How Mexico Is Locking Down Its Once-Porous Southern Border Wall David Agren - MacLean's
go to original January 4, 2016

Mexico has put into action a plan to handle the flow of mainly Central American migrants passing through its territory on the way to the US. The government clampdown comes after the number of child migrants taking this route to the US spiked. But the plan not only resulted in a huge increase in deportations. There have also been complaints of human rights abuses. (Al Jazeera)

Mexico previously paid little attention to the migrants transiting the country - except for the unscrupulous public officials and crooked cops who preyed on vulnerable Central Americans or acted in cahoots with criminal gangs like Los Zetas, which started kidnapping migrants and demanding ransoms from relatives already living in the United States. But over the past year it has focused on securing its porous southern border, previously a backwater notorious for people floating on rafts across the Suchiate River from Guatemala to Mexico. At the same time that U.S. officials were being swamped with child migrants, Mexico introduced a Southern Border Plan and set about establishing checkpoints, fixing infrastructure in the region and preventing migrants from climbing aboard La Bestia.

The moves might appear sensible, but critics contend the increased enforcement is forcing migrants to try untested routes, away from the system of shelters established to help them. “It was a police operation, not a southern border plan,” says Father Alejandro Solalinde, an activist Catholic priest known for his defence of Central American migrants in the isthmus of Tehuantepec. “The U.S. policy has been: allow in the talent that it wants and stop those that they don’t want in,” Solalinde says. “Mexico is doing this job for them - doing this dirty work.”

The enforcement programs have produced results - at least initially. Figures compiled by the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organization, show detentions up 71 per cent between July 2014 and July 2015 (the first full year of the Southern Border Plan), with many of those deported likely to have been eligible to apply for asylum. Alberto Xicoténcatl, director of the Saltillo shelter, says the INM, the government agency that oversees migration, has started using different language, too, calling detentions “rescues,” even though the migrants were not asking for assistance.

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