In February I traveled to Guerrero, Mexico City and Chiapas to learn more about what Mexico was doing to prevent its own residents from being forced from their homes and heading to the U.S. border. Under threat from the Trump administration, the Mexican government had taken drastic action to stop Central American migrants.
— Tim Steller
Citizens disrupted by violence in the Mexican poppy-growing region say the federal government has looked the other way.
Leonardo Bravo, Guerrero, Mexico — So many people have been forced from their homes in this highland area of southern Mexico that the mayor gives a form letter to local residents who want to seek asylum in the United States.
In the last 14 months, Mayor Ismael Cástulo Guzmán told me, he’s handed out around 600 of them. The formal document explains:
“Due to clashes between armed groups and organized crime in the area of the county of Leonardo Bravo and in the state of Guerrero during recent years, there has been a wave of violence that has kept society in fear and prevented residents from carrying out a normal way of life.”
Displaced people, forced from their homes by armed groups, can take these letters to Mexican cities on the U.S. border to help them make an asylum case.
In some of these border cities, exiles from Guerrero and neighboring Michoacán, not Central Americans, make up the bulk of the people waiting on the list to make an asylum claim. In Nogales, Sonora, early this month, 40 percent of the people waiting for asylum appointments with U.S. officials were from Guerrero.
The Mexican government, though, continues to treat migration as mainly a Central American problem.
In June, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his government reacted to threats from President Trump of closing the U.S. border and imposing tariffs by reversing his initial, more liberal migration policy.
Now, Mexican immigration agents check IDs at informal crossings on the Guatemalan border where they never did before.
Soldiers and other officials man highway checkpoints in the south and corral foreign migrants into shelters and detention centers. One shelter I visited earlier this month in Tapachula, Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, teemed with more than 700 people in a complex meant for 250.