Migrants sew their lips in Tapachula; apply for humanitarian visas

Elio Henriquez

Correspondent

Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, February 16, 2022, p. 13

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chis., Ten migrants of different nationalities, including a woman, sewed their lips together and began a hunger strike in front of the National Institute of Migration (INM) in the border city of Tapachula to demand that the authorities Mexican women the delivery of documents to move to the northern border and enter the United States.

We protested to be allowed to get to Monterrey and then cross, but they gave me an appointment for three or four months and I don’t have the money to stay that many days; I ask the authorities to please help usrequested Rafael Hernández, from Venezuela.

Hundreds of foreigners stranded in Tapachula completed a week of protests and demands, including marches, in which they demand a solution to their requests and that the delivery of humanitarian visas be expedited so that they can leave the city and go to the northern border or other entities to to work.

Guatemalan Patricio Peralta assured: We have been sleeping in the park for 15 days, with the children, underwater; They have closed doors on us from all sides.

Josué David González Peña, from Venezuela, seconded him: “We have to do something so that we stop ball (attend); They send us like little children, from one place to another, and one of us standing in line, enduring hunger. Where is the solution that they are giving us? What we want is just to pass, because we are not thieves”.

The director of the organization Pueblos sin Fronteras, Irineo Mujica, who accompanies the migrants, explained that the thousands of undocumented immigrants stranded in Tapachula for weeks or months decided to take drastic measures and hold protests. because the immigration authorities really do not respond, they are not solving the regularizations and they do not want to give humanitarian visas.

assured that the protests have only served to stop the raids a little. Everything has already been tried, they form daily, they tell them not to demonstrate and they will give them their humanitarian visas, but it is false because they do not give them anything.

He explained that those who sewed their lips are the Venezuelans Josué David González Peña, Góber Eduardo Hernández, Rafael Enrique Hernández Guanina, José Rafael Colmenares Mancilla and Jorgelis Primera; Nicaraguans Ricardo Vargas Jarquín and Wilver Cardenal; the Guatemalan Patricio Peralta, and the African Guylain Lounangou, as well as one more person who did not provide his name.