Los Invisibles: Nuances of Migration Along Mexico's Southern Border
Part 4 in a Series
TENOSIQUE, MEXICO – When Marvin Aguilera, 41, left his home in Honduras in May 2013 to find work in the U.S., he never imagined his journey would end in Coatzacoalcos, a municipality in the coastal state of Veracruz in southeastern Mexico.
The community lies on one of the two most common routes that migrants use to cross southern Mexico. Most migrants travel north atop freight trains.
But when Aguilera and a group of other migrants tried to climb onto the train in the Coatzacoalcos station in July, a group of men appeared. They identified themselves as members of the criminal band Los Zetas and told the migrants they each had to pay $100 if they wanted to board the train.
Aguilera was traveling with another young migrant he had met on the way to Mexico, he says. Neither had enough money to pay the bribe. One of the criminals told them this was as far as they could go because they did not have money to pay.
Aguilera had heard stories about Los Zetas and how they threw migrants who could not pay their bribes from moving trains. He and his companion did not try to climb onto the train for fear the criminals would harm them.
Los Zetas began operating along most of the migrant route in 2008, according to organizations that defend migrants’ rights. Their presence stretches from the southern border and follows the railroad that crosses the country.
“‘I am going to lose my life,’ I said to myself,” Aguilera recalls from the encounter. “‘No, it’s better if we return.’ I didn’t get on the train. We turned back.”
Aguilera plans to return to his country, where he worked at a sugar factory. On his way home, he stopped at La 72 Hogar Refugio Para Personas Migrantes, a migrant shelter in Tenosique, a city in Tabasco state near the border with Guatemala. The shelter attended to more than 8,000 migrants between January and June 2013.
Aguilera’s eyes moisten when he speaks of his wife and 7-year-old daughter, whom he left behind in Honduras. Although he never made it to the U.S., he will be happy to return to his family, he says.
“It is better to go back to your own country, even if you are poor,” he says.
Along Mexico’s southern border, violence against migrants continues. Local prosecutors say they investigate all reports of abuse against migrants while police patrol to prevent crimes. But most migrants do not report the crimes against them because they either do not know that they have the right to file a complaint or they worry a long process will delay their journey north. As few cases are resolved, migrant advocates ask the government to implement recommendations by the National Human Rights Commission in order to increase justice.
Stories of abuse like Aguilera’s are common among migrants traveling through Mexico. Many migrants meet fates worse than extortion – including assault, arbitrary detention, injuries, kidnapping, torture, sexual assault, human trafficking and murder, according to organizations such as Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Groups that run shelters for Central American migrants passing through Mexico’s southern border region echo these reports.
The Mexican government has no official tally of the number of crimes committed against migrants. But its most recent statistic available on the topic gives some sense of the problem's magnitude. In the six months between April and September 2010, 11,333 migrants were kidnapped as they traveled through Mexico, according to a 2011 special report by the National Human Rights Commission.
Migrants who are in Mexico illegally are easy prey for common and organized criminals and, in some cases, local and federal authorities because they travel on unknown and inhospitable routes and pass the night in open areas, says Fernando Batista Jiménez, head of the migrant services program in the Fifth Inspector General of the National Human Rights Commission.
In the southern border region, the states of Tabasco and Chiapas are the main entry points for migrants and the cradle of the two most common routes migrants use to cross southern Mexico. But, regardless of which route they choose, migrants are at risk of violence.
Tomás González Castillo, a priest who directs La 72 Hogar Refugio Para Personas Migrantes, has seen a great deal of violence during his two years at the shelter.
Criminal bands have raped, kidnapped and even murdered migrant men and women, and police and immigration officials have beaten and extorted migrants, he says. Many migrants hire human traffickers called “coyotes” to lead them, but these guides often cheat and abandon them.
The shelter helped 825 migrants in 2012 who were victims of crime, according to its statistics. More than half of the crimes were assaults, and more than one-third were abuses at the hands of immigration officials.
Irmgard Pundt, coordinator of the Albergue Belén Casa del Migrante, a migrant shelter on the route that begins in Chiapas, reports similar problems. The shelter attends to about 5,400 migrants each year.
Migrants on that route must cross the state from southwest to southeast to reach the cargo train, which leaves from the municipality of Arriaga in Chiapas, Pundt says. To get there, migrants take public transportation, but they get off before the immigration checkpoints along the road and walk through the brush to avoid detection. During these off-road treks, migrants are often assaulted, and female migrants are raped.
After leaving Arriaga, the cargo train next stops in Ciudad Ixtepec, a city in Oaxaca state that houses another migrant shelter, Hermanos en el Camino. About 15 to 20 percent of the migrants who arrive at the shelter have been the victims of crime, with assault and extortion the most common, estimates José Alberto Donis Rodríguez, the shelter's coordinator. Between January and August 2013, the shelter assisted 9,085 migrants.
The criminal gang Mara Salvatrucha, which started in Los Angeles, Calif., and now operates primarily in the U.S. and El Salvador, as well as throughout Central America, Mexico and Canada, operates along the railroad, Donis says.
Government officials in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Tabasco say police patrol the locations that are riskiest for migrants and prosecutors investigate all crimes that they report.
Ignacio Alejandro Vila, a prosecutor in a division of the attorney general’s office that specializes in crimes against migrants in Chiapas, says that in the first seven months of 2013, his unit initiated the investigation of 226 crimes committed against migrants, mainly human trafficking, rape, robbery and assault.
During the same period, Oaxaca's attorney general's office opened investigations into 62 crimes against migrants, mainly robbery, assault and extortion, says Nahum Pineda, the office's prosecutor specializing in migrant issues.
The state of Tabasco has no special prosecutor focused on crimes against migrants. José Manuel Oropeza, an agent from the investigative district attorney’s office in Tenosique, says migrants reported between 30 and 40 crimes during that period.
The three officials investigate all of the complaints they receive for crimes against migrants, they say.
But the number of reported crimes does not match the actual number of crimes committed against migrants because many do not report them, Batista says.
Oropeza, Pineda and Vila all acknowledge the problem of underreporting. Migrants must report crimes before officials can investigate them, they say.
Many migrants who are victims of crimes do not report the incidents because they do not want to interrupt their journeys, Batista says. Their objective is to reach the U.S. regardless of what happens along the way.
Reporting crimes can create significant delays for migrants who not only have to file complaints, but also must make themselves available to law enforcement during the investigations, Batista says. This means they must stay in the state where the crimes occurred.
Other migrants do not report crimes because they do not realize that they have the right to file a complaint even though they are in the country illegally, Donis says. Others minimize the seriousness of the crimes committed against them.
In addition to providing lodging and free food to migrants in transit, shelters’ staff members inform migrants of their rights to report crimes and accompany them to file complaints if they decide to do so. They also allow migrants to stay at the shelters during the investigation of their cases.
Despite this support, some migrants prefer to continue on their journey rather than report crimes.
Blanca Ortiz, 40, is from El Salvador and is traveling with her brother to the U.S. Armed men assaulted the pair in Tenosique, she says. They stole her brother’s money and backpack and took her shoes. Still, she is grateful not to have suffered a more serious crime.
"They assaulted us, but they did not do anything to us," Ortiz says while she rests at La 72 migrant shelter.
When one of the shelter's volunteers explained that she could report the crime if she wanted, Ortiz declined because the minor incident would not be worth the time and effort.
"Since, thanks to God, they did not do anything to us – they did not beat us or anything – for what?" she asks.
Donis knows from personal experience that reporting a crime does not mean the perpetrators will face swift punishment.
Before coordinating the Hermanos en el Camino shelter, Donis was a migrant himself five years ago, traveling with two cousins and a friend from their home country of Guatemala toward the U.S.
The group was taking a bus toward Arriaga when a group of federal agents of the Federal Investigation Agency, now called the Federal Ministerial Police, stopped the bus and asked the four migrants to get off to be searched, Donis alleges. Once the group was off the bus, the police stole their money.
The men did not plan to report the incident, but the priest who founded the shelter where Donis now works persuaded them to file a complaint.
The group met many obstacles during the process, says Donis, who believes they were intentional delays. After they filed a complaint with the district attorney’s office, the office sent the report to two other agencies, which eventually circulated it back to the office where they had originally reported the crime.
On another occasion, the group went to identify the police who they alleged had robbed them, but the photographs they viewed of the 15 officers were distorted. They had to ask for digital copies to take to a cybercafé to adjust in order to view them. But none were the officers they remembered.
Donis' cousins and friend decided to abandon the legal process and to continue with their journey. Only Donis decided to stay and follow through with the case, which, five years later, remains unresolved.
“If the day after filing the complaint with the district attorney’s office, they had taken action, the day after, we would have identified [the police],” Donis says. “The next day, they would have been able to detect who they were. They would be in prison, and I would have already gone, most likely. But no – authority acts with impunity.”
Impunity is rife in Mexico, where the majority of crimes go unpunished, Batista says. Even when migrants report crimes, authorities resolve few cases.
Only 12.8 percent of crimes in Mexico in 2011 were reported, and criminals were tried in only 4.7 percent of these cases, according to a national survey the government conducted in 2012. The study did not report how many of the few crimes that went to trial resulted in prison sentences.
Since so few crimes even make it to trial, the fraction of crimes against migrants that authorities resolve must be infinitesimal, Batista says. He worries about justice for migrants because they report so few crimes against them.
“It is a delicate subject,” he says. “It is a subject that falls to the law enforcement authorities. If we want to prevent crimes, the best preventative measure is to sanction those who are responsible.”
Oropeza, Vila and Pineda say they act quickly on cases related to migrants. But Vila understands that migrants may not want to waste time on a legal process, he says.
Oropeza encourages migrants to understand all that goes into filing a complaint. They must realize that delays in investigations are not just due to the time prosecutors require to do their work because they are not the only ones involved in a criminal investigation, he says.
Still, neither Pineda nor Oropeza knew what percentage of their investigations of crimes against migrants had been resolved, saying they did not have the information. Vila provided only the number of human trafficking cases resolved – 30 cases – since 2008.
Both Donis and González, who hear about crimes against migrants on a daily basis through their work, say authorities’ attempts to seek justice on behalf of migrants have improved. Still, this improvement is minimal and has come about only because of pressure from shelters, González says.
In the National Human Rights Commission’s special report on kidnappings of migrants, it made several proposals to local and federal authorities aimed at ensuring justice for migrants who suffer crimes. The proposals included increasing coordination among local and federal law enforcement agencies, strengthening vigilance in high-risk zones, and making the judicial process more agile.
Although the report is from 2011 and the commission is now at work on a new version due out sometime in 2013, the original proposals remain relevant because authorities have still not implemented them, Batista says.
Although the struggles of migration have frequented the media, coverage has been shallow about the diverse issues that Central American migrants who enter Mexico illegally face as they try to settle in the country or travel north. Mayela Sánchez, senior reporter for GPJ's Mexico News Desk, spent one month along Mexico's southern border delving into the nuances of employment, health, violence, gender justice and various human rights issues that push people to migrate and confront them along their journeys. GPJ will feature this series on the first Wednesday of October, November and December.
GPJ translated this article from Spanish.