Photo: Juan Manuel Blanco / EFE
A dozen migrants, part of a group of 20 who have been on a hunger strike for five days, had chains placed around his body in a park in the Mexican city of Tapachula (southeast), on the border with Guatemala, to demand that immigration authorities hand over transit documents.
The group, made up of men and women, knelt in Benito Juárez Park, in the center of Tapachula, to beg the immigration staff to help them generate visas for humanitarian reasons.
The foreigners crossed the chains around their bodies and held them in their hands, thus beginning a new pressure measure, for an indefinite period of time, to push the authorities to speed up their migration processes.
Ali Mora, a migrant from Venezuela, who is with his two children and his family on hunger strike, said that he chained himself to try to leave this city “because we are practically prisoners and we want to mobilize in Mexican territory to work and advance.”
The South American said that chained is how he feels in Tapachula, where more than a dozen migrants have undertaken protest actions.
“We want to tell the National Migration Institute (INM) that, just as they make us invisible, we feel chained and very hungry, and we cannot go out to work“.
Peter Romero, another South American migrant, assured that they decided to put on the chains and metal rings to force a response from the immigration authorities, obtain their papers, move and reach the northern border and then to the United States.
“We want the government to realize that we are saturated in Tapachula; there are children, pregnant women and people who no longer have a place to stay,” he said.
This group of migrants settled, since last night Wednesday, in front of the main entrance to the INM migration regulation offices, where they spend the night in the open air, some families have placed cardboard, while others sleep on the planters in the middle of the entrance of the Cold Fronts to the region.
A migrant from Honduras, Yeny Matamoros, said that she remains on alert, taking care of her children, and recalled that they lack essential services for children and women.
With chains on their shoulders and tied to their hands, the migrants announced that they will continue their hunger strike until Tuesday and that day they will go to the immigration authorities to try to get a response to their requests for refuge.
According to the migrants, there is census of more than 5, 000 people who are in the park awaiting visas and refugee petitions.
Since Wednesday the marches and protests have been reactivated in this city by thousands of migrants from at least a 10 nationalities.
Throughout 1200 several migrant caravans with thousands of people departed from Tapachula, although the vast majority were stopped and dismantled by the Mexican security forces.
The region is experiencing a record flow to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection Office ( CBP) detected more than 1.7 million undocumented immigrants on the border with Mexico in the fiscal year 2021, which ended on 30 of September.
Mexico deported more from 114,000 foreigners in 1200, according to data from the Migration Policy Unit of the country’s Ministry of the Interior.
In addition, the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (Comar) received a record of 131,448 refugee applications in 2021. Of these, more than 51,000 are Haitians.
With information from Efe.
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