In August of this year, the despair and fury of the migrants held in Tapachula again overflowed. After months of waiting without any news from the authorities, hundreds of migrants protested at the offices of the National Migration Institute (INM) and the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) demanding their right to apply for asylum and the timely resolution of applications already made. There was no answer.
More than 125,000 people are corralled in the city of Tapachula (in southern Mexico, next to Guatemala), which has become an “open-air prison” for migrants. They are being held hostage and the authorities deliberately lengthen the proceedings to establish their legal stay in Mexico. Migrants cannot leave the city without papers, but there is no work, food, money, or shelter for them. And more than 15,000 agents of Migration, the National Guard, the Army, and the Navy are deployed so that they do not leave the encirclement.
On August 28, hundreds of Haitian, Central American and other migrants set out in a caravan. They were seeking to reach the northern border to apply for asylum in the United States, or if not, to reach another part of Mexico where they could work and survive. They were brutally attacked by the uniformed men. More than 100 were captured and “secured” on INM buses. Their compañeros managed to free some detainees and together they continued on their way. In the following days, three more caravans left Tapachula. Again the police and military ambushed and thwarted them, detaining hundreds of migrants each time. But hundreds of others were still scattered about, trying to get north.
Fifteen days later, some 15,000 migrants, mainly Haitians, were already camped under a bridge in Del Río, Texas, demanding their right to apply for asylum in the United States. Corralled by armed U.S. agents, they had to cross the river to Mexico to get water, food and diapers for the eight days of their stay, until the authorities took them all away.
According to the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 5,000 of these migrants were still in custody “to be processed,” 2,000 were “expelled” (deported to Haiti), and 8,000 “voluntarily returned to Mexico,” that is, they were deported or forced to return on their own. The Mexican government also deported at least hundreds of Haitians to Port-au-Prince and many more were forcibly returned to the Siglo XXI detention center in Tapachula. The authorities deported migrants from other countries to Guatemala.
On October 5 in Tapachula another 500 migrants demonstrated again, demanding that they expedite their immigration proceedings or else they would leave in a caravan for Mexico City in 20 days. Irineo Mújica, director of Pueblos sin Fronteras [Peoples Without Borders], declared that “The demonstration is to tell Migration that enough is enough; that this jail has already been broken and that we give them 20 days to regularize people’s papers. With papers or without papers, we will go to Mexico City.” This caravan already took off on October 23, as we write this article.
Brutal Repression by Mexican and U.S. Governments
While the rulers of both countries run out honeyed and hypocritical phrases of supposed respect for “human rights,” the reality is brutal repression and hunting down of migrants for the supposed “crime” of looking for a place where they can survive, fleeing from the hell caused by the functioning of the very world capitalist-imperialist system in their countries of origin.
On the southern and northern borders of Mexico, immigration agents, the National Guard, the Army, and local police viciously hunted down, wounded, detained, and deported migrants. Some of the savage attacks were captured on video: In Chiapas, the director of the migrant detention center in Tapachula (the largest in all of Latin America), Jorge Alejandro Palau, grabs and drags a migrant, so that other agents can knock him down, hit and kick him in the head several times. In another video, members of the National Guard knock down a man who is carrying his son in his arms. He stands up with his child grabbed on to his neck. The uniformed men push him and try to block his way with their shields, and he yells at them, “Kill me. Kill me here with my son!” In Mapastepec, National Guard troops encircle migrant families who rest in the downtown park; they beat and arrest everyone they can. Families are separated and a woman desperately searches for a son she cannot find. In Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, on the U.S. border, the National Guard enters a hotel breaking doors and windows to detain all migrants—with and without papers—to return them to Tapachula; Villahermosa, Tabasco [southern Mexico]; or deport them to Guatemala. They detained many more in northern Mexico, all the way to the U.S. without reporting how many they grabbed.
On the other side, in the U.S., a Border Patrol agent on horseback using his reins as a whip against Haitian migrants was captured on video. Another agent nearly runs over two children with his horse, and one yells at a migrant, “This’s why your country is a shit hole—because you use your women” (to cross into the U.S.). For a week the armed uniformed men encircled them, keeping them packed under the bridge. When hundreds of the Haitians were deported to Port-au-Prince, others returned to Ciudad Acuña. One parent in this situation pointed out, “I don’t want to be like the mice that don’t know about the trap and get trapped, because returning to Haiti is like being buried alive.” Xenophobic and racist repression and immediate deportations (denying thousands of refugees the right to asylum) sparked protests from U.S.-based Haitians and other people angry at these cruel abuses.
