the kids struggled on the road, sleeping and walking under the night sky,” he said.

The refugee caravan clashes with the government

The caravan advances as the Mexican president reiterated this Friday that “migration is decreasing,” after a visit on Wednesday by a US delegation led by his Secretary of State Antony Blinken to address the unprecedented migration surge in December.

“There are already good results. Of course it also has to do with the end of the year, not to get too excited, but migration is decreasing. Remember yesterday we talked about the 10,000 in the caravan? Today. “We confirmed again that there are (already) 1,500,” López Obrador said in his morning conference.

But the group, dubbed the “Caravan of Exodus from Poverty,” has asked the Mexican government for visas on humanitarian grounds or else they would advance further through Chiapas, a border state with Central America.

The coordinator of the Center for Human Dignity denounced that the INM would begin persecuting, detaining and deporting migrants.

“The government has decided not to hand over documents, it has decided to close the doors of the Comar (Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) and the National Migration Institute so that containment can begin, and that means that the most vulnerable people of the organized Crime will be handed over,” said García Villagrán.

Salvadoran Adonay Martínez asked the president for compassion so that the government would issue them documents for temporary residence and work in Mexico.

“There is a lot of fear of being arrested” and “we don't leave the area, they grab us and deport us back, there are many people who have been grabbed and taken away in this way,” he said. EFE

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