Thousands fleeing conflict or poverty in Africa, Asia and the Americas have traveled across oceans, through jungles and mountains and up through Central America on a route that – so far – ends in the steamy, crumbling Mexican city of Tapachula.
A migrant child calls out to a street vendor selling water as he waits with other children inside an area of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid office, while their parents fill out paperwork, in Tapachula, Mexico, Friday, April 26, 2019. Thousands of migrants remain on the southern border of Mexico waiting for documents that allow them to stay legally in the country.
Maureen Meyer, director for Mexico and migrant rights at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that word quickly spread through international smuggling networks that Mexico had become more permissive for migrants. Attention drawn to the large caravans meandering north to the U.S. last year, combined with Mexico’s fast-track for thousands of humanitarian visas in January, appeared like welcome mats on the global stage.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico if the heavy flow of migrants to the U.S. continues. He crossed through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, but like most, he found the border between Panama and Colombia to be the most dangerous. It is patrolled by bandits toting guns and machetes who call themselves “Los Indios” even though they have no links to Panama’s indigenous population. It was there that the bandits sprang out of the jungle. “He pointed the pistol at me and said: ‘Hand over everything.’ And I gave him my backpack.
Charles Lwanga, a 38-year-old teacher, said he fled Cameroon two months ago to escape violence against the English-speaking population by the Francophone majority-government there. Lwanga travelled to Ecuador and then headed north, hoping to seek asylum in the United States. Sometimes migrants travel a staggeringly long way to go just a short distance. Cuba is 90 miles from Florida, but Alain Romero, a baker and desert chef from Havana, has travelled nine months and thousands of miles only to be stalled in southern Mexico.
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