[News] The fire in Ciudad Juárez exposed the disinterest and repression of migrants

[Draeno]

 

The tragedy in the immigration center, where 40 migrants who were confined died, revealed once again the crude institutional treatment that these people receive from the governments of their countries.

Migrants and activists protested in Chiapas, a state on the southern border of Mexico, after the fire that left 39 dead at a station of the National Institute of Migration (INM) in Ciudad Juárez, on the border with the United States. The protesters questioned the speech of the Government of Mexico after the incident, for which they have blamed the migrants.

Amid the smoke, flames, and anguish that consumed the Ciudad Juárez migrant detention center on March 27, 2023, the desperate screams of a woman were heard, a scene captured in a video that went viral in Latin America, especially in Mexico, where the fire occurred, in which 40 migrants died.

This is Viangly Infante, a Venezuelan who traveled with her three children and her partner in search of a better life in the United States. In fact, it was his partner he was calling desperately. Fortunately for the family, the man survived the fire and was alive in the ambulance that appears in the same video.

Infante lived in Colombia for four years and had returned to Venezuela. It was not her first experience migrating, but this time, as she told BBC Mundo, she decided to take a greater risk looking for better opportunities for her three children.

He ventured to travel through the jungle, passing through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala before facing the hostile landscape that receives migrants in Mexico, the last step before reaching the US. “My Passing through Mexico seemed harder than the jungle. Migrants were being robbed here when I traveled, you had to give money all the time. Then Migration is continually grabbing us, locking us up. That is inhumane and these are things that I did not experience in the jungle,” he stated in the interview.

And it is that Mexico has a particular tradition since the days of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) highly questioned by human rights organizations: responding with Army units to the migratory flow that arrives in the country. And when they are not repressed by the force of the State, they confront organizations involved in human trafficking, the so-called "coyotes", who offer accompaniment in the illegal passage to the United States.

“The stories are terrible. We are very concerned because we are seeing that what we have been experiencing for many years here in Mexico is taking place in the Darién, we have documented cases where women are reported to be raped, there are people who report finding lifeless bodies on the road. We had a case last week of Venezuelan people who came to us to request support for missing persons, also in Juárez, and the testimony that one of these people gave us was that they would cross the Darién three times before going through Mexico,” says Lorena Delgadillo, Director of the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law (FJEDD).

Regarding militarization, the report “Bajo la bota”, supported by the FJEDD, reported that in April 2022 the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, had increased the number of elements of the armed forces to more than 28,000. Armed Forces to monitor the two borders. Almost three times more than the more than 8,000 troops assigned to this work in 2019, as stated in the report.

According to the document, the strategy implemented by the military to control migrants passing through Mexico is aimed, “at the southern border, to discourage the passage of migrants, and in the north, to prevent them from leaving the national territory. The objective is to prevent migrants from approaching the United States.”

In this attempt to control the migratory flow, centers operate like the one that caught fire in March, where 68 men were being held (among them a Colombian, an Ecuadorian, 12 Salvadorans, 28 Guatemalans, 13 Hondurans and 12 Venezuelans) who would be deported to their countries of origin, 40 of whom died in the accident. Due to the death of these men, on April 12 an investigation was announced into Francisco Garduño, director of the National Institute of Migration of Mexico, since respect for human rights in the treatment of those caught migrating irregularly has been widely questioned. .

Initially, the attitude was to hold the people in prison responsible. “This had to do with a protest that they started, from, we assume, that they found out that they were going to be deported,” said President López Obrador. "As a protest, they put mattresses at the door of the shelter and set them on fire, and they did not imagine that this would cause this terrible misfortune," added the president.

However, organizations such as the FJEDD have questioned the behavior of the State in all the proceedings and investigations surrounding the fire, going so far as to file a criminal complaint that would allow them to participate in the process.

“What worried us the most is the whole issue that had to do with the identification of the remains, with all the forensic tests that have to be done on the remains. We have some testimonies that some people could have been tortured while at the station in the immigration stay. There must be very good expert tests carried out on the bodies to find out if there are any signs of torture,” says Delgadillo.

According to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), cited by AFP, "since 2014, some 7,661 migrants have died or disappeared on their way to the United States since 2014 and 988 have died in accidents or because of traveling in subhuman conditions."

It is in the management of the identification and repatriation of the bodies when one of the great problems faced by Venezuelan migrants becomes evident: the invisibility and lack of interest on the part of the State.

"We sent a communication to the governments of Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela and Colombia saying that it was important that they participate in the investigations to help represent the victims, their nationals (...) from Venezuela we have not had any answer unfortunately. What we know, from conversations we have had with the Venezuelan po[CENSORED]tion in exile, is that there is no possibility that they can get a response from their own institutions,” says Delgadillo.

 

https://www.elespectador.com/responsabilidad-social/lado-a-lado/el-incendio-en-ciudad-juarez-expuso-el-desinteres-y-la-represion-a-migrantes-noticias-hoy/