The Latin American Report # 165

The American Dream for irregular migrants: between extortion and the erratic currents of the Río Grande

A Honduran migrant told Reuters about the "surreal" episode he and his family experienced while traveling —with other desperate Latin American dreamers—along a highway in México's violent northern border region. Noel Castillo felt "a burst of gunfire" and then saw through the bus window how trucks surrounded it. "We did not believe what was happening because there was shooting, there was a lot of shooting", said the Honduran. He was a member of the group of about thirty migrants who were kidnapped in the last hours of 2023 by armed men, masked and also dressed in military fatigues, who, according to available information, have not yet been apprehended. It is not even known who they were or if they belonged to any particular criminal group, a sign of the level of irresponsibility of the authorities or their potential collaboration.

Suppose the plagiarized migrants—26 Venezuelans and 6 Ecuadorians—got anything good out of their tragedy. In that case, it seems to have been the opening of an expedited channel to ensure their legal crossing to the United States. At least that is the reality for Castillo, who fled from Honduras with his family because of an attempted forced recruitment by "powerful drug gangs" of his sister's two teenage daughters. To my fellow Cubans, even if the veracity of the story is debatable, I suggest you review the situation related to this Honduran to learn what a real potential political asylum case is. But Castillo got stuck in the south of Mexico in the last quarter of the year, ground down in the big trapiche of the saturated Aztec immigration system. That's why he moved to Monterrey, and from there he took that fatal bus to Matamoros, one of the strategic points used by migrants to cross the Río Bravo to Texas. Already in the United States, he denounced to Reuters that at two checkpoints they were extorted by Mexican agents, who demanded 30 dollars from him and other migrants.

_{On January 3, Noel Castillo was abandoned on this bus along with the rest of the migrants kidnapped in late December. Authorities said they had been "rescued," when in fact they were released by their captors (source of the image).}

Then after passing through the city of Reynosa, the traumatic kidnapping, during which the criminal group that executed it demanded from his sister Dilcia Castillo, who was kept in a cramped house with rats and cockroaches, but without food or water, that if she did not pay the ransom she would not see her youngest daughter again, who had been left in a second group with Noel. The latter was held in similar conditions, in an uncomfortable place where "sometimes there was not even enough space to sit down". There, the agents of crime took everything he had of value, such as telephones, the critical cash he needed to continue his journey, and even his shoes. In his native Honduras, his family went so far as to sell his sister's house and raised other funds—at what cost to them, heaven knows—to wire $7,000 to his captors, with Perú as the likely destination of the funds. On January 3, the 32 kidnapped migrants were loaded onto a bus and abandoned in the parking lot of a shopping mall, curiously undetected by the "large deployment of security forces" in the locality. The Reuters report that serves as a guide to commenting on this shameful extortion does not detail how many migrants managed to transfer to their captors the funds demanded, but I assume that they were able to suck enough from these unprotected migrants, deepening the debt they were already carrying. The Castillo brothers left the ranches with other migrants—not as famous as them—there.

The despicable human trafficking continues

Nearly 730 migrants—mostly Central Americans except for a group of Ecuadorians—were found in what appears to be a warehouse in the municipality of Cuaxomulco, in the small state of Tlaxcala, México. The rescue operation, which originated after an anonymous call denouncing the arrival of "multiple migrants" in trailers and trucks, involved forces from the Secretariat of Citizen Security, the Secretariat of the Navy, and the Mexican Army. Some 145 people were traveling in family groups, while there were also about 400 men, approximately 110 women, and 75 minors traveling alone. In this case, the authorities were able to arrest four people involved in a new chapter of these overcrowded and potentially deadly travels using transportation not designed for human beings. It is alarming how brazenly all these long-suffering Latin American souls are moving around the country, with no news of the traffickers being intercepted in flagrante delicto. As I always stress, it is either a chronic inability to reject crime there or an even more shameful complicity with those who profit amid the migration crisis in the region. I share below images provided by Aztec immigration authorities of