Mexico

Tensions Between Migrants and Mexican Community Force Shelter Closings

Tensions between migrants, the local community, and even gangs and human traffickers have forced several shelters in central Mexico to close.

Tensions Between Migrants and Mexican Community Force Shelter Closings

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO – Carlos Mauricio Mejía, a migrant from Honduras, spent several days in the San José de Huehuetoca shelter in central Mexico before it closed in November. The shelter, which offered undocumented migrants passing through Mexico a place to eat, sleep and shower, was the third to close in the area since July.

 

Twenty days before arriving at the shelter, located 67 kilometers (42 miles) north of Mexico City, Mejía had said goodbye to his wife and his 5- and 8-year-old children in Honduras. It wasn’t the first time that this 26-year-old tried to migrate to the United States via Mexico in order to earn a better living to support them.

 

During his first attempt in January 2012, he says a local gang kidnapped him in Reynosa, a city on the Mexican-U.S. border.

 

“I was kidnapped for 15 days there,” he said while resting in the shelter. “Thanks to God, I was able to escape, I and two more companions.”

 

He said that a man he met in Mexico City lied to him that he was also a migrant, then lured him into a trap.

 

“He worked for the people who kidnapped me, and he left me where they took 1,500 pesos from me,” he says, the equivalent of $115. “They beat me up, and they wanted more.”

 

Mejía wasn’t the only migrant the gang kidnapped.

 

“There were 67 of us kidnapped, all migrants,” he said. “And there were about five Mexicans, and they hit them the hardest. There were some seven women whom they took out during the day to rape them. They took out about three whom we never saw again.”

 

Mejía managed to escape from his kidnappers.

 

“Thanks to God, one weekend that they started to drink, it enabled me to escape through the window,” he says.

 

Mejía tried to conceal his anguish as he recounted every detail of his story. The shelter, which offered a safe space for migrants to stay during their journey north, closed last month.

 

Several shelters for Latin American undocumented migrants traveling north to the United States have closed during recent months in central Mexico following tensions with locals. Residents blame migrants for increased insecurity in their neighborhoods. But migrant defenders cite xenophobia, organized crime and an inefficient government for local insecurity and intolerance of migrants. Migrants say shelters offer a safe haven during their pursuit of a better life for their families.  

 

Some 140,000 Central American migrants traverse Mexico to reach the United States annually, according to Amnesty International.

 

During the transit through Mexico, migrant workers are the victims of forced disappearances, murder, sexual exploitation and discrimination, among other human rights violations, according to a 2011 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States.

 

Among the most recent aggressions against migrants crossing Mexico, Amnesty International reported during October 2012 the mass kidnapping of 40 Central American migrants, allegedly by a Mexican gang. It also cited the reactivation of detentions of undocumented migrants by the Instituto Nacional de Migración, the governmental body in charge of detaining and deporting undocumented migrants, during which migrants have alleged mistreatment and injuries.

 

Between 150 and 200 undocumented migrants from Central America and South America came to San José de Huehuetoca daily, mostly from Honduras and El Salvador, says César Hernández, a volunteer at the shelter that has temporarily closed. All had the same goal: to cross through the country to make it to the United States, where they hoped to find jobs to support their families.

 

But along the way, migrants face social resentment, at least in the central zone of the country. Tensions with the local community have caused three shelters to close in recent months, including San José de Huehuetoca in November.

 

The shelter closed for security reasons after a confrontation between people identified as members of the transnational criminal gang Mara Salvatrucha and human traffickers, according to a release from Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, one of the civil society organizations that operated the shelter. The organization is not satisfied with responses to its requests for a stronger municipal police presence at the shelter and throughout the town in order to ensure the safety of migrants and volunteers amidst rising tensions in recent months. Shelter representatives are now asking for federal authorities to intervene before it would reopen.

 

Saulo Rubén Jiménez Leal, subsecretary for the government of Mexico state, responded in writing to Global Press Institute that municipal and state police guarded the shelter until it closed, and the government has not received reports of the presence of gangs or aggressions. The state government guarantees humanitary assistance to all migrants, he wrote. 

 

In the neighboring town of Tultitlán, the social resentment of undocumented migrants by local citizens forced the closing of two shelters in July and August.

 

The first shelter to close was Casa del Migrante San Juan de Dios in the neighborhood of Lechería, a mandatory transit point for undocumented migrants from Central America and South America. All cargo trains coming from southern Mexico converge here, carrying dozens of migrants en route north.

 

Casa del Migrante San Juan de Dios had offered migrants clothing, food, and a place to wash up and rest since 2006. But the large influx of migrants frequently exceeded the shelter’s capacity, which bothered Lechería residents.

 

During July 2012, a fight broke out between neighbors and migrants outside the shelter. Local tensions led muncipal authorities to close it.

 

Residents of the area blame migrants for the insecurity that has swept the neighborhood during the past two years.

 

The house of Berenice Rosas, 24, sits next to the former shelter. She says the migrants from the shelter used to loiter on her property.

 

“They used to sit here in the doorway,” she says, adding that they also littered on her property.

 

She says she used to tell them to leave, but they refused, making it difficult for her to go outside her house. Rosas alleges that a migrant touched her mother inappropriately while she was walking by the railroad, where migrants enter the town.

 

Another neighbor, Zoraida Espinoza, hung a cloth in her doorway, reading: “The neighbors of Lechería demand the closing of the Casa del Migrante.” She says that the migrants assault community members, rape the women and murder other migrants.

