2K migrants detained in Mexico

Mexico, October 13

Mexican officials broke up a caravan of around 2,000 migrants that had set out from southern Mexico Saturday in the hopes of reaching the United States, amid increasing difficulty obtaining permission to pass through Mexico.

Many of the migrants who departed from Tapachula, Chiapas early in the morning had been held up in this city just north of Guatemala for weeks or months, awaiting residency or transit papers from Mexican authorities.

The migrants are originally from Central America, Africa and the Caribbean. They left their countries because of violence or simply in search of a better life.

“I want to pass through Mexico, I don’t want to live here,” said Amado Ramirez, a migrant from Honduras who said he had been living on the streets of Tapachula with his young children and wife, hoping for a transit visa from Mexican officials.

The group trudged about 40 km northwest along a highway under the supervision of human rights officials before the federal police and national guardsmen blocked their path.

An Associated Press photographer saw hundreds of men, women and children running to escape the security forces encircling them in Huixtla, Chiapas.

They were rounded up and placed in vans. Officials refused to say where they were transporting the migrants.

Hundreds of African migrants, in particular, have been stuck for months in Tapachula, where they say immigration authorities have stalled on giving them residency or transit papers. Almost all of them want to seek asylum in the United States, rather than stay in Mexico.

Maureen Meyer, director for Mexico and migrant rights at the Washington Office on Latin America, said enforcement around Tapachula has made it very difficult for migrants to head north undetected. “What you had were thousands of people that were feeling very much trapped in Tapachula,” she said. — AP