San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Patrols deter few immigrants
FRONTERA COROZAL, Mexico — On the day last week when Mexico imposed new measures to shut down migrant crossings at its southern border, some 1,200 made the trip at a single remote jungle outpost without showing a document to anyone. A man who helped board the migrants for the fiveminute boat ride from Guatemala across the Usumacinta River knew the count because each one received a ticket.
Mexico wants to again appear cooperative, as in 2019 when, faced with tariffs from thenPresident Donald Trump, it deployed its newly created National Guard to slow the flow of migrants from Central America. But the reality is it’s business as usual, with entire communities making a living off the passing migrants.
Their reasons for heading north are familiar: violence, an inability to support their families, the devastation wrought by two major hurricanes in November and egged on by rampant misinformation.
Among those crossing last week was Yuri Gabriela Ponce, a 30yearold mother from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, along with her husband and three children, ages 2, 5 and 9.
Now, having reached Mexico, they were uncertain how to proceed. As she rested Wednesday in the shade at a crossroads just north of the border, she worried about what would come next.
“They told us that farther ahead there is a checkpoint and we don’t know what to do,” Ponce said. “I hope that with the children they help us.”
Initially they planned to cross into Mexico much farther south, but heard a rumor that criminals were stealing children and killing parents there. So they reversed course and came to this remote jungle outpost instead.
In the riverside Guatemalan community of La Tecnica, across from the frontier Mexican town of Frontera Corozal, a steady stream of vans arrived Wednesday. From each a dozen migrants exited, ate something, made calls to relatives.
Within an hour there were more than 100 migrants at the river’s edge. They were mostly from Honduras, many women with children barely old enough to walk.
They were led onto boats with outboard motors, everything organized and out in the open. When they reached the other side, only Mexico lay between them and the U.S. border. More than two dozen taxis awaited, packed cabs leaving and empty ones returning. Those with guides got into cabs and disappeared into the Mexican countryside. Those without guides or money, like Ponce, walked up the road.
As in 2019, Mexico relies heavily on highway checkpoints transiting its narrow southern isthmus to prevent migrants heading north. It stepped up those efforts last week, as well as at airports in the region.
The more than 31,000 migrants the government has tallied so far this year roughly mirror the numbers from early 2019, before Trump forced Mexico to act. But Mexico’s migrant detention numbers are more a sign of the government’s effort than a reliable representation of the overall migration flow.
Much of that traffic becomes clandestine in Mexico as smugglers pack migrants into semitrailers and vans or put them on buses or airplanes with fake documents. Often they only reappear at the U.S. border.