1,500 begin trekking north in Mexico

TAPACHULA, Mexico — A new, smaller caravan of about 1,500 migrants started walking north from southern Mexico on Thursday, a week after a larger group that set out on Christmas Eve largely dissolved.

The migrants, most from Central and South America, said they had grown tired of waiting in Mexico’s southern city of Tapachula near the Guatemala border. They said processing centers there for asylum or visa requests are overloaded and the process can take months.

The migrants carried a sign reading “Migrating is not a crime, it is a crime for a government to use repression against migrants.” The group managed to walk past two highway control checkpoints Thursday as immigration agents and National Guard troopers stood by.

The Christmas Eve caravan once numbered about 6,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America, but after New Year’s Day, the Mexican government persuaded them to give up their trek, promising they would get some kind of unspecified documents.

By the next week, about 2,000 migrants from that caravan resumed their journey through southern Mexico after participants were left without the papers the Mexican government appeared to have promised.

The migrants wanted transit or exit visas allowing them to take buses or trains to the U.S. border, but they were given papers restricting holders to Mexico’s southernmost Chiapas state, where work is scarce and local residents are largely poor. By last week, only a hundred or two had made it to the border between neighboring Oaxaca state and the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, mainly on buses.