MEXICO.- Directing the delegation of the National Migration Institute (INM) in the state of Chiapas is like winning the jackpot in the lottery, say rights activists humans who observe the arrival of thousands and thousands of migrants on the ground, like never before.
That is why they are targeting Paola López, the current incumbent, and they want her head.
“I should resign right now,” said Irineo Mujica, representative of the binational organizations Pueblos sin Fronteras and Pueblos Unidos Migrantes. “Her husband is part of the network of smugglers.”
“In Chiapas, traffickers of migrants are in collusion with the INM and the National Guard”, says Luis Villagrán, coordinator of the Center for Human Dignification.
Mujica and Villagrán are the only two defenders of civil society that openly support the logistics of the stay and the passage through Mexico of the caravans of the undocumented in Chiapas. Their attention is focused today on Tapachula, where they are stranded around 150, foreigners.
Undocumented immigrants are waiting for an opportunity called a humanitarian visa. This allows them to advance towards the United States. Thousands join them daily in search of the same thing.
The government of President Joe Biden announced that it will reverse the application of the Title 42 in the month of next May and the reaction on the south side translates into hope of reaching the American Dream.
Title 42 was invoked during the administration of former President Donald Trump since the start of the pandemic in order to protect “national security”. The legal provision allows the US government to expel undocumented immigrants immediately, without due process.
On the Mexican side, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered humanitarian visas to those immigrants in need since the beginning of his government in 2018 and agreed with the US to receive asylum seekers at the northern border to to wait in Mexico for a response to their request for refuge in the United States.
These policies became more power on south side gates. Human rights advocates say that Mexican officials “take advantage of everything” to make money.
“For the Mexican authorities there are no migrants by nationality, but rich and poor migrants; those who can pay and those who cannot. Their passage with humanitarian visas depends on how much is paid and that is why we see so many people waiting”, Luis Villagrán points out in an interview with this newspaper.
Appointments for visas are sold, they are sold visas, QR codes for any procedure, passage by land, by sea, by air… adds Irineo Mujica, who for the last decade has advocated for the strategy of migrant caravans.
Mujica considers that these are an option for the poorest undocumented immigrants fleeing poverty and violence from their countries and cannot pay the network of traffickers to pass through Mexico. A network that includes the authorities and obtains income for almost 7, million dollars annually, according to reports from the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime
In recent days, the Attorney General’s Office detained Juan Pablo Flores, husband of the Chiapas delegate Paola López.
Paola López took possession of the charge the last December to replace Aristeo Taboada, a retired general who was involved in a scandal over the death of 56 undocumented immigrants aboard a trailer that had passed two INM checkpoints without be detained.
López’s experience is far from the profile of his predecessor with military confrontation experience. Away from the barracks, she studied law and criminology. Previously, she held positions in various sectors of the public administration such as the Chiapas State Prosecutor’s Office, the National Electoral Institute, and she was sub-delegate at the INM.
To her official resume, her critics add that she has used her knowledge of the reality of Chiapas so that her husband set up a transport company that “is nothing more than trailers” for migrant smuggling.
“If we review all the reports of the trailers detained in Mexico that are full of migrants, we see that they occur in Oaxaca, in Monterrey San Luis Potosí, not in Chiapas and they all left here and here there are six immigration detention posts that they must have detected them,” Villagrán specifies. “It is said that the trailer where the 36 belonged to the husband of the delegate”.
According to figures from the Migration Policy Unit of the Institute National Migration Office (INM), in the year 2002, when the deportations of foreigners in Mexico began to be counted, of the 138,000 recognized, more than half were detained and expelled in Chiapas; in 2021, of the 138,000, single ,000 ( one-fifth) left the state.
In the latest records from January and February, the proportion is similar to that of 2021.
The official speech
Juan Pablo Flores was arrested in the first week of April. He was a delegate of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (Sagarpa) in the state of Chiapas, according to his profile on the social network LinkedIn.
After his arrest, the FGR did not issue any statement about the reasons for his arrest. This newspaper inquired about it in the area of Social Communication of the INM ¾all officials must be authorized in this area to speak with the press ¾ but they argued incompetence.
Irineo Mujica says that among the migrants it is known that “for months” the federal public ministry was tracking Juan Pablo Flores for the sale of direct passes on the highways and by plane with the help of agents of the National Guard and the INM.
