Recent issues on migration – US-Mexico-Central America

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Recent issues on migration – US-Mexico-Central America

Marta Sanchez Soler Executive Coordinator

Mexico, Distrito Federal July 19, 2015

Migration responds to multidimensional incentives, but the massive migrations of today are due to circumstances over which people have no control. It is an issue related to geopolitical interests, a global phenomenon which feeds from the political, economic and social inequality generated by the neoliberal economic system exemplified by the Free Trade Agreements, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, SPP, and more; all at the service of big capital and transnational companies.

Why are the people from Central American migrating? Historically, the US has intervened in Latin America by overthrowing democratically elected governments, financing atrocities and pushing trade policies that destroy local economies The US government must recognize that conditions it helped create make people leave their countries. Central Americans haven’t managed to overcome crime, violence, corruption, exploitation and poverty, since every time there is a possibility for change, the US provides money and weapons to governments to halt their efforts.

Nicaragua was invaded in 1912 and occupied until 1933. Anastasio Somoza took over, launching a decades-long dictatorship with US support. When the Sandinista government rose to power the US began years of financing the “Contras,” a right wing group responsible for committing atrocities and smuggling drugs into de United States with the Regan administration knowledge. The Salvadoran military committed atrocities in the 1980s, with US funding, including raping nuns, assassinating priests, killing hundreds of children. In Honduras, Manuel Zelaya became president in 2006 and responded to grassroots demands providing direct assistance to the poorest Hondurans but by 2009, Zelaya was ousted in a violent coup by powerful right-wing elites, with tacit support from the US government. The new governments reversed Zelaya’s reforms and the country’s homicide rate jumped along with a major increase in political repression. As much as 70% of the nation’s police forces are corrupt. Yet US military and police aid to Honduras keeps on flowing. In 1944, Guatemala´s first democratic elections brought Juan José Arévalo to the presidency. Arévalo confiscated foreign estates to redistribute them to peasants; built new schools, hospitals and homes. Jacobo Árbenz, became president in 1951, deepening Arévalo’s reforms. To crush “communism” and restore United Fruit’s profits, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) joined Guatemalan military officers to overthrow Arbenz in a 1954 coup. Decades of brutal repression ensued, peaking in the 1980s, when the Guatemalan military slaughtered 200,000 people and eliminated entire rural communities.

There is much more to be said about US intervention in Latin America, including Mexico, among the most visible:

The U.S. funded the Guatemalan military during the 1960s and 1970s anti-insurgency war, some of the recipients of military funding and training were the Kaibiles, a special force unit responsible for several massacres. Former Kaibiles have joined the ranks of the most violent of Mexican drug cartels: the Zetas.

The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. With NAFTA, cheap US subsidized imports, agricultural products, flooded the Mexican market, leaving farmers and other low-skilled

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workers without jobs, and sparked huge migration to the US. From being self sufficiency in food, Mexico, now relies heavily on imports mainly from US.

These and other actions of criminal capitalism have caused the expulsion of migrants from their places of origin because lack of employment and opportunities for survival, and has reduced human beings to a mere commodity. The level of inequality created is beyond belief. The engine of migration has been for many years the neoliberal system that has been imposed in the region.

This extreme inequality is collecting is dues by creating structural survival responses all over the Region in the form generalized violence and criminal activity. Residents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are being pushed northward by the world’s highest levels of criminal violence. As a region, México and Central America share a close third and fourth place with the highest number of violent deaths in the world, only after Syria e Iraq1.

The indescribable level of violence that Central American families face, is rooted also on more recent historical events: Fleeing war from the early 80’s young people migrated to the US, only to find extreme violence from mafias and gangs in Mexican, African American and Asian ghettos. They counteracted by creating their own gangs like Mara Salvatrucha, and Barrio 18. By the 90´s the Central American gangs controlled many neighborhoods and ghettos through violence and criminal activities. The US authorities opted for mass deportation and over 100,000 young gang members that had grown up in the US and spoke mainly English, were sent back, displacing the violence to their original places in Central America and de facto exporting and regionalizing criminal activity2. Today, the Mara Salvatrucha, Barrio 18, and smaller organizations control neighborhoods throughout Central America, using extreme brutality to obtain streams of money from extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, and street-level drug trafficking.