 

“It doesn’t hurt us that we have driven the people from here,” she says of the closed shelter. “What we ask is that they understand us.”

 

Espinoza’s brother is a delegate in the Tultitlán government. He says that before the shelter opened, Lechería was a peaceful neighborhood. But he says that many migrants, rather than continue north, have decided to stay in the neighborhood and become traffickers of other migrants, called “polleros.”

 

“We aren’t against them,” Osvaldo Espinoza says of migrants that pass through the community. “It’s the security.”

 

Now, residents are trying to “clean” the neighborhood of migrants in order to change its negative image, he says.

 

But Marta Sánchez Soler, founder of Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, disagrees. She says that instigators of the anti-migrant movement are in collusion with organized crime. They reject the presence of shelters, which leave less business for polleros.

 

The activist says that the lack of attention from local authorities regarding problems such as security and street maintenance enable the instigators to obtain the support of their neighbors in Lechería by blaming these problems on migrants.

 

“No one likes to see a city council that doesn’t solve a single problem,” she says. “And it’s very easy to blame the migrants.”

 

José Luis Pérez Cortés, president of Tultitlán, and Angélica Baldespino, secretary of the municipal government, did not respond to resquests for comment.

 

The lack of official data available makes it hard to know how many crimes are committed by migrants in Mexico annually, which residents of Tultitlán state as the reason they don’t want migrants in their towns.

 

But Sánchez Soler says that there is no record of a rape of a woman by a migrant in Mexico. Seven out of 10 female migrants are raped, though, according to research by and shared with her organization.

 

Various civil organizations opened San José de Huehuetoca as a food distribution center for migrants in the neighboring town of Huehuetoca. At the end of July, the center came under attack by gunfire, leaving five bulletholes in one of the walls. No one was hurt, and authorities never announced a culprit.

 

During the same month, the municipal government of Tultitlán opened a provisional shelter. Consisting of a tent under a bridge, the shelter was close to the cargo train that migrants clandestinely ride into town.

 

Waldina Zapata, 38, stayed here after traveling for 11 days from her native Honduras. Her destination was Lousiana, a state in the southeastern United States, she said as wind and rain pervaded the cracks of the temporary shelter.

 

Zapata not only left a country where she said there were no jobs or opportunities. She also left behind five children in the care of their grandmother. Before deciding to emigrate, Zapata sold candy for 12 years in order to support her children. She eventually found a government job, but it paid just 3,000 lempiras ($150) a month and didn’t offer benefits.

 

Like other migrants, she came to town by train. Traveling clandestinely on the roof of a cargo train, she was dragged by the train after fellow migrants failed to pull her up onto the roof. Luckily, she says she fell parallel to the train tracks and wasn’t run over by the trains’ wheels.

 

“From there going forward, I was afraid,” she said. “And that’s why we haven’t gone because here, [the train] goes faster still.”

 

But Zapata eventually had to move on, as authorities closed the shelter in August following complaints from neighbors.

 

Following the shelter closings in Tultitlán, various civil organizations expanded San José de Huehuetoca into a free shelter. But now, this one is closed too.

 

Now, the only available shelter is one run by the municipal government, which opened in Huehuetoca in August. Migrants may come here for free, but they may not stay longer than 24 hours, talk to the press or stay in the area after they leave the shelter.

 

Also, migrants must travel to the shelter from Lechería, where the cargo trains stop. Locals sometimes charge them higher rates to take public transportation, and the walk by foot takes more than an hour.

 

Mexico is a country of migrants in transit, but also of migrants of origin. More than 20 million Mexicans – 10 percent of the national population – are migrants in the United States, according to the Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística, a governmental organ in charge of the country’s statistics.

 

This generates a contradictory discourse from the Mexican government, Sánchez Soler says. While it condemns anti-immigrant politics in the United States, its own practices are “absolutely criminal against the migrants,” she says of Mexico.

 

Defenders advocating for migrants also face resentment.

 

From 2004 to June 2011, there were 62 attacks on defenders of migrants in Mexico, according to a report by Dimensión Pastoral de la Movilidad Humana, part of the Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano. The report cites a lack of sensitization and tolerance campaigns, which has generated “disciminatory and xenophobic attitudes” toward migrants that government authorities and citizens use to discredit defenders of migrants’ rights.

 

Jorge Andrade works for Ustedes Somos Nosotros, a civil society organization that studies migration and also helped to operate San José de Huehuetoca shelter.

 

“They are stigmatizing the migrant, giving the migrant the label of rapist, pickpocket, drug addict and alcoholic,” he says. “And that causes a series of fears to be generated among the population.”

 

He says this provokes a discourse of xenophobia toward the migrants, which sometimes escalates to extortion. He acknowledges that some migrants do contribute to this.

 

“While people come with the idea of getting to the North, of working and of supporting their families whom they left behind,” he says, “there are also other [migrants] who come robbing them. And that complicates the situation.”

 

He says that, like all people, migrants are humans.

 

“I’m not saying that all the migrants are saints,” he says. “They are human beings.”

 

William, a 35-year-old from El Salvador who declined to give his last name, was staying at the same shelter. On his third attempt to relocate to the United States after being deported twice, he said shelters were essential for migrants.

 

“It’s the greatest,” he said in broken Spanish. “It’s the best that can happen to the migrant. If this didn’t exist, the people always would be under the bridges, on the corners, in the spaces that they consider for taking refuge. For me, this shelter are little camps that little angels make for migrants.”