For caravan, still many miles to go
Scope of distance sinks in for U.S.-bound migrants
SAN PEDRO TAPANATEPEC, Mexico — For some of the Central American migrants traveling in a massive caravan across Mexico, the reality of the enormous distance head has begun to set in.
Their walk, if they reach the United States, will have more than 2,000 miles to go. It could take them three months or more.
The thousands of migrants reached the state of Oaxaca on Saturday, flooding the
town of San Pedro Tapanatepec.
Weary-looking migrants, faces baked red from walking in the sun and heat, jammed into the town’s square, sprawling under tarps or lining up for plates of tortillas and beans being handed out by local volunteers outside the main church.
Under a tent, Red Cross workers tended to feet bloodied with blisters, while more migrants lined blocks and blocks of streets, crashed out from exhaustion on sidewalks. Others walked down to a river, stripping down to their underwear to bath in the murky water.
For the caravan, traveling together is a form of protection, both against criminal organizations said to control much the area and also against Mexican immigration authorities. A day earlier, a similar but smaller caravan was intercepted by authorities and loaded onto five buses, escorted away by heavily armed Federal Police trucks.
It has taken the leading migrant caravan a week to cross through the state of Chiapas, Mexico’s most southern state, covering a distance of about 180 miles mostly on foot, averaging about 25 miles a day.
At this rate, it will take at least 90 days to walk the remaining 2,300 miles to reach Tijuana, on the U.S. border, where several migrants said Saturday the caravan was headed.
By Saturday night, some migrants decided that they had had enough.
“I want to go back to Honduras,” said 21-year-old Jesis Reyes, a ball cap turned backward on his head.
Reyes had joined the caravan in Honduras 10 days earlier. By Saturday, he had grown frustrated by the caravan’s slow progress, and the decision to walk instead of hopping freight trains, the way many migrants cover much of the distance through Mexico.
“We haven’t made any headway,” Reyes said. “So much time has passed, and we have hardly advanced.”
Reyes said he was traveling with five friends. They weren’t ready to give up yet, and planned to continue without him, he said.
Reyes spent the waning hours of the afternoon looking for a way to get back to Honduras, even though it meant returning to the violence and poverty he fled.
He wasn’t sure how he would make it back to his country alone.
“Taking a bus back would be really expensive,” he said. “I don’t have money for that.”
Other migrants, however, vowed not give up until they reached the United States, no matter how long or hard the journey.
President Donald Trump has promised to stop the caravan from entering the U.S. illegally, and has pressured Mexico and Central American governments to stop the caravan, and the other waves of migrants traveling in large group the caravan has spawned.
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has also offered Central American migrants a chance to remain in southern Mexico to work and live.
But many migrants have family members or friends already living in the U.S. without documents after making similar journeys on their own. They are propelled forward by the belief that if others made it, there is a chance they will, too.