Mexico worries about less-prominent migrants
so that people don’t feel forced to leave.
“The central question is what is being done so that people have opportunities at home,” Guillen said in an interview last week in Tijuana. “You can’t manage these movements if at the same time you don’t have a development program; these have to go hand in hand.”
The caravans have put the spotlight on the rising number of Central Americans who flee communities that are beset by poverty and violence.
“If we don’t come up with development initiatives based on international cooperation, and we don’t confront the problem of Honduras and its crisis, we’re going to have the same cycle, each time more amplified,” Guillen said.
The numbers are reaching levels not seen for more than a decade, said Ernesto Rodríguez Chavez, a migration scholar at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research group funded by the Mexican government.
His estimates put the current annual flow of undocumented crossings from Central America to the United States through Mexico at 350,000 to 400,000. The calculations consider crossings, rather than people, as some people might cross more than once. Much of the traffic is out of sight, at night, in smaller numbers, Rodriguez said, to escape the attention of Mexican migration authorities.
Rodriguez said that compared with the earlier flows, the current exodus includes a rise in the proportion of women and particularly children, although male migrants continue to make up the largest proportion of those attempting to reach the United States.
Many of the migrants don’t make it to the U.S. border because Mexican authorities detain tens of thousands every year.
Still, the hardening of the U.S. border means that growing numbers of Central Americans choose to stay in Mexico.
That is a challenge for Mexico’s newly elected president, who has promised to respect human rights and promote social welfare.
“Mexico has always seen itself as a transit country and not a receiving country for migrants,” said Eric
Local Mexican officials were again Sunday helping thousands of Central American migrants find rides on the next leg of their journey toward the U.S. border.
At a toll plaza west of the central Mexico city of Queretaro, where the group had spent Saturday night, police helped find trucks to take migrants while preventing the migrants from trying to stop drivers themselves.
The government of Queretaro said via Twitter that 6,531 migrants had moved through the state between Friday and Saturday. It said that 5,771 of those were departing Sunday morning after staying in three shelters it had prepared, the largest of which was a soccer stadium in the state capital.
Those numbers appeared even higher than counts made by officials when the group was in Mexico City for several days, raising the possibility that other migrants caught up to the main caravan.
The migrants began walking before dawn Sunday for Irapuato about 60 miles to the west after crossing into Guanajuato state, where local authorities also assisted them. Olson, a senior adviser at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington. “But the reality seems that more and more Central Americans are settling in Mexico. What kind of policy is Mexico going to adopt to make sure that those people settling in Mexico are going to receive the protections they deserve?”
As he prepares to assume the presidency, Lopez Obrador has said he will offer work permits to Central Americans in Mexico, and he is asking for the collaboration of the United States and Canada to invest in southern Mexico and Central America to stem migration.
“This is not a problem that can be confronted only with the use of force, with coercive measures; human rights must be guaranteed,” he said last month.