Anti-immigrant, rhetoric actions rising in Mexico
Border regions mirror fears stoked in the U.S. about crime and drugs.
Last year, Mayor Leobardo Ramos earned the nickname “The Oaxacan Trump” after he shut down a migrant shelter for Central Americans in his small town of Chahuites near the Guatemalan border.
“We see many migrants without a shirt, doing drugs and fighting among themselves,” he told local reporters at the time.
And in a postscript that echoed Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan, he added, “It’s not the Chahuites that it used to be.”
In recent years, a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment has arrived in Mexican border areas as hundreds of thousands of Central Americans have fled violence and extreme poverty in their home countries. Ivan Briscoe, Latin America program director for the International Crisis Group, said in some small towns ill-equipped to handle the influx, anger is festering.
“In areas where there is a very great concentration of Central American migrants, you are seeing a xenophobic reaction similar to what you see ... in any other part of the world where you see an intense influx of migrants with very few resources,” Briscoe said.
Central Americans increasingly are seeking asylum in Mexico. According to Mexico’s tiny, underfunded asylum agency, requests have increased from 1,296 in 2013 to 14,596 last year. The Mexican government has set up a vast system of checkpoints, military patrols and detention centers throughout southern Mexico as it seeks to keep migrants from reaching the United States.
According to Enrique Vidal Olasco, a lawyer with the Mexico-based migrant advocacy
group Voces Mesoamericanos, many of the arguments that played out during the U.S. presidential election — that immigrants take jobs and social services and bring drugs and crime — are taking root, even in communities where many residents themselves migrate to the United States to work.
Vidal Olasco said numerous shelters have been forced to close, at least temporarily, after outcry from local politicians, businessmen and local media who he said “are trying to foment anti-migrant feeling in the south of Mexico.”
He said such sentiment is particularly strong against Afro-Latino migrants, such as the Garifuna people of Central America.
Briscoe said that local media often sensationalize crime among migrants, depicting them as “members of the feared maras (gangs), adding stigmatization and discrimination to their plight.”
But he added that while Central American gang members have begun to move into southern Mexico, they generally target fleeing migrants, not Mexican residents.
Mexico’s northern border also has seen an uptick in anti-Central American fervor, with criticism centered on crime concerns. In Chihuahua City, the capital of the border state of the same name, advocates say local authorities have launched an effort to rid the city of Central American migrants, including those trying to reach the border or the growing number who have been turned away and are pooling in nearby Mexican cities.
Civil society groups say local police, along with federal immigration agents, have targeted makeshift camps in a series of raids since last fall and are “hunting” migrants.
Chihuahua City Mayor María Eugenia Campos took a hard line on the issue in December.
“If we have people trafficking drugs or committing crimes like prostitution or robbery, then of course we will arrest them, and more so if they are migrants who spend more than three days in the capital and are causing these problems,” she said. “We are going through a difficult stage, where we have to reinforce our public security.”
After a backlash that included recriminations from the head of the state’s human rights commission, the mayor insisted her government was committed to human rights and said city police would receive training in treatment of migrants.
Angelina Muñoz Fernandez, the mayor of Hermosillo, capital of the border state Sonora, earned the online moniker #alcaldesatrump (Trump mayor) after urging residents not to give food or aid to a caravan of Central American migrants passing through the city on the way to the U.S. border.
Several observers said they don’t believe such sentiment to be common in Mexico, and that most residents remain sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, despite the fact that the number of Mexicans migrating north has fallen steeply in recent years.
“I think you find that sentiment where you find a significant concentration of Central American migrants, but most of Mexico is not seeing a lot (of Central American immigration),” said Alexander Main, senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I don’t think it’s a more generalized phenomenon, but we are seeing some concerning things.”
Vidal Olasco said that both the Mexican government and society are grappling with the country’s new role as a destination for some migrants as opposed to simply a point of transit. “This is something very new for the Mexican society,” he said. “There still haven’t been the big public debates here over immigration as there have in the United States.”
Vidal added that presidential front-runner Andres Manuel López Obrador could represent a dramatic shift from Mexico’s current immigration posture if he wins next week’s election.
López Obrador’s pick to lead the Interior Ministry, which oversees Mexico’s immigration agency, is former Supreme Court justice Olga Sánchez Cordero, who would replace current officials who critics say have given the agency too much of a national security emphasis.
Sánchez Cordero has said Mexico’s immigration institutions deprive migrants of their freedom. “We want this to be a sanctuary country,” she said.