A member of the National Guard had already given him his documents, but just when the driver was about to close the box of the tractor in which, apparently, he was transporting industrial waste, voices were heard among the cardboard and the sheets.
“Stop him, he’s loaded,” was the order of the chief inspector, Juan José Tiburcio, to the group of officers. “Are you a trafficker? Where are you taking them?” He questioned the driver, while he removed a sheet that revealed 45 migrants, including five Cubans.
The vehicle had already passed the inspection of municipal officials in the Mexican state of Veracruz, according to Tiburcio. 14ymedio. “Upon inspecting the box, everything seemed normal. If it hadn’t been for the murmurs, it would have passed and arrived calmly in Mexico City.”
Behind the cardboard and sheets, there was a passageway that led to a small space with mats, separated by cyclone mesh and tubular structures. “It was an oven. Traveling without ventilation and with just a few bottles of water is a danger for anyone. There is a risk of suffocation if you travel for more than 10 hours in these conditions,” assured the command of the National Guard.
The officers informed the National Institute of Migration to take charge of the detained persons. According to a statement20 people were “rescued” from Venezuela, nine from the Dominican Republic, five from Ecuador, five from Cuba, three from Bangladesh and one from Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, respectively.
Migration confirmed to this newspaper that 11 women and 34 men were taken to the Acayucan immigration station. This site has been denounced by several Cubans as a “detention center” in which human rights are violated and they suffer extortion by agents and administrative staff.
The agents have charged up to 10,000 Mexican pesos to grant freedom to the Cubans. “They do it because the Migration agents have to deliver a quota to the head of the representative office and this to the national commissioner,” denounced the migrant lawyer José Luis Pérez Jiménez, which works, in practice, as a network of corruption. inside the migratory stays of Mexico.
Data offered by the Department of Customs and Border Protection show that in the last eight months a total of 140,602 Cubans have arrived by land in the United States, a figure that already exceeds the Mariel exodus of 1980, with 125,000 emigrants in seven months.
This Tuesday, the United States Coast Guard repatriated 58 Cuban rafters aboard the ship william trump. The migrants were stopped at several intersections before making landfall in the Florida Keys.
According to official dataSince October 1, 2021, the Coast Guard has intercepted 3,739 Cuban rafters. “Coast Guard crews and our partner agencies continue to patrol the Straits of Florida maintaining a presence with air and maritime assets every day,” Alberto Garcia, a police officer, said in the statement.
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