Mexico, has also exported its criminal cartels to the Central American countries3. The Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas control most of organized crime in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and became partners with the Central American Maras, gangs and other criminal organizations in their business activities. Central American gangs are participating in the trafficking of undocumented immigrants, kidnappings, disappearances, extortion, and trafficking of young women for prostitution under the control of the Mexican cartels that also use the Central American gangs to protect trafficking routes, transfer weapons, collect dues and debts and killing other cartel members.

Additionally, there is an ever-growing black market in firearms along the U.S.-Mexico. A recent study4 estimates that around 252,000 guns cross the border every year, along with US Government involvement in supplying arms to organized crime5. Organized crime in Mexico is being provided with weapons from the United States, both from private arms dealers as well as from government agencies.

1 International Institute of Strategic Studies, (IISS), London, 2014.

2 According to the latest National Assessment of Gang Threat (NGIC) published by the FBI in 2009, the Mara Salvatrucha had 30 to 50 thousand

members around the world. In the U.S.there are between 8 and 10 thousand members. This band operates also in Atlanta, Dallas and Washington and according to the FBI; the Gang 18 has almost the same number of members dispersed in 44 U.S. cities in 20 states of the American Union. 3 The Criminal Diaspora: The Spread of Transnational Organized Crime and How to Contain its Expansion. The Woodrow Wilson Center, June,

2013. 4 5 A federal operation dubbed Fast and Furious allowed weapons from the U.S. to pass into the hands of suspected gun smugglers so the arms

could be traced to the higher echelons of Mexican drug cartels. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which ran the operation, lost track of this firearms, many of which have been linked to crimes, including the fatal shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010.

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Migrant or Refugee?

This situation of unbearable violence was exposed by the increase of migrants going north through Mexico that escalated in the months of April, May and June of 2014, when along with the regular stream of migrants, there were an unusual number of women with children between 0 and 12 years old, a large increase in young migrants between 14 and 18 years, and entire ethnic afro-descendant communities, the Garifuna, as their lands had been taken over by mega projects and corporate investments.

A qualitative change in the attitude of the migrants was clear; they displayed a sense of emergency that prevail over any consideration of the enormous danger and the physical and personal sacrifice that the journey through Mexico implies. This was a population pushed by desperation, without any regard for consequences or tragedies waiting ahead. Seven out of ten migrants interviewed stated they were fleeing their countries due to death threats, extortion or the assassination of a relative by gangs or “the narcos.”

Thus 70% declared fear for their lives as the reason from leaving their countries, about 20% cited that there were going to join family members, and 10% expressed that there were in search of a “better future and to help their families”6

The general term of Forced Migration “refers to the movements of refugees as well as people displaced by natural-environmental disasters, chemical-nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects”.7 This definition has been challenged over the past 60 years, and is under constant review. Many forcibly displaced people do not easily fit within this formal category. They, as well as their rights, are in urgent need of protection8. Three preferred categories define more clearly the scope of Forced Migration:

Conflict-Induced Displacement, occurs when people are forced to flee their homes as a result of armed conflict including civil war, generalized violence, and persecution on the grounds of nationality, race, religion, political opinion or social group, and their governments are either the perpetrators or incapable or negligent in guaranteeing their safety.

Development-Induced displacement occurs when people are forced to move as a result of policies and projects to advance ‘development’ efforts: large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams, roads, ports, airports; urban clearance initiatives; mining and deforestation; and the introduction of conservation parks/reserves and biosphere projects. This causal factor disproportionately affects indigenous and ethnic minorities, and the urban or rural poor.

Disaster-Induced Displacement occurs when people fly as a result of natural disasters (floods, volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes), environmental change (deforestation, desertification, land degradation, global warming) and human-made disasters (industrial accidents, radioactivity)9.

In the case of Central American, the extreme violence, poverty and the development projects, compels us to examine current migration differently. We are not looking at normal migratory phenomenon; we are faced with a case of forced displacement in which the players cease to migrate for traditional reasons. They are fleeing from extreme violence and the actual risk of imminent death.

6 Direct personal interviews conducted by the Mesoamerican Migrants Movement, from February to June, 1994.

7 http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/pubhealth/modules/forcedMigration/definitions.html

8University of Oxford, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, 2012-13.

