ARRIAGA, Mexico (AP) — A caravan of about 2,000 migrants resumed their journey through southern Mexico on Monday after participants were left without the papers the Mexican government had apparently promised.
The original caravan of about 6,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America set off on Christmas Eve. But after New Year's Day, the government persuaded them to abandon their march, promising that they would receive some unspecified documents.
The migrants were looking for transit or exit visas that could allow them to travel on buses or trains to the US border. But they were given papers prohibiting them from leaving the southern state of Chiapas on the border with Guatemala.
The migrants set off Monday from the railroad town of Arriaga, near the border with Oaxaca state, about 150 miles (245 kilometers) from Tapachula, where they started the original caravan on Dec. 24.
Salvadoran migrant Rosa Vázquez said Mexican immigration officials gave her shelter in the Chiapas town of Huixtla and offered her papers that would have allowed her to remain in the state.
But there is hardly any work there and the residents are largely impoverished.
“The immigration authorities lied to us, they made promises that they didn’t keep,” Vázquez said. “They just wanted to break up the group, but they were wrong because we are all here and we are going to start running.”
Coritza Matamoros, a migrant from Honduras, was also taken to a local shelter along with her husband and two children, even though she thought she would be sent to Mexico City.
“They really tricked us, they made us believe we were being taken to Mexico City,” Matamoros said. “They forced us to sign documents.”
For now, the caravan is hoping to make it to a town further up Oaxaca.
Mexico has in the past let migrants through in the hope that they would tire themselves out walking on the highway. No refugee caravan has ever traveled the 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the US border on foot.
U.S. officials discussed how Mexico could help stem the flow of migrants during a meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in December.
López Obrador has confirmed that U.S. officials are demanding that Mexico do more to block migrants at the southern border with Guatemala or make it more difficult for them to move through Mexico by train, trucks or buses – a policy that is known as a “quarrel”.
The Mexican government felt pressure to address the issue after U.S. officials briefly closed two key rail border crossings in Texas, saying they were overwhelmed processing migrants.
This maintained a stranglehold on freight traffic from Mexico to the United States, as well as the grain needed to feed Mexican livestock heading south. The level crossings have since reopened, but the message seemed clear.
Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, spoke Monday in Eagle Pass, Texas, about the increase in crossings at the Southwest border in December.
“It coincides with the time when Mexican enforcement was no longer implemented. Immigration enforcement in Mexico has not been funded,” Mayorkas said.
On December 1, the head of Mexico's immigration agency ordered the agency to suspend deportations and transfers of migrants due to a lack of funds in an internal memo. López Obrador later said a financial shortfall that had led the immigration agency to suspend deportations and other operations had been resolved and some deportations had later resumed.
Most recently, the number of migrants crossing the border fell sharply from an average of 10,000 crossings per day to 2,500 in early January, but Mayorkas remained skeptical about the reason for the sudden drop in apprehensions.
“It is still too early to say whether the significant decrease in the number of encounters that we have experienced in the last week is a consequence of the season, the holiday period, or whether it is a consequence of the fact that the Mexican “Authorities have resumed their work.” Enforcement actions, and it may well be a combination of both,” Mayorkas said.
Migrants in Monday's caravan included single adults but also entire families, all desperate to reach the U.S. border and angry and frustrated at having to wait weeks or months in the nearby town of Tapachula for documents could enable them to continue their journey.
Mexico says it discovered 680,000 migrants moving through the country in the first 11 months of 2023.
In May, Mexico agreed to accept migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba who had been turned away by the United States because they did not follow rules that opened new legal paths to asylum and other forms of migration.
But that deal, aimed at stemming a post-pandemic surge in migration, appears to be insufficient as numbers rise again, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-immigrant sentiment.
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