Photo: Miguel Sierra / EFE
By: EFE
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Mexico’s northern border reflects a new humanitarian crisis that the country is experiencing in the face of a new wave of migration, which has led to suspensions of freight trains due to accidents with migrants, protests and the clash of foreigners with Mexican and American authorities.
The problem is mainly focused on the metropolitan area of Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua, Mexico and the city of El Paso, in the state of Texas, in the United States, where a camp of 500 migrants has already been set up on that side of the river. Bravo.
It has also led the loss of millions of dollars in loads of stranded merchandise due to the low capacity of customs, while along with the massive arrival of a greater volume of migrants coming from Central America and the Caribbean, the conviction grows among them that achieving the “American dream” has become easier.
On Friday, after a meeting between representatives of the three levels of the Mexican government, Immigration and Municipal Police vehicles traveled along the Rio Grande, where immigrants gather, taking anyone who did not present a legal permit to prove their stay in the country.
The Mexican government does not have an estimate on how many immigrants there are in the border Ciudad Juárez, because hundreds of them arrive without registration every day and it is unknown how many manage to enter the United States.
It is estimated that up to 10,000 immigrants could arrive on a train to Ciudad Juárez. And the El Paso border sector faces more than 1,000 migrants a day.
Activists point out that the shelters are at maximum capacity, with almost 2,400 people waiting for an appointment with immigration authorities to regularize, while There are more than 5,000 living in rented houses, abandoned buildings and homeless people.
Ivonne López de Lara, Human Rights coordinator at the Casa del Migrante, one of the shelters that receive people on the move, indicated that there is always talk of a humanitarian crisis, “since we are not prepared to have so many migrants in this border (northern Mexico).”
“The three levels (of Government) have to propose a program or a reform where they limit these situations, since it is harming the population of Ciudad Juárez because they cannot control and/or can organize the migrants, they come from their places of origin out of necessity and not out of pleasure,” added the activist.
Francisco Garduño Yáñez, commissioner of the National Migration Institute (INM), blamed the US government for the crisis that already affects the economic and social part of this border.
“We are not the problem, the problem is the United States (…) there are appointments at the embassy and the United States Consulate in two years, it is a bureaucracy worse than an elephant,” he said on Friday in Ciudad Juárez.
The business sector has expressed its concern, since During the week, more than $500 million dollars were accumulated stranded in cargo that could not be exported. Only on Friday night there was still a line of at least 8 kilometers of loaded trailers, which spent the night outside the Zaragoza-Ysleta international crossing to cross to El Paso, Texas.
“I think that we do have to work on other types of schemes (…) if you ask the authority how many people there are here, we don’t know. “It is a big problem, for themselves (the migrants), and for us, for the people, because we do not even know how to help them,” said Thor Salayandía Lara, national vice president of Maquiladora and Border Strips of the National Chamber of the Processing Industry.
The industrial leader questioned the authority because they have allowed The problem escalates to a level where it begins to affect the competitiveness of Ciudad Juárez and the entire border strip, who lives off foreign trade.
Like Luis Alfredo Torres, many migrants arrive in this border city of Ciudad Juárez, in northern Mexico. It took him a month and a half to get from Venezuela to Juárez with his wife and his son.
He explained that among his reasons are the salaries of $20 dollars that grandparents who stayed in their country of origin receive today and which he assured “are not enough at all.”
”Either it’s the food or it’s the rent, working from 6 in the morning and arriving at 11 for $10 dollars,” he said.
Torres and his family know that they cannot cross the fences installed on the US side of the Rio Grande, in Texas, while they were warned that “you have to last days here, without food and with the children.”
By Martin Coronado
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