Despite describing his government as humanist, López Obrador has implemented public policies and security strategies on the southern border of Mexico that not only stop migration, but also violate their integrity and human rights.
Perhaps our president has never made it clear in his speech to build a barrier like Trump’s. However, in fact, the government of Mexico implemented a human wall on our southern border that tends more towards aggression than containment.
The migration crisis in our country has reached new records in 2021. On the one hand, the push factors have multiplied with the pandemic, the economic crisis and the rise in insecurity in the region.
Regarding the United States, the government of Joe Biden, in an effort to contrast the anti-immigrant vision of its predecessor, announced a series of promises that would seem to favor migration, such as citizenship for 11 million irregular immigrants or greater laxity in the asylum applications. Not surprisingly, the numbers of arrests on the US-Mexico border reached an all-time high in July of this year (213,000).
Faced with this time bomb, Mexico has received pressure from Washington, both the Trump and Biden administrations, to curb flows from Central America, which have exceeded Mexican emigration in rates for years.
For this reason, the Mexican side that began its mandate with the flag of a humanitarian vision towards migration, since June 2019 has deployed troops along the southern border. In effect, the numbers of Central Americans who made the journey north dropped drastically at the beginning; at a cost perhaps higher than the economic one.
In this context, the Secretary of National Defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, announced this week that, in the Migration and Development Plan in the Southern and Northern Borders, 28,000 elements of the Armed Forces (13,000 from the Army, 900 from SEMAR and 14 of the National Guard).
Without detriment to their professionalism, these elements are not able to contain migration without incurring flagrant violations of human rights of people.
Furthermore, “containment” (as the president says) does not inhibit migration, nor does it safeguard migrants. On the one hand, it shoves them to look for alternate routes, less traveled, which are usually more dangerous. On the other, it makes them victims of abuses by the Mexican authorities, as has been evidenced in videos that circulate on social networks.
Those who get rid of it are lucky enough to fall into the arms of organized crime. The propensity to be victims of trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, rape, robbery and homicide is dynamited by the gaps in the Mexican immigration system.
The National Migration Institute (INM) and the National Guard do not have mechanisms to register irregular crossings or to formally monitor the routes. In numbers, from January to August 2021, US immigration authorities recorded 1.3 million arrests on the border with Mexico. In the same period, the INM reported having “rescued” 147,000 irregular migrants throughout the Republic.