Canadian hospitality wanes
Families at risk in dangerous country, advocates say
In the six years since Mexico declared war on drug cartels, more than 60,000 people have been killed and another 160,000 have been displaced within the country’s borders. As the violence flares, the number of Mexican refugee claimants in Canada has increased steadily. But Catherine Solyom reports at the same time, Canada’s hospitality has decreased: in 2011, 83 per cent of refugee claimants from Mexico were rejected by the government.
On Saturday morning, as most of us are eating our Cheerios or chocolatines, the Reyes-Mendez family will be making their way to the international departures terminal at Trudeau airport, escorted by two armed border guards, there to make sure they get on a plane bound for Mexico after almost five years in Montreal.
They are the latest, but certainly not the last, of a long string of Mexican families shown the door by Canada, some of whom have made the headlines, some who haven’t.
But as the stories of torture and decapitation, extortion and assassination in Mexico pile up as the by-products of that country’s seemingly endless war on drug cartels, advocates here wonder whether Canada shouldn’t be more welcoming of these “narco-refugees” until the violence lets up.
In the Reyes-Mendez case— father Fernando, wife Marisol, and children Eduardo, 16, and Ingrid, 17 — the order to appear at the airport with their worldly possessions in tow came after their refugee claim was denied in March.
Reyes had told the Immigration and Refugee Board that he had been abducted or assaulted by federal police not once, but three times, in attempts to extort money from him. The family ran a printing and packaging business in Hidalgo state, then moved to another town after the first abduction and opened a restaurant. Reyes was abducted again, he said.
In its decision to reject the claim, the IRB said Reyes had not shown the link between these incidents, or proven that Reyes’s assailants were in fact police officers. And he had not sought the protection of his own government before appealing to Canada.
“Considering all of the evidence, the tribunal deems that Mr. Reyes Muñoz did not establish that the danger to which he and his family would be subjected, if they returned to Mexico, differed from the “general danger” to which all or some Mexicans are subjected.”
Since then, neither a letter from the student council at Eduardo’s school, nor the support of the Reyes’s church in Laval, nor a petition with 1,203 signatures on it, has prompted the immigration or public safety ministers to intervene on the family’s behalf and stop the deportation, until at least the end of the school year. (A spokesperson for the immigration department said Minister Jason Kenney did not have the authority to stop a deportation — only the Canada Border Services Agency or the Federal Court has that ability.)
MUR — Mexicanos Unidos por la Regularización — an organization acting on behalf of Mexicans in Montreal, has already moved on to the next case: The Aguilas of St-Hyacinthe say they were also victims of extortion and armed assault before fleeing the country in 2009. Their refugee claim has also been rejected, but a date has not yet been set for their removal.
But the gruesome statistics of the conflict in Mexico, more than the details of any one family, are indicative of the situation there.
More than 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the past six years, since for mer president Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a further
Canada “says it’s dangerous for Canadians to go to Mexico … obviously it’s dangerous for Mexicans, too.” ROMINA HERNANDEZ, MUR
160,000 have been displaced within Mexico as a result of the ongoing armed conflict among rival drug cartels, and between the cartels and Mexican government forces.
And yet while the violence flared and the number of Mexican refugee claimants in Canada rose over those years — from 1,704 in 2001 to a peak of 9,527 in 2008 — Canada’s hospitality decreased dramatically.
To stem the flow of refugee claimants from Mexico, the Canadian government added Mexicans to its list of nationals requiring a visa to enter the country. In 2011, only 677 Mexicans applied for refugee status. More telling still, the percentage of refugee claims that were accepted also declined — from about 30 per cent in 1996 to eight per cent in 2009. In 2011, 17 per cent of the claims were accepted.
Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, believes the IRB is not giving sufficient weight to corruption in the Mexican police and army, and the Reyes decision — that he should have sought the police’s help after the police allegedly assaulted him — is a prime example.
“In the case of many Mexican claimants the issue is state protection,” Dench said. “The IRB will say, ‘Yes, it’s violent,’ but it’s a democratic state that can protect you; notwithstanding that the state is unable and is sometimes complicit in the violence.”
Dench also worries that the IRB has internalized the message coming from the Harper government, that Mexican refugee claims are bogus — hence the need for a visa to stop the flow.
For Dench and other observers, there is a disconnect between the warnings issued to Canadians not to travel to many parts of Mexico and to use “extreme caution” in others, and the ease with which Mexican claimants are deported. According to the CBSA, 3,516 Mexicans were deported in 2011.
Asked to comment on this apparent disconnect, Nancy Caron, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, said: “All eligible asylum claimants receive a hearing at the independent IRB based on their individual circumstances to determine if they will be at risk if returned to their country of origin. Please note that there is a difference between an ‘asylum claimant’ and a ‘refugee.’ ”
MUR’s Romina Hernandez says that given Canada’s close relationship to Mexico — with the U.S., they are known as the “three amigos” — it is not in Canada’s interest to recognize how bad the situation in Mexico really is.
But her group believes that given the level of violence Canada should put a moratorium on deportations to Mexico and grant status to the estimated 200 to 300 Mexicans now living in Montreal illegally.
“The Canadian government says it’s dangerous for Canadians to go to Mexico — obviously it’s dangerous for Mexicans, too,” Hernandez said.
She pointed to the cases of two women deported from Canada who were killed in the weeks that followed — Veronica Castro, who had lived in Ottawa, was beaten to death. The other, known only as “Grise” to protect the identity of her mother and sister, now in Canada, was found with a bullet in her head.
Perhaps to avoid these fatal mistakes, and contrary to expectations, Mexico was not included on the federal government’s list of Designated Countries of Origin — which “do not normally produce refugees” — established Dec. 15, whose citizens would be fast-tracked for removal without recourse to an appeal.
“I think it tells us that Canada doesn’t want to make a mistake in the few cases where harm can befall a family,” said Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer and editor-in-chief of Lexbase. The appeal is a safety net appropriate for a country like Mexico, he said. “It’s inconceivable that Mexico could be put on a safe country list.”
Unfortunately, the government’s new Refugee Appeal Division is not available to the Reyes-Mendez family, because their claim was rejected before it came into force in December.