Hundreds of Haitians leave the city of Tapachula (Mexico’s southern border) desperate after months of waiting for their papers. President Lopez Obrador announces that he “will continue to contain” migration.
A Human Rights group (COMDHSM) that has followed the departure of the caravan denounced that the containment operation had an “excessive and unjustified deployment of security forces” of a contingent made up of 50 military vehicles, the National Guard and the Institute of Migration. “People were attacked, subjected, beaten with shields and batons; The carrying of long weapons was identified by elements of the army, elements of the INM dressed in civilian clothes inciting aggression, as well as other unidentified security agents, civilian clothes and carrying firearms ”.
The caravans are being dissolved by blows and captures among those who can least run, it is made up mainly of Haitians, many who previously arrived in Chile, where they resided after the 2010 earthquake. Others left Haiti in this last and troubled month in the Caribbean country, where their president was assassinated and a force 7 earthquake destroyed the Les Cayes region. To this is added that for two weeks, almost daily flights arrive to Chiapas and Tabasco from Texas with hundreds of deported Central Americans.
The ‘shield’ deployed by Mexico to prevent the departure of migrants has 14,000 elements of the Army, Navy and National Guard deployed along the 650-kilometer border between Chiapas and Guatemala.
FIRST CARAVAN AUGUST 28TH
SECOND CARAVAN AUGUST 31ST
THIRD CARAVAN SEPTEMBER 2ND
The National Migration Institute (INM) of Mexico reported that it seeks to install a humanitarian camp for Haitian migrants in the state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, where care is provided to citizens of that country awaiting refugee or asylum resolution.
For this, the organization said that it tries to join forces with the representation in Mexico of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Unhcr) and the Episcopal Dimension of Pastoral Human Mobility (DEPMH), of the Conference of the Mexican Episcopate (CEM ).
At the National Conference on Migration, held from August 25 to 27 in Mexico City, the INM undertook to coordinate efforts with national and international organizations “to allow humanitarian aid to be extended to people in the context of mobility that They are in the state of Chiapas and they come from Haiti ”.