9 http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/pubhealth/modules/forcedMigration/definitions.html

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Central American Governments, Mexico as well as the United States are unwilling to acknowledge these facts. For Central American countries, it would mean that they acknowledge their governments´ failure in providing their citizens with an environment suitable for achieving even a minimal state of well being.

For the US, beyond admitting their share of responsibility in causing this humanitarian crisis, the implication is that they would have to abide both by international law and their own migration regulations, and welcome this forced migrations persons in their country as asylum seekers, people who have moved across an international border in search of protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention, but whose claim for refugee status has not yet been determined. They are non deportable until a migration judge rules their claims unsubstantial.

Yet, In the US there is an increasing skepticism from some politicians and the media, about the credibility of the claims of many asylum seekers. They have been labeled ‘economic refugees’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’, even against the facts showing that asylum seekers come from failed or failing states enduring extreme violence and with high degrees of human rights abuses and significant levels of poverty.

In the light of this undeniable evidence, at least 80% -if not all, the migrants from Central America should be considered subjected to force migration and thus they are Refugees.

Underlining causes - policies and institutions

The current humanitarian crisis, so widely exposed by the media, is the product of the toxic mix of US immigration policies, the hardening of border controls, militarization, and regional economic models that displace small agricultural producers and urban workers. Models and policies that have produced massive poverty, inequality and violence in the entire region, eroding governmental institutions and pushing to the limit their ability to govern.

After the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001, Mexico was hit by the paradigm shift in US National Security favoring the concept of “Homeland Security”, the militarization of internal security in the United States and the plan to shield the borders. The US government began to prosecute undocumented immigrants as criminals justifying its policy as a security anti-terrorism strategy. US law was amended to create the Department of Homeland Security and state immigration laws were reformed giving way to xenophobic and discriminatory policies that labeled undocumented immigrants as “Threats to National Security” to the US, in the same class as terrorism, drug trafficking and social movements. The United States has invested heavily in security along the southwestern border over the past decade, in large part to stop unlawful immigration. The Border Patrol, with more than 20,000 agents, doubled its manpower over the past decade. The budget of its ruling agency, Customs and Border Protection, has grown from $5.9 billion in 2004 to more than $12 billion in 2015.

In parallel, in 2001 Mexico’s government starts “Plan Sur”, a national security plan to control the flows of “people, drugs and arms”, in 2002 the Alliance for the Mexico-US Border included 33 actions to reinforce security in the area, and by 2004 the action Plan for Border Security US Mexico, was designed to use better technologies to facilitate removals and to enhance the mechanism of communication between officials from both countries.

By 2005, Canada, US and Mexico, signed the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), ASPAN in Spanish, that marked the beginning of a new era in the Mexico-US bilateral relationship focused on combating drug trafficking and transnational organized crime. This SPP was finalized with the Merida Initiative, a three-year plan consisting of military training, technical assistance on security, operational technology and military equipment to Mexico to combat drug trafficking. The United States became Mexico´s principal partner on “security”. Subsequent and more aggressive agreements have followed.

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It was during the preparatory discussions for the Merida Initiative when the National Migration Institute (INM) was included among the security agencies of the Mexican State, shifting its role from being in charge of the administrative tasks of managing migration to one focused on migration as a threat to national security, even as Mexico throughout its history had been a preferred host country for refugees from countries undergoing wars or political problems.

Before 9/11 organized crime was busy successfully dealing drugs. As controls tightened in the northern border, the cartels diversified their portfolio of crimes to include arms trade, piracy, trafficking in women, etc. A total of 22 illegal businesses go across the 3,085 kilometer border that the United States and Mexico share, including the very profitable business of managing migrations flows. Kidnapping and extortion of migrants has become a lucrative business not only for criminals but also for the public officers who protect them. Violence and criminality grew in Mexico from 2006 on, and by 2010 international agencies were deeming Mexico as the world’s most violent country for migrants. The figures are shocking:

more than 20,000 abductions of migrants per year;

from 72,000 to 120,000 migrants missing in the period from 2006 to 201510,

an estimated 24,000 bodies buried in unmarked graves in municipal cemeteries,

40,000 unidentified bodies in public morgues (SEMEFOS)

The slaughter of San Fernando, Tamaulipas August 2010 that left 72 bodies of migrants, 47 mass graves discovered in the same municipality in April 2011 uncovered 193 bodies, the massacre of Cadereyta, Nuevo Leon that led to a toll of 49 dismembered victims found between May 12 and 13, 2012, and the numbers of migrants who have not disappeared or died, but who nonetheless suffer all sorts of criminal assaults at the hands of organized or common crime in partnership with Mexican local, state and federal authorities, either by direct action, omission, negligence, collusion, protection, and/or acquiescence.