Even the U.S. special envoy for Haiti, Daniel Foote, resigned in protest because of the deportation of Haitians. He wrote, “I will not be associated with the United States' inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life.” He noted that Haiti is devastated by “poverty, crime, government corruption, and a lack of humanitarian resources,” and warned that more disasters in Haiti will cause “catastrophic” consequences, not only for Haiti, “but in the U.S. and our neighbors in the hemisphere.” This last comment alludes to the fear of sections of the U.S. ruling class that the migration boom could destabilize their rule even in their own territory.
Almost all recent Haitian migrants arrived in Mexico after living for years in Chile or Brazil, where they fled due to poverty, the devastation of earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as repression and robbery by governments imposed and propped up by U.S. imperialism. Now the situation in Haiti is even worse. As the migrants point out, there is no president there (he was assassinated in July), there is no congress, there is no work, and criminal gangs run things, kidnap and kill at will. In Chile and Brazil, unemployment (exacerbated by the pandemic), anti-immigrant policies that deny migrants permits to work, and growing xenophobia among sections of the population force them to migrate again to survive.
Media reports indicate that since the beginning of August, “almost daily” planes full of migrants take off from Texas and Matamoros [northern Mexico], and that the INM forces them to cross without anything into remote areas in the Guatemalan jungle, including migrants with permits to be in Mexico. From October 2020 to September 2021, the U.S. Border Patrol detained almost 1,700,000 migrants at the border with Mexico: 608,000 Mexicans, 684,000 citizens from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador (the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Central America) and 367,000 from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, and dozens of other countries.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants who reached the northern Mexican border and managed to sign up to apply for asylum in the United States have been expelled to Mexico. Many live out in the open on the northern border, suffering beatings, extortion and kidnapping at the hands of uniformed agents or non-uniformed criminal gangs. Defenders of migrants in the United States who demand an end to this “Stay in Mexico” program that “legalizes” the expulsions of asylum seekers, point out that there are 6,356 reports of kidnapping, rape, torture, and other attacks against migrants expelled to Mexico or those who were blocked from making their way to enter the U.S. since the beginning of the Biden administration (in January 2021). They also note the “complicity of Mexican government agents in violent attacks and kidnappings of migrants and asylum seekers.”
This is how the U.S. and Mexican governments respond to the just demands of migrants.
Unparalleled Hypocrisy
The imperialist government of the United States forces the capitalist government of Mexico, a dependent and dominated country, to hunt down, detain and deport migrants before they reach the border. Biden declares that his immigration policy is just and humane, while Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO] insists that his “containment” policy is to “protect migrants.” The two governments vow to respect migrants’ “human rights” while warning them “not to risk” trying to reach the U.S. or even Mexico City and unleash their armed guards to beat, rape, lock up, and deport them on the spot daily and on a large scale.
The Mexican government uses deceptive language to disguise these crimes against humanity that it commits in its “mission” to “secure” the border of the superpower that dominates this continent and much of the world: The detentions are called “rescues,” imprisonment is called “accommodations,” the detention centers are “immigration stations,” and the deportations are “assisted voluntary returns.” AMLO swears that “there is no repression,” and that his “strategy” is to “solve the root problems” that cause migration, with his “Sowing Life” program and with more imperialist investments in Chiapas, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. However, these measures have not had and will not have any important results. They will not lessen the rising tide of migration (their only real concern), much less improve people’s lives.
The “Root” Problem Is This System, and the Only Solution Is Revolution.
What kind of system makes it so millions of people cannot survive in the country where they were born? Migration is now increasing due to hunger and unemployment; due to global warming that destroys crops and intensifies hurricanes, floods, and droughts; due to reactionary wars; due to the political chaos and to the criminal gangs that run things and kill people indiscriminately in more and more countries. And due to the crimes and atrocities caused by white supremacy, male supremacy and xenophobia. These horrors have driven more than 270,000,000 migrants out of their countries of origin to risk their lives searching for somewhere they can survive in this world.
The capitalist-imperialist system entails all this and it is the real root problem. The very functioning of this system does not allow a favorable solution for humanity to any of these horrors. On the contrary, it is intensifying them.
The crises that are convulsing the world arise from the contradictions of the capitalist system itself, and it is important to understand that they not only greatly increase the suffering of the people, but they also increase the problems of keeping the system afloat.
Only a communist revolution can overthrow this system and build a true socialist system, a system whose goal is to eliminate all forms of exploitation and oppression. We are living in times in which the conditions that make this revolution possible are very likely to arise in many countries.
We must defend migrants and support their just struggle to live, and above all we must prepare the revolution that is the only way to create another world and put an end to all this unnecessary suffering.
Download this article in Spanish in PDF format: Migrantes-se-rebelan.pdf
Aurora Roja
Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico