LATimes

Mexico Curbs Neighbors' Migrant Flow Policy: Deportations of U.S.-bound Central Americans are aimed at reducing nation's crime.

By JAMES F. SMITH, Times Staff Writer

TALISMAN, Mexico -- The number of Central American migrants crossing from Guatemala into Mexico on their way to the United States has plummeted by about 40% in recent weeks because of an aggressive new policy on deporting migrants, border officials and relief agencies say.

Since mid-July, a Mexican-Guatemalan pilot project, supported in part by U.S. funds, has transported migrants back to their countries of origin rather than merely sending them to the Guatemalan side of the border, as in the past.

That means would-be migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and beyond can no longer simply turn around and cross the southern border back into Mexico--and then go on to the United States, the prize destination for migrants from Central America trying to escape economic hardship at home.

More than 168,000 migrants were deported by Mexico last year, nearly all Central American, and the U.S. sent home about 30,000 from that region. If the sudden falloff is sustained, thousands fewer Central American migrants could reach the United States each year.

U.S. arrests of undocumented Mexican migrants, meanwhile, were down by 27% in the first half of this year. Combined with the likely drop in Central American migrants, this suggests that the number of Hispanic migrants of all nationalities making it across the U.S. border is declining even as U.S.-Mexican migration talks are to take place in Washington this week.

For Mexico, the new repatriation initiative forms part of "Plan Sur" (Plan South), launched in July to reduce the rampant organized crime and corruption that feed off the illicit traffic in migrants and merchandise at the country's southern border. Mexico and the United States are helping finance Guatemala's repatriation of the migrants under the pilot project. U.S. officials couldn't say how much Washington is spending.

Along with implementing the new border policy, Mexican authorities are stepping up their arrests of migrants and their pursuit of corrupt officials and brazen criminal gangs such as a branch of the Los Angeles-based Mara Salvatrucha. These officials and gangs prey on vulnerable migrants as they travel through southern Mexico.

Human rights groups have criticized Plan Sur for the same reasons they oppose the U.S. tightening its border with Mexico, arguing that migrants will merely be forced to seek more dangerous routes and pay more to migrant smugglers. Yet some applaud the accompanying anti-corruption crackdown, calling it the first serious effort in years along the tough jungle frontier.

At this muddy border village at the Suchiate River, contracted luxury Mexican buses arrive from as far away as Mexico City and even Ciudad Juarez, 1,200 miles to the northwest on the U.S. border, each day carrying 30 or 40 Central American detainees. The detainees are then put on rickety Guatemalan buses and driven across the river to the Guatemalan border village of El Carmen.

There, the arriving migrants are interviewed. Once back on their own territory, the Guatemalans are released, but the other Central Americans are immediately driven to a shelter farther into the country and from there are taken to the capital, Guatemala City, for repatriation.

In the past, El Carmen border station chief Miguel Cantoral said, 300 to 350 people a day were brought through by Mexican officials. As the new policy has taken hold, the number has dropped to 125 or 150 a day, he said.

Mexican border officials and others involved with migrants in the region surrounding the city of Tapachula concur that the number of Central American migrants has fallen dramatically.

Genaro Perez, chief of the nearby Mexican border station at Ciudad Hidalgo, estimates the decline at 40% in the past six weeks.

From his office, Perez can almost see the undisguised traffic in migrants a couple of hundred yards from the official border bridge. There, dozens of rafts made of huge truck tires ply a steady cross-river trade, taking migrants and locals across for less than a dollar.

For some reason, the authorities don't bother with the river traffic, which mainly transports local passengers and commerce between the two towns, blithely bypassing customs and visa formalities.

Herbert Werner Bech, Guatemala's director of consular affairs, said he expects the pilot repatriation program to be extended beyond the original two-month test, which concludes Sept. 20, "because of the very good results it has delivered."

"These people arrive [at the border] with nothing, with no money, and they are often sick. So we give them food and organize their transport [home]," he said. "Before, the poorest ones often stayed at the border, barely surviving," before trying to head into Mexico again.

Bech said that given the hardships migrants encounter traveling through Mexico, "many are no longer interested, they no longer want to go, they lose heart. If people are returned to their own country, they will think twice. . . . This offers protection for the undocumented migrant because he isn't just abandoned and can get back to his home country."

While citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua may move freely across the borders of the four countries, being brought all the way home means far more travel and higher costs for those who want to try again.

But the new system isn't foolproof. In the Roman Catholic migrant shelter in Tecun Uman, the Guatemalan border town facing Ciudad Hidalgo, Nicaraguan migrant Maximo Espinosa said Guatemalan officials accepted $5 payoffs in August to allow some non-Guatemalans to be released at the border rather than sent home.

The migrant culture has created a growth industry in Tecun Uman. But locals and migrants say the illicit trade in people fuels crime and exploitation on both sides of the border.

Mexico has long been accused of ignoring these abuses of migrants on its southern border. While the government has complained bitterly to the United States that more than 300 Mexican migrants die annually crossing the U.S. border, rights groups point out that more than 120 Central Americans died last year on or near the southern Mexican border.

Felipe de Jesus Preciado, the chief of Mexico's migration service, defended Plan Sur last month against criticism that it is doing the dirty work on behalf of the United States and militarizing the nation's southern border in the process.

Mexico's own interest, Preciado said, lies in attacking the organized crime and the extortion of migrants that have become endemic in the area. He said Mexico is spending an initial $1.3 million on the repatriation initiative and will soon review with Guatemala how future funding would be shared.

In the past, he told reporters, "it took longer for our buses to turn around at the border than it did for the undocumented migrants to reenter Mexico somewhere else. . . . The thousands of people without work or resources who are waiting for their pollero [smuggler] to pass them through our country raise the levels of crime, of drug trafficking and consumption, of prostitution, of poor sanitation."

Preciado stressed that Mexico receives no U.S. support for the program. Bech, the Guatemalan official, said Mexico and the United States are providing some funds to Guatemala to help cover costs.

A spokeswoman in Washington for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service confirmed that the INS "is providing consultations and financial support" to assist Guatemala with the repatriation.

While most of the migrants cross illegally at Ciudad Hidalgo, the repatriations occur at a smaller border post about 20 miles to the north that straddles this Mexican village and El Carmen, its Guatemalan twin.

Guatemalan officials quickly judge the nationalities of the arriving migrants on the basis of appearance, accent and local knowledge. Cantoral, the border official, said, "At most, I need about 30 seconds to know if they are Guatemalans or not."

A Honduran man, 39-year-old Alvaro Nunez, and his wife were sitting glumly aboard a Guatemalan bus one recent evening waiting to be taken home. Nunez said they had managed to stay undetected in Mexico for only seven hours before being caught. He said the couple would not try the journey together again, "but I may cross alone. There is no work at home, there is just crime."

At a shelter in Tapachula on the Mexican side, Father Flor Maria Rigoni agreed that migrant traffic has dropped sharply in recent weeks.

"The flow is down 30% to 45%, depending on the week," he said.

Rigoni criticized government policy for pushing migrants into the hands of traffickers or forcing them to take more dangerous routes, such as along the Pacific coast in small launches or in the mountains farther inland.

But he also praised the determined attention he said the government of Mexican President Vicente Fox is paying in the effort to attack official corruption.

"Each week, a high official from the Fox government arrives," he said. "They really want to change this. . . . We really are in the heart of impunity here."

-- Anonymous, September 02, 2001