In Mexico, the latest official data shows that Central Americans continue to flee north in large numbers defying the dangers of transit and also challenging the US inhumane treatment by Border Patrol and the immigration administrative process. Mexico’s massive immigration crackdown has increased deportations in response to the intense media and political attention given to the surge in “unaccompanied minors” crossing the US-Mexico border in the summer of 2014. A propaganda campaign designed to cover up the real humanitarian tragedy happening not in the US, but in Central American and in transit through Mexico. An excuse used to blame, as the American government has done, the “Irresponsible parents” and the smugglers, and thus to justify their increased policies of border militarization, and “persuade” Mexico to stop migration in its own southern border.

The “Humanitarian Crisis” declared by the US launched an institutional campaign to discourage migration, and started emergency rounds of negotiations with all Central American nations and with Mexico. As a result Mexico, fast tracked the “Southern Border Plan” after Barack Obama declared the unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied children and families seeking refuge at the US border an “urgent humanitarian situation”11.

The misleading information given to the world’s audience is deliberate and obvious: About 65,000 unaccompanied children (0-17 years old) were detained by the United States Border Patrol in fiscal year 2014, (10.01.2013 to 09.30.2014). Of those detained, only about 500 children were under 5 years old,

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As reported by the National Commission on Human Rights and Mauricio Farah: Conference “FORO DE BALANCE LEGISLATIVO, Advances y

Challenges on Migration and Human Rights, April 18 y 19, 2012, Senado de la Republica. http://www.cndh.org.mx/sites/all/fuentes/documentos/informes/especiales/2011_secmigrantes_0.pdf, 11

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/02/presidential-memorandum-response-influx-unaccompanied-alien-children-acr

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1,300 between 5 and 12 and about 63,200 between 13 and 17,12 and 95% were already turned over to their families in the US to wait for their “day in court”

These youngsters are surely entitled to the protection of the laws governing under age persons (0-17), but considering the socioeconomic conditions in which their lives have been spent, they can hardly be portrayed as “children”. The circumstances of their lives have forced then to assume adult roles. Many have worked for years helping their families and many already have their own families who sustain, they are best described as “young migrants, independent and undocumented”.

Nor is it accurate to use the term “unaccompanied” because it creates the false impression that they are traveling alone while it refers to a legal technicality meaning that there is no “parent or guardian” present. The term is misleading as younger ones do travel with their mothers; most others travel with friends, family members, smugglers, and many of the older ones (14-17) have always traveled alone.

None the less, the campaign was believed by most human rights defenders and it served its purpose well. We now have in place the “PLAN FRONTERA SUR”, a policy that allows security forces from across Mexico to be deployed into migrant hot spots with US funding through the Merida Initiative. In southern Mexico migration police officers guard traditional crossings places and new, more dangerous and expensive routes are already starting to emerge as migrants and smugglers adapt to the new rules of the game. Men, women and children are forced to go into hiding in alternative pathways, where local gangs and organized crime, in complicity with different governmental and civil society actors are awaiting, more invisible than before as they are not operating along the railroad tracks.

Under this plan, Mexican authorities have now arrested more unaccompanied minors from Central America than the United States. The numbers show that the so-called increase in 2014 has not ended. A huge number of Central Americans are still running, but most are still detained in Mexico rather than in the US, WOLA indicates that “between October 2014 and April 2015, the US stopped 70 440 Central American migrants while Mexican authorities arrested 92 889.”13 So far in 2015, Mexico has detained 9,483 under age persons and 9,526 women, 560% and 690% over the same time period in 2014.14 That has meant that fewer Central Americans who have reason to seek asylum are getting a chance to make their case. During the first nine months of 2014, the Mexican government, which has a backlogged and lengthy asylum application process, approved only 16% of requests filed.