It is even known of the nicknames of the people who operate the logistics: “El Carro chocón”, “La Gorda blanca” and “El Shrek”…
After the arrest of Flores , Mujica, journalistic versions were published about the resignation of Paola López. The INM denied it through a publication on Twitter. He did not speak to officials about a possible investigation in the southern zone.
Last March, Francisco Garduño, commissioner of the National Migration Institute (INM), affirmed that, since his administration began, 1, 800 immigration agents have been dismissed for corruption, dishonesty or non-attendance, he said.
Garduño was questioned by reporters after the morning conference by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in the 04 military region, located in Tapachula, Chiapas.
It did not specify in which INM delegations throughout the country the dismissed officials worked. Nor did he mention actions that could prevent corruption.
The National Human Rights Commission and other non-governmental organizations suggest that the INM allow the observation of civil society groups of various profiles to detect bad practices from the root and not when crises are upon them.
In Tapachula, immigrants have had to resort to protests of all kinds to get their requests for humanitarian visas answered. From street demonstrations to riots.
They also sewed their lips with needles and thread since the US media talked about the elimination of the Title 42 and organized two caravans that intended to reach Mexico City to denounce the irregularities in Migration, but they were repressed by the National Guard as soon as they left Tapachula.
Right there, on Good Friday, the third began to be organized with foreigners from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Haiti, Africa and Central America seeking visas that consider direct passage to the United States because they can circulate around the country without being detained.
When the 50 people sewed their lips, more than 800 people received humanitarian visas and the migrant community from Africa and Haitians obtained about 2000 Multiple migratory forms”.
But they did not occur through a systematized and ordered mechanism but as a response to chaos. “There were two months of persecution of struggle, emotional exhaustion and torture for the families because the delegate Paola López refused to give them those visas until President López Obrador sent Dr. Castuera (a mediator).”
Days later, the problem with the INM continued with another modality. Through WhatsApp messages, around 3 were summoned, 000 undocumented to the Ecological Park of the city of Tapachula.
The convener was supposedly Immigration to give them QR codes as exit passes from the entity. The chaos generated such expectations that an uncontrollable mess was feared.
From the offices of the Mexican capital, the INM denied the summons.
“This authority regrets that those who are in a context of mobility were deceived in this way, and invites them to go to the INM offices in this town, to start the process that allows them to regularize their stay in Mexico.”
The institution has dissemination and information channels through social networks such as Twitter (@INAMI_mx) and Facebook (@InamiMX) , as well as the official website https://www.gob.mx/inm, where it discloses the requirements to obtain immigration status in national territory.
Last Friday it announced the opening of 42 windows of care and service procedures in the nine locations located in the state.
“ We invite you to go directly to receive r personalized attention, without the need to resort to intermediaries, managers or the so-called ‘coyotes’”, he said without further ado.
The location of the migratory offices with processing windows are located in strategic places:
The collapse of Tapachula
The decentralization of procedures to other entities in Chiapas is seen favorably by the locals of Tapachula. The city had around a quarter of a million inhabitants before the massive influxes of the past decade. For 2020 he officially added a little more than 350,000 and in the last two years more undocumented immigrants have been added.
These days, unofficial figures speak of 150,000 people without papers and homeless. Juani García, a resident of the city, says that although migrants do not die of hunger because Chiapas is a very fertile region, they and their neighbors do suffer from a lack of services.
“They appropriated the green areas, parks and other public spaces to use them as camps, public bathrooms and even as motels; they ventured into clandestine prostitution, drug dealing, and informal commerce,” he says.
“ They recently attacked the Public Services inspectors who tried to put them in order ”. The activist Luis Barragán observed that this The rejection of the population and xenophobia is generated by the mismanagement of the INM crisis, where officials who have been in the institute for years and know how to evade new corruption controls work.
Affirms that the current delegate has done a lot of damage to migrants and human rights defenders. “In recent times I have received more death threats and intimidation, 50 false profiles of journalists on the networks to discredit us”.
Irineo Mújica adds that the tactic of the National Guard is to infiltrate the migrants. The strategy has landed innocent people in prison, including activist Cintia Alvarado, accused of organizing the sale of QR codes and later released for lack of evidence.
“No Mexican government, neither the current nor the past, has wanted to recognize that the INM is corrupt and needs to be remade”.
Another problem is the lack of justice. From December of 2018 to date, the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) initiated four thousand 138 investigation folders for human trafficking , of which 1 were prosecuted,150 and only 407 received a conviction.
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