AND
n December 9, 2021, it will be three months, a trailer with more than 160 migrants overturned and 56 people died, including several women and children. The scandal was huge and the Mexican authorities tore their clothes indignantly.
As usually happens, a commission was formed, but this time it was with great fanfare: the Immediate Action Group (GAI), with the participation of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico, the countries directly involved.
The GAI was intended to be a multidisciplinary mechanism ad hoc and immediate response that would serve as a permanent table to investigate, identify, apprehend and bring to justice the members and commanders of the transnational criminal organization responsible for the accident. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) would be the coordinator of the group and all the representatives of the nations endorsed their interest in combating international human trafficking.
The only two news that I have recorded that something was done in this regard; one, from the Dominican Republic, where the traffickers who had been hired by two of the deceased migrants were identified and the gang was dismantled; and the other, by Mexico, the SRE, which reported that on January 26, 2020, the bodies of the last migrants who died in the accident were repatriated. Then, dead silence on the news.
The accident occurred in December and at the end of January of this year, the Border Patrol reported that they apprehended 146,000 migrants in that month. The undocumented continue to pass on foot, by train, by truck, by plane, in trailers. And the mafias of traffickers and dealers continue to do their business. The costs vary according to each country, but if we make a very conservative calculation of 4,000 dollars per migrant, on average, it would be 584 million dollars that the smugglers received just last January.
By 2022, it is estimated that the figure will exceed 2 million migrants apprehended, plus those who managed to cross, but also had to pay. The amounts that smugglers earn from smuggling people end up being stratospheric and the bribes to get the trailers full of people through, too.
The containment work, by Mexico, during the past year and according to the Migration Policy Unit, was 187,000 migrants captured and 114,000 deported, of which 110,000 were from Central America, 2,000 from the Caribbean and 1,400 from South America the rest were originally from other nations.
The cold numbers show that Mexico’s work in the field of containment is symbolic, it manages to contain 10 percent of the total flow, according to these indicators, but the figure is higher because there are as many migrants who manage to cross and They are not detained, neither in Mexico nor at the border.
These indicators have been maintained throughout the Joe Biden administration, but they were different during the Donald Trump era. The hotel tycoon put the apprehension of 130,000 migrants in a month as an unacceptable figure and blackmailed Mexico by imposing tariffs, canceling the signing of the Free Trade Agreement and bankrupting the Mexican economy. With a tweet he folded López Obrador’s hand.
A possible reading of what is happening is to consider containment as the dirty work
What does Mexico have to do due to pressure from the United States? Which makes some sense, migrants don’t want to stay in Mexico, so it’s up to those on the other side. And when it comes to dirty work, as little as possible is done. But the consequence of all this is the permissiveness regarding the mafias, the bribes, the abuses, the extortions and the deaths that human trafficking entails.
The 146,000 migrants detained at the border, who failed in their attempt in January, not only lost time, for many it means a real financial catastrophe, because they sold their house, their land, their cattle or took on debt to be able to go north.
Each number, from one to 146 thousand, is a story and a personal tragedy. For a few it was an adventure, for others a serious economic loss; for some it implied abuse or violation; for those the extortion of a family member; for others the loss of a loved one or a leg falling from the train, and for all, a nightmare.
Let’s wait for news of this good and necessary initiative of the so-called Immediate Action Group.
