Mexican Saints and Trumps Emerge in Migrant/Refugee Drama

By KENT PATERSON

As has been true throughout their history, the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico were once again a flashpoint in a burning international political question of our times — immigration.

Awaiting an opportunity to gain entrance to this country for asylum interviews, hundreds of mainly Central America and Cuban migrants and refugees camped out for about two weeks this fall on the Santa Fe Bridge connecting Juarez with El Paso. Newcomers interviewed at the site said they had arrived independently of the well-publicized caravans traversing Mexico.

“We hope they let us through. We’re poor, and it’s critical. There’s no work — you earn very little,” said Esperanza, a woman from the Guatemalan highlands. With temperatures tumbling and few belongings to their name, Esperanza and her companions, children among them, were facing a humanitarian crisis. But Juarenses delivered help in a big way.

On two visits to the bridge, the reporter saw locals lugging food, clothing, water and other items to the asylum seekers; the Mexican Red Cross was present, and the campers enjoyed access to bathrooms on the Mexican side of the crossing.

Minus Mexican aid, “We wouldn’t be able to live with the cold and hunger,” declared Yolanda, another young woman from Guatemala who said the snoozing toddler next to her was her daughter.

An exception to the hospitality was Lapolaka.com, the Juarez news portal known for its sensationalism and homophobia, which railed against “invaders” on the border. But as November progressed, similar anti-immigrant postures surfaced in Tijuana across the border from San Diego, where thousands of Central Americans converged.

The city’s mayor, Juan Manuel Gastelum of the conservative PAN party, was quoted in the Mexican media labeling the new arrivals a “horde.” He threatened roadblocks and urged deportations. Dozens of migrants were arrested by Tijuana police and charged with drug and other alleged offenses.

“Human rights are for upright humans,” Gastelum was quoted.

Gastelum later attempted to walk back some of his remarks, but the specters of racism, homophobia and xenophobia were unleashed. Reminiscent of soccer hooligans, bands of anti-migrant protesters confronted the Central Americans in Tijuana, with violence erupting in one instance. “Faggots” and other choice words flowed from the lips of anti-migrant demonstrators.

“Now we have Donald Trump Jr. here, the mayor of Tijuana. How dare (he) call the migrants criminals, bringing diseases. He is promoting violence,” charged Enrique Morones, director of San Diego’s Border Angels.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, US President Donald Trump zapped a tweet rehashing his invasion rhetoric and citing Gastelum. Adding to the tension, US authorities partially closed the San Ysidro border crossing with Tijuana Nov. 19, erecting barriers and concertina wire at the facility. The US Customs and Border Protection agency cited reports of possible attempts to rush the border.

Though Trump and incoming Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) have maintained a civil relationship until now, the migrant/refugee influx portends conflict between one leader who’s determined to stop people from the south from entering the US and another one who says he will uphold human rights and even offer work visas to folks fleeing their homelands.

Signifying the new approach, two academics with career backgrounds different from the men with police or military vocation who have previously overseen the country’s immigration bureaucracy, Tonatiuh Guillen and Andres Ramirez, were named to head in AMLO’s government the National Migration Institute and the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, respectively. Ramirez has worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan.

Government immigration offices will become centers of attention and not detention, newly-appointed Mexican Interior Minister official Alejandro Encinias additionally vowed.

“It’s the correct thing to do, but there’s a difference between declarations and realities,” Gero Fong said of AMLO’s immigration stance.

The Juarez scholar/activist views contradictions between AMLO’s reformist bent and Mexico’s economically and politically subordinate relationship to the United States, illustrated in part by Mexico’s recent role of acting as a US border sentry under the Southern Border strategy of stopping and detaining migrants/refugees before they reach the US.

Fong and other activists with the left-leaning Paso del Norte Regional Popular Assembly were among Juarez residents who donated supplies and expressed solidarity with the Santa Fe Bridge campers before the migrants were moved to a shelter after a cold snap chilled the borderland.

For his part, Lopez Obrador seeks to stem future migration crises by establishing a trinational Marshall-like plan for Central America.

“We are ready to allocate resources to that plan, and the Canadians and Americans can do the same,” AMLO proposed.

Ironically, the presence of migrants and refugees of distinct nationalities in Mexico loomed as Lopez Obrador’s first big foreign policy challenge with the US.

Meanwhile, Mexico continued to witness migration dramas involving its own citizens, as evidenced by the 1,107 Mexicans deported from the US to Juarez alone during October, according to municipal authorities, or the displaced Mexicans from the violence torn states of Michoacan and Guerrero who reportedly are seeking US asylum, too.

As migrants and refugees huddled on the Santa Fe Bridge, two Mexican women put up missing persons posters in downtown Juarez.

The pair was searching for Domingo Nandin Trevino, aged 56, who vanished from the state of Nuevo Leon seven years ago.

Identifying themselves as relatives, the women said Nandin had recently been reported in Juarez but for all they knew could be in Houston, Texas, where he once lived. Like the Central American mothers who periodically scour Mexico for their disappeared loved ones, the truth eluded the Mexican women.

Accompanying the Popular Assembly to the Santa Fe Bridge, Connie Gonzalez, posed the migrant/refugee question as an ethical and political test for both Mexico and the United States.

“They believe in the dream. Who am I to tell them not to come?” Gonzalez asked. “I feel terrible that they have to leave their land and come to one that doesn’t want them.”

For Gonzalez, it’s up to Mexicans to change their own migrant polices and the responsibility of US citizens to do likewise. “Nothing will change until US citizens act and pressure Trump,” she asserted.

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018

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