El Paso-Ciudad Juarez — When Mexican officials embarked on their redevelopment of downtown Juarez more than a decade ago, they certainly didn’t mention a new Caribbean district.
Nowadays, however, Cuban accents, food and music splash the streets just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. “Cubans have lifted up the economy, in the restaurants and hotels, for example,” said Lisette, a young Mexican woman working in an eatery that now features non-spicy Cuban cuisine on the menu. Seated at a table, Surama and her son Manuel spoke about their journey from their native island in search of US political asylum.
Winding through Central America and Mexico, and encountering graft-hungry cops along the way, they arrived in Juarez planning to cross into the US. More than two months later, Surama and Manuel are instead living and working in Juarez, mom in cosmetics and son in a welding shop.
“We’re working to get by. If you don’t work, you can’t support yourself,” Surama said. Shrugging his shoulders, Manuel added the pay they earn is enough for food and rent but insufficient for getting ahead in life.
The mother and son said they are treated well by most locals and Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM). Nor have they had trouble with the Mexican soldiers visibly deployed along the nearly bone-dry Rio Grande as a shield against migrants seeking to enter the US.
But Surama and Manuel worry about the “cholos” and potential kidnappers who reportedly target Cubans and other migrants for robbery and extortion. In their view, Juarez is not a secure place; news reports back them up.
While the Mexican military had its eyes on migrants, 22 people were murdered in the city during the weekend of July 26-28, bringing the death toll to at least 136 killings in the month of July alone, according to El Diario de Juarez. Most of the murders likely stem from disputes over illegal drug sales.
A Cuban national, Osmany Bahemira Pavon, was recently stabbed to death, allegedly by another Cuban, according to Nortedigital.mx.
Like thousands of other Cubans and Central Americans stranded in Juarez by hardline US immigration policy, Surama and Manuel said they have numbers which mark their places in line for making a US asylum claim in El Paso. At the rate the number roll is clicking, the pair estimated their turns will come about in four months.
Though immersed in a day-to-day struggle for survival, Juarez’s migrants and refugees are part of a larger political drama that’s directed from the Trump White House but also includes a significant stage presence of the reform-minded government of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who took office last December with an unprecedented mandate.
Among the promised changes were an end to militarized policing and respect for the human rights of migrants passing through Mexico to the US. But as the Trump administration pressured AMLO’s government to crack down on the migrant caravans leaving Central America, culminating in threats to impose tariffs on Mexico, a politician long viewed as a staunch defender of Mexican sovereignty stunningly relented.
To the glee of Washington, the Mexican government agreed to make asylum claimants wait in Juarez and other border cities, dispatched its new National Guard — sold to the country’s Congress and public as a necessary force meant to control internal criminal problems — to Mexico’s southern and northern borders for migrant control, and conducted mass deportations. According to La Jornada daily, the INM detained 104,439 people and deported 75,759 during the first six months of 2019.
After barely six months in office as the INM’s chief, Tonatiuh Guillen, an academic with a strong human rights background, resigned and was replaced by a man with a military background.
Although Trump has praised Mexico for doing “good work,” Amnesty International, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) have all raised serious human rights concerns about the US-Mexico immigration collaboration.
High profile supporters of AMLO are publicly voicing their criticisms, too. The president of the lower house of the Mexican Congress, Porfirio Munoz Ledo of AMLO’s Morena party, sharply condemned Mexico’s new migrant/refugee policies as the trading “human flesh for an economic measure.”
Calling the migrant/refugee issue the “Achilles Heel” of the new government, internationally respected migrant advocate Father Alejandro Solalinde blamed Chancellor Marcelo Ebrard for pushing AMLO into a “blind alley” while missing an opportunity to challenge Trump on the threatened tariffs by going to the World Trade Organization and capitalizing on of internal US opposition to the White House’s use of trade as an immigration stick.
Behind the scenes, it’s a good bet that AMLO and company are looking to the 2020 US presidential election for relief. Meanwhile, the Mexican president has gone overboard to butter up Trump and ensure that existing US-Mexico economic relations aren’t disturbed, lest his Fourth Transformation reform program falls to external pressures from Washington.
Does the Mexican president have any real cards to play? Perhaps broaching an inconvenient truth, prominent Mexican historian Lorenzo Meyer, examining economically subordinate Mexico’s dilemma in Proceso magazine, contended that Mexico has “limited sovereignty.” Facing down Trump, he asserted, would require almost unimaginable popular sacrifices.
“I don’t see anybody in Mexico that would have the resolve to defend the country like the Vietnamese did,” Meyer said.
Internal pressures are bearing down on AMLO’s administration, too. Outbursts of xenophobia have erupted in Mexico since last fall, when the current migrant/refugee surge began. Conversely, so has solidarity. Building on civil society activism on both sides of the border, El Paso’s Hope Border Institute and the Roman Catholic Diocese of El Paso have launched a new fundraising campaign to support struggling Juarez migrant shelters.
Collecting books for migrant/refugee children as part of Juarez’s recent “Cumbia with Cause” campaign, Sandra Torres noted the ironic circumstances of the newcomers in a border city where a huge swath of population is originally from other places in Mexico and abroad
“This city received me very generously,” said Torres, who hails from the Mexican state of Sonora. “It hurts me to hear (xenophobic) rejection of any immigrant. I consider myself one of them.”
Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2019
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