These numbers clearly imply that Mexico has taken on a new role as an immigration enforcer and that this role has come in response to US pressure. “Mexico is a trusted partner on this issue and has made great efforts to stem the flow of unaccompanied minors across our shared border and at its southern border. We continue to rely on Mexico for its cooperation and support even as the numbers of unaccompanied minors apprehended at our border drops15.”

In July 10, 2015, The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) 16 expressed its concern over stepped-up actions reportedly being taken against migrant persons and those who defend their rights in Mexico since the Southern Border Plan (Plan Frontera Sur) was put into operation: […] reiterates that the State of Mexico must immediately and urgently adopt all necessary measures to guarantee the rights to life, physical integrity, and safety of migrants in transit through Mexico, as well as the rights of migrants’ human rights defenders. […]Moreover, the IACHR urges the State to implement international standards regarding the use of force in immigration control operations; investigate, on its own initiative, acts such

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US State Department official Data 13

El Universal, July 13, 2015. Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) with data from the Bureau of Border Protection (CBP) and the US

National Institute of Migration of Mexico (INM). 14

http://www.gobernacion.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/Extranjeros_alojados_y_devueltos_2014 15

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/04/mexico-deports-record-numbers-women-children-central-america 16

15.06.10 Press release 65/15, IACHR Expresses Concern over Mexico’s Southern Border Plan.

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as those described above; punish agents responsible for human rights violations; and provide reparation to the victims of these violations. The Commission reiterates the importance of the principle of exceptionality of immigration detention, as well as the prohibition on the detention of child migrants. […]In terms of deportation proceedings, the Commission reaffirms the State’s need to observe due process guarantees and to guarantee the right to seek and receive asylum, the protection of the principle of non-return, and the absolute prohibition of mass expulsions”17.

The illegal “fast” deportation strategies favored by both countries are further risking the lives of the minors leaving Central America motivated by specific threats to their security, yet neither Mexico nor the United States are adequately screening these minors for protection concerns, and the overwhelming majority are deported rapidly back to the situations they were fleeing from.

The Southern Border Program will be remembered as the unlawful instrument used by the Mexican and US states to contain in an offensively criminal manner, transit migration through Mexico.

As for the strategy in Central America, the White House is asking congress to provide $1 billion in aid to help El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The package includes $400 million for promoting prosperity and regional economic integration, with an emphasis on such goals as “trade facilitation” and “creating friendly business environments” promoting the neoliberal economic policies the US has been imposing in Central America for the past 25 years: “privatization”, “free trade,” and “open markets”. Another $300 million earmarked in more aid to police and armed forces. Plan Colombia has been mentioned as a model for security enhancement, when it is now public knowledge that Plan Colombia has used the “war on drugs” as a pretext to bolster the Colombian military’s war on its opponents, and it has pushed drug trafficking deeper into Mexico and Central America.

As if that were not enough, “About 250 Marines are preparing to form the U.S. military’s first rapid-response task force to be based in Central America, where they’ll train local forces battling drug cartels. Small teams of Marines have been deployed to Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador in recent years to train local forces to combat cartels and narcotics traffickers. The new task force is part of a broader effort by SOUTHCOM and Marine leaders to partner more closely with other Marine Corps, navies, armies and coast guards in the region.18

All of these actions expose what we argued before: The Humanitarian crisis is a cover up to justify more intervention, militarization, more economic deals, and more of the same trade policies and security assistance that have driven thousands of people into forced migration. As well as the ever-present geopolitical imperatives: The intent to reinforce US control of the Central American territory in view of the challenges presented to the US by the China-Russian connection defying US hegemony, and the imminent construction of the Nicaraguan Canal.

Social Response

In Mexico, throughout 2014 and continuing in 2015, hundreds of thousands of people have protested all over the country. Protesters are demanding the Return of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa teachers school who were abducted by local police in Guerrero last September and no credible information has been offered by the authorities, boycotted the elections (June 7). Other main issues are Impunity, (98% of legal suits in Mexico end up overthrown), the disappearance of thousand of Mexican people as well as migrants. corruption, violence, defense of the territory, mining, indigenous rights, feminicides, mega projects, assassination of journalists, persecution of human rights defenders, human rights violations, militarization, and criminalization of social protest.

