The U.S. is pushing Mexico to get tougher on its southern border, with dangerous consequences.
The U.S. pushed Mexico to do its dirty job of keeping people from reaching our border
and trying to request protection here.
There’s been a lot of focus on the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
The Trump administration has been lying about this policy and downplaying the deliberate child abuse.
At its capacity, this place could house up to 4,000 children.
And if children get caught up in the fallout of that, according to the attorney general, so be it.
And despite President Trump’s claims,
They flow right through Mexico, they send them into the United States.
Mexico actually deports more Central American people than the U.S. does, and has done so since 2015.
The fact that there was a lot of pressure on Mexico to do something that they probably weren't equipped to do,
really is concerning in terms of what this has meant for a very vulnerable population
of Central American migrants mostly, who have been fleeing their homes seeking protection
in the past few years.
Hi guys, I’m Daniel and this Sunday we’re going to be talking about the other Mexican border
and how the U.S. is supporting Mexico’s efforts to control immigration from Central America.
Those are just a few of the reasons people along Mexico’s border with Guatemala
told us why they decided to leave home.
However, most refugees and migrants will never make it to the U.S. border.
That’s because starting in 2014 there was a dramatic jump in the number of them arrested in Mexico.
To understand why there’s been this increase in arrests, we need to talk about Programa Frontera Sur,
or as it’s known in English, the Southern Border Plan.
Frontera Sur is the Mexican government’s program to step-up immigration enforcement,
particularly in southern Mexico.
It was announced in July 2014 by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto after tens of thousands of children
fleeing violence arrived at the U.S. border.
President Obama declared it a humanitarian crisis.
And earlier this week, Mexico announced a series of steps that they're going to take on their southern border
to help stem the tide of these unaccompanied children.
Obama, by the way, has been called “deporter-in-chief” by undocumented immigrant advocacy groups.
Maureen Meyer at WOLA, the Washington Office of Latin America, says
that while Mexico was already arresting Central American refugees and migrants prior to Frontera Sur,
this was significant because it was a conscious decision by Mexico to work more closely with the U.S.
Lots of phone calls were made and requests made from the United States to Mexico saying,
“You need to help us address the Central American migration” and really pressuring Mexico
to step up enforcement as a way to reduce the number of Central Americans reaching the U.S. border.
Initially, Peña Nieto said that part of Frontera Sur would promote and protect migrant rights.
I think if that was the aim, it's failed miserably.
If the objective was more to detain and deport Central Americans and others, then they've had a lot of success.
A quick look at the nature of U.S. involvement might give you an idea of what’s shaped the policies of Frontera Sur.
WOLA says that since 2014 there’s probably been $200 million allocated to Mexico for southern border security.
Now, what this looks like on the ground is funding for setting up communications towers
along the border that enable Mexico security agencies and the immigration agency to better communicate,
to improved biometric equipment for Mexico's immigration agency,
so you know who's going through your detention centers and the ports of entry.
WOLA even found that ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency,
maintains a presence at a detention center in Tapachula, Mexico that houses children.
Besides sending those fleeing violence back into potentially dangerous situations in their home countries,
Frontera Sur may actually be putting them more at risk on their journey.
Just listen to some of their stories.
The crackdown has pushed travellers into more remote, more dangerous parts of the country
-- a country that’s getting more unsafe for everybody.
Mexico’s population is a little over one-third of the United States’
and in 2017 there was a record 29,000 homicides in Mexico, the highest number since
the country’s modern record-keeping began.
That means in Mexico for every 100,000 people,
more than 20 of them were murdered.
In the U.S. that number was closer to just five,
meaning Mexico’s murder rate is nearly four times higher.
Crimes and abuses against people travelling through Mexico continue at an alarming rate,
and according to WOLA, shelters have noted a more intense degree of violence in the reported cases.
And there have been reports of alleged verbal and physical abuse by Mexican officials,
even using Taser guns to threaten and control them.
Migrants are frequently kidnapped, extorted, robbed.
Often women are sexually assaulted both by criminal organizations,
but sometimes in collusion with Mexican officials.
And we have not seen any significant effort by Mexican authorities to curtail those abuses.
The U.S. may have played a larger role in making Mexico more dangerous.
Diego Lorente says the policy of dealing with migration as an issue of national security
actually goes pretty far back.
This focus on security began after the 9/11 attacks,
when former Mexican President Vicente Fox and then U.S. President George W. Bush decided to cooperate
more closely on matters of national security.
Mexico established Plan South, a system of police and
military surveillance. It also started deferring to the U.S.
on issues relating to the southern border.
Then in 2007 came the Mérida Initiative.
The U.S. signed on to support the purchase of military equipment and training
as part of Mexico’s newly declared war on drugs.
Under Mérida, the U.S. has allocated over $2 billion in aid to Mexico in the past decade.
And $100 million of that has gone to Mexico’s National Institute of Migration since 2014.
Mérida is highly controversial. Critics say it has only made the situation worse.
The strategy coincided with the militarization of public security in Mexico,
in part stemming from an enormous increase in firearm sales from the U.S.
WOLA and human rights organizations have even gone so far as to call on the U.S. to withhold aid from Mexico
because they’re concerned about the human rights situation.
It's a very dangerous situation where Mexico’s in right now because you have military in roles that don't
correspond to them, and a lot of times leads to abuses against the civilian population or others that they
encounter with very weak accountability mechanisms, so really weak efforts to investigate any soldier involved
in crimes or human rights violations against their population.
And there’s another way the U.S. has contributed to this crisis.
Many of the reasons Central Americans are fleeing their home countries stem from decades of U.S. intervention.
Take, for example, the wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua in the 1980s.
The U.S. spent billions funding these wars in an effort to stop the spread of communism
– and the effects are still felt today.
Gangs like MS-13 were made in the U.S.A. They were actually started by
Central Americams who fled U.S.-sponsored civil wars in the 1980s.
In the 90s, President Bill Clinton’s policy made it easier for people to be deported,
which sent these gangs back to Central America.
Today, countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are among the most violent in the world.
I'm actually Salvadoran-American.
And my family fled the war in El Salvador in the 1980s.
What other stories about Central America should we cover?
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