Reuters.- Hundreds of migrants from Central America and from Caribbean nations continued their journey to Mexico City on Tuesday, but confronting security forces and migration agents, in some cases violently trying to prevent their advance.
Entire families arrived on Tuesday in the small communities Mapstepec and Escuintla, in Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, after walking many hours in the intense sun from neighboring Tapachula, some 100 kilometers away.
But far from finding a refuge to rest on the long road, the migrants were greeted with a new operation by the immigration authority and the National Guard to try to dissolve the caravan that left Tapachula over the weekend.
Security forces violently detained several migrants, including children, according to witnesses.
“They were taken away,” Bertha, a Guatemalan woman, told Reuters cryingly how “people in white shirts” took three of her children, ages five, four and three, when she left them in the care of other people to go to buy food.
On the eve, another of her daughters was snatched from her arms when she was breastfeeding, she said.
The migrants, tired of waiting in Chiapas for months or even a year to respond to their refugee requests in Mexico, set out on the weekend to Mexico City, hoping that their march would help make their demand visible.
But as soon as they started the trip, they were stopped by agents of the National Migration Institute (INM) and the National Guard, who have intensified their operations to stop the massive march, even due to “excessive force”, two of them were dismissed.
“We do not come with violence, we ask that they let us go through the good times (because) we are not going to stop,” a young man who identified himself as a Haitian migrant told journalists from a makeshift camp in Escuintla and who managed to advance after a confrontation with agents on the weekend.
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The United Nations asked the Mexican government on Tuesday to respect the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, given the increase in migration agents and the National Guard on the southern border. They also expressed concern about the images where some agents were observed beating migrants.
“We are facing a poor immigration policy,” Javier Urbano, an expert on migration issues at the Universidad Iberoamericana, told Reuters.
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