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IBID 18

http://www.marinecorpstmes.com/, Marines set for new mission in troubled Central America, By Gina Harkins April 13, 2015

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All of these protests have been given the same treatment that the PRI has historically mastered: By co-opting opposing forces when possible, along with brutally repressing the others. The ability of the Mexican government to control social anger reduces the possibility that this scenario of strong social mobilizations will attain radical and permanent changes in today´s Mexico.

The people of Latin America are re-organizing. In recent week, angry people have been marching on centers of authority and scuffling with agents of the law. Hundreds if not millions of people protesting in response of the generalized record of blatant human rights violations, extreme violence and corruption scandals currently ensuing in Latin America. There is a strong movement of civil organizations defending human, migrant, land, sexual, reproductive, and LGBT rights all through Central America. Many have networked with allied organizations worldwide.

As for the issue of migration, the engine for social action have been the Central American mothers who have one or more family members missing, and whose last contact was from somewhere in Mexico, while on their way north.

Their activism first got underway in El Progresso, Honduras, in 1999, with two women united by having lost contact with their migrant children, the two decided to organize the Committee of Relatives of Migrants from El Progreso (COFAMIPRO) and take to the road. In December of 2000 the first search tour got as far as Tecún Umán City, in northwest Guatemala on the border with Mexico, and Tapachula, on the Mexican side of the border in the state of Chiapas.

What at first was just a handful of poor Honduran women with no money or Mexican visas, and without really any organization at all, their persistence allowed them to grow in numbers, to strengthen the organization in their country and help others to organize.

While they come from different organizations, this joint effort became known as The Caravan of Central American Mothers Searching for Their Disappeared Family Members in Transit Though Mexico: The Caravan of Central American Mothers.

The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement and the Caravans Luis Angel Nieto, co-founder of MMM embarked on a journey through the migration route starting in Central America in 2006. During his tour, Nieto met the group of mothers from El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras, who carried out extremely precarious tours to the border with Mexico. MMM’s collaboration with the mothers of missing migrants emerges thereafter, and we began to accompany them in their annual tour. By 2008, MMM became the organizing arm of the caravan throughout Mexico, involved mothers from the other Central American countries and activated a qualitative change getting the attention of both national and international media as well as the Mexican government officials and Mexican NGO’s and human rights defenders, and specially the migrant shelters. The issue of the violations of the rights of migrants was positioned as an important issue on the national agenda. From 2012, women from the four different Central American Countries-Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala made the trip together. The families of the migrants have established a solid network of Organizations in defense of human rights, among others, the Committee of Relatives of Migrants of El Progreso (COFAMIPRO), Committee of Relatives of Dead and Missing Migrants - El Salvador (COFAMIDE), Committee or Migrant Families- Central Honduras (COFAMICENH), National Bureau for Migration in Guatemala (MENAMIG), Jesuit Service for Migrants, the Scalabrini’s Pastoral of Human Mobility, Project Counseling Service. Hosting the work in Mexico of the Search Caravans, has been a major challenge for those associated with the MMM. The caravan has driven us to join efforts with more than 120 different civil organizations, in

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order to be the local hosts of the Caravan during its transit through the country. It is also a challenge for the political implications of direct accusations and the demands on the government of Mexico Our goal is to find missing family members in transit through Mexico, whether live, they were killed, deprived of liberty or in situations of trafficking; and not allow that the missing migrants remain ignored and declared non-existent, always focusing on finding their relatives alive, as well as to denounce publicly and peacefully the continuous aggressions that migrants suffer in México; bear witness to the inhuman and criminal treatment that the Mexican State allows to happen to migrants in transit; and require that the complicity, impunity, and the direct participation of officials and public servants in acts of kidnapping and forced disappearance are eradicated through concrete actions the address. The heightened violence, the passivity of the States in undertaking research or exercising concrete actions seeking missing persons in Mexico, the impunity, the silence of some sectors society, affect us all equally and must now end.19 Document the undocumented is the best alternative to end the violation of migrant’s human rights. It would discourage criminal activity. It would also render unnecessary the millions of dollars used to contain the flow of migrants, and it would facilitate circular migration where international workers would return home when work becomes scarce and go back when their labor is needed. The increment of undocumented migrants in host countries happens when the containment measures impede their mobility.

The urgent need for comprehensive regional public policies that addresses migration in Central American and Mexico states, as countries of origin, transit, destination and return, and guaranties the right to migrate, not migrate and not to be forcibly displaced, make it necessary to implement efforts to adopt the following concrete measures: 20

To create special prosecutor agency to deal with all crimes perpetrated against migrants, in coordination with national and regional levels.

