• by IPS Correspondents (mexico city)
• Thursday, August 23, 2012
• Inter Press Service

MEXICO CITY, Aug 23 (IPS) - Two years after the massacre of 72 migrants in Mexico, shelters for undocumented migrants are facing challenges and threats, due to the rise in the number of people seeking assistance, the lack of solidarity on the part of local communities, pressure from organised crime, and a lack of adequate public policies addressing the problem of migration.

“We are seeing a backlash from a combination of hurricanes that have destroyed infrastructure, train accidents and mass killings, that have drawn increasing attention to immigrants,” activist Martha Sánchez, with the Meso-American Migrant Movement, told IPS.

On Aug. 23, 2010, people around the world were shocked when the Los Zetas drug cartel killed 72 migrants who were headed to the United States – 58 men and 14 women – in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.

There are 54 shelters in Mexico, located at the main transit points for migrants, many of whom ride cargo trains northward. One of them is run by civil society organisations, and the rest by the Pastoral de la Movilidad Humana, the Mexican Catholic bishops’ human mobility ministry.

Some 500,000 undocumented migrants from Central and South America cross Mexico every year in their attempt to reach the United States, according to estimates from experts and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Along the way, they face the risk of arbitrary arrest, extortion, theft, assault, rape, kidnapping and murder at the hands of criminal organisations and corrupt police and migration officers, activists and migrants report.

“The shelters are places of protection, and they also denounce the situation, in public and in the courts,” said Alberto Xicoténcatl Carrasco, director of the Casa del Migrante Posada Belén, a shelter in the town of Saltillo in the northern state of Coahuila.

“Public sentiment against the shelters has grown in some areas…We are seeing many interests mobilising against these centres,” he told IPS. The Posada Belén shelter takes in 200 to 300 immigrants a week, who stay one week on average before continuing their journey.

In the shelters, the undocumented migrants are given food, clean clothes, a bed, a shower, and advice about the measures they should take to reduce their vulnerability. The shelters survive mainly thanks to donations of clothing, food and medicine.

“The main problem is the country’s migration policies,” Raúl Vera, the bishop of Saltillo, told IPS. He is one of the most outspoken defenders of undocumented migrants who are in transit or have come to Mexico to stay.

Activists accuse the Mexican government of implementing repressive policies against immigrants under the argument of national security, which they say are ineffective in combating the complicity of police and migration officers with the criminal bands that prey on migrants.

“The shelters stand between the immigrants and the interests of those who want to benefit from them,” said Jorge Andrade, a member of the local NGO Ustedes Somos Nosotros (You Are Us). “Because of their vulnerability, they are easy prey for criminals.”

The NGO used to support the Casa del Migrante San Juan Diego, in the town of Tultitlán on the outskirts of the capital, with provisions. But the shelter was forced to close in July, as a result of pressure from the local population, who protested the presence of migrants in their midst.

The shelter then set up a camp under a bridge, near the railroad. But they were driven out of there as well by the local community. The state government then relocated the migrants to the town of Huehuetoca, 30 km from Tultitlán. They are now near the San José shelter in that town, which is run by civil society groups and receives support from Ustedes Somos Nosotros.

In the new spot, up to 180 undocumented migrants are allowed to stay a maximum of three days, in the large tent that was set up as a makeshift shelter. The fate of the Casa del Migrante San Juan Diego is an illustration of the harassment experienced by the shelters for Central American migrants without papers – yet another obstacle faced by the migrants on their difficult journey through Mexico.

In 2011, Leticia Gutiérrez, a nun with the Pastoral de la Movilidad Humana, told IPS that their shelters and staff had received death threats from both organised crime and the authorities, and reported that their electric generators had been sabotaged, their electricity cut off, and their windows broken.

The activists say the increasingly precarious situation faced by the shelters is more evidence of the shortcomings in the immigration policies of the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón, whose six-year term ends Dec.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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