Migrant caravan members protest in capital
MEXICO CITY: Armed with placards blasting US President Donald Trump, some 100 members of a caravan of migrants crossing Mexico demonstrated on Saturday in central Mexico City, from where some will push on to the US border.
“If they kick us out, we’ll go back. No to Trump,” one of the banners read, placed on the steps of the Angel of Independence monument.
Among the migrants was Yanci Flores, 22, a Salvadoran travelling with her twoyear-old son. She said her son’s father was killed by gang members.
As her toddler played with a plastic pistol, Ms Flores said her plan “is to go to the United States to be able to work, to be able to leave behind all the violence of my country. If I go back, they will kill us.”
Later, the migrants assembled in front of the US embassy nearby, displaying more anti-Trump slogans and messages hitting out at deportations from the US.
The caravan, an annual event held since 2010, assembled in Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, on March 25.
Its members — mostly from Honduras, but also from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua — originally planned to travel en masse to the US border.
However, the caravan started breaking up on Thursday in southern Mexico after organisers said it had abandoned its goal of reaching the US border and would end its activities with the rally in Mexico City.
Their initial plan had prompted fury from Mr Trump, who renewed threats to abandon the Nafta trade pact if Enrique Pena Nieto’s government did not act to break up the caravan, and ordered troops to be deployed to secure the southern US border with Mexico.
The US states of Texas and Arizona announced Friday they would send National Guard troops to the Mexican border.
The measure, criticised in the US, was dismissed by Irineo Mujica, of activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which organised the caravan.
“[The migrants] do not represent a threat for the troops because most of them are going to request asylum ... it is pure show,” she said.