To establish national and regional mechanisms for the immediate search of all missing persons so that families should not make themselves this search.

Building a national and regional bank of forensic data of unidentified remains, with the support of civil society and independent experts.

Implementation of Mexican and Regional governmental program of comprehensive care for migrant families and missing persons who have been victims of crime committed in transit and the inhuman conditions during the migratory journey injuries.

The establishment of an independent international commission of forensic experts to investigate the identities of migrants in the case of the 72 migrants killed and the remains found in San Fernando and those that are unidentified and ask migrants belong to Cadereyta, as well as the remains found in all clandestine mass graves and common graves in Mexican cemeteries.21

With overwhelming evidence of the systematic violation of human rights of migrants, neither Mexican nor Central American authorities have taken concrete measures for the prevention, investigation and punishment of these crimes. In this institutional and political vacuum the civil society organizations, have accompanied the mothers searching for their relatives in demanding access to truth and justice.

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http://movimientomigrantemesoamericano.org/acerca-de/ 20

http://movimientomigrantemesoamericano.org/2014/11/15/x-caravana/ 21

http://movimientomigrantemesoamericano.org/2015/05/30/los-culpables-de-la-masacre-de-migrantes-en-san-fernando-tamaulipas/

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Remedies in concrete cases are not enough

International action is required to reverse the global humanitarian crisis facing “The wretched of the earth,” as Frantz Fanon’s famous phrase describes, are on the move as migrants22. Mostly, they have headed north across scorching deserts and menacing seas to follow their dreams of escaping poverty and finding a better life. Freedom of migration already virtually exists for middle-class citizens of Northern countries. It can be seen as a normal part of the relationships between societies with similar economic, social, and legal levels. The so-called migration crisis arises because of the vast imbalances between North and South with regard to economic conditions, social well-being, and human rights. Border restrictions, however draconian, will do nothing to eliminate unwanted migration flows, as long as these fundamental disparities persist. And, as they have in the past, forced migrants of every category will form part of those flows.23 We dream about reaching the Mesoamerican Citizenship, as integrator of the peoples of the sub-region

of our continent to result in a zone of free human mobility, where all governments not only guarantee

the right to free movement, but the full and complete enjoyment of human rights of migrants for all

citizens of in each of the countries in the sub-region.

This necessarily implies the rejection of policies radically contrary to the dream of equality and justice,

policies that have been applied under the SPP, making regional governments complicit in the policy from

the US It that is driven to criminalize migrants and encourage criminal enterprises around migration

(kidnapping, extortion, smuggling and trafficking in persons, etc.), the payoff is not only perpetuating the

use of migration as cheap labor in the US territory, rather it is another excuse to justify militarization of

Mesoamerica under the tutelage of the US. The failure of these policies is apparent and is expressed in

the humanitarian crisis that exists with the hundreds of thousands of deaths over the last 10 to 15 years.

Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson suggest that “We can also continue to push for renegotiation of existing pacts like NAFTA and DR-CAFTA, and demand that our government uphold whatever protections these pacts are supposed to include.24

Join campaigns to end the detention and deportation of immigrants and refugees, and demand a just immigration policy.

Join anti-sweatshop campaigns and help workers defend their rights in Central America and beyond.

Support efforts to reverse harsh drug laws and incarceration and redirect resources to community-based treatment and prevention programs.

Support campaigns to crack down on militarization, including the manufacture, sales and trafficking of weapons.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/weekend-roundup-63_b_7139312.html

23

MPI, Confronting the Realities of Forced Migration, May 1, 2004. 24

27 february 2015 / TRUTH-OUT.ORG, Central America "Aid" Won't Slow Migration

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Support Central American activists struggling to regain community control of land and resources,

Ending forced migration requires changing the way receiving countries deal with developing nations. This includes ending military intervention, overturning austerity policies and ending trade and investment pacts that lead to economic polarization. These measures could help people to achieve the right to stay home, to make migration a voluntary choice, rather than an act forced by the need to survive. An immigration policy that protects migrants from drowning or dying in the desert must link basic rights: the right to stay home, not to be forcefully displaced and equality and dignity when people leave and migrate.