At the beginning of this week, nine butchered bodies that were found naked and stacked in Chihuahua, on the border with Texas. According to the authorities, they were foreigners in a crime linked to the fight to control migrant trafficking in the area.
Faced with the macabre scene, migrants who have managed to reach the Rio Grande, the border between Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas, claim to fear organized crime after the massacre.
The migrants who arrive in this area commented on their fear because, they noted, they have been victims of attacks.
According to analysts, migrants traveling through Mexico are frequently subject to serious violations of their human rights. Organized crime groups in Mexico interact and victimize migrants
These criminal activities are often predatory in nature and in many cases include rape, kidnapping or murder. Despite the federal legal framework designed to protect irregular migrants in Mexico, the responsible institutions have not been able to fully prevent crimes against migrants and have sometimes actively participated in their victimization.
In such a context, Ayarí Zedeño, a migrant from Venezuela who traveled to Ciudad Juárez with her family, said that even being next to the United States they have been attacked.
“We were already lying down and a group of those people (criminals) arrived with ropes and we managed to run. (They said) that they were coming to take all the people because we couldn’t be here. That is what we fear the most, not so much the immigration (authorities), ”he said.
Fear grows because just this week the authorities found 9 naked bodies lying north of Chihuahua, at kilometer 37 of the highway to Ciudad Juárez, a road heavily traveled on foot by migrants. The crime was attributed to human trafficking gangs.
Zedeño said that there is a lot of distrust in what the Mexican authorities do once they secure the migrants, which is why they stay away and do not ask for help.
“They also say that the same Mexican immigration (authority) has grabbed some and handed them over to those people,” the Venezuelan woman said worriedly.
He stated that the migrant policy that Mexico has adopted, of persecuting people in mobility conditions, has forced them to expose themselves to many dangers, among which is being exposed to organized crime.
“We have been there for almost a week and we have had a bad time because we are sleeping in the mountains, we have killed snakes, we have already gone to the wall but they took us out. The Army took us out because (the National Institute of) Immigration was not there, they wanted to hit the child’s father with the child on top of them, they treated us badly, they wanted to tear up our documents,” the woman said.
Gilberto Loya Chávez, Secretary of Public Security of the State of Chihuahua, assured thatThe control that criminal groups seek over human trafficking is so serious that more than half of the homicides that occur in Juárez are related to this crime.
In addition, he did not rule out the presence of the Venezuelan criminal group “Tren de Aragua”, which would be generating the fight over migrant trafficking in the region.
In a Special Report on the state of trafficking and kidnapping to the detriment of migrants in Mexico 2011-2020the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) documented that 67% of migrant kidnappings occur in Chiapas, Nuevo León, Tabasco, Veracruz and Tamaulipas.
According to InSight Crime, which cites the report “Organized Crime and Central American Migration in Mexico” carried out by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas in Austin, when passing through Mexican territory, migrants must face three types of criminal actors: criminals local gangs, gangs, and transnational criminal organizations.
The first and second usually assault, rob or sexually assault them, while criminal organizations such as the Gulf Cartel or Zetas not only charge them for allowing them passage and kidnap them.
*With information from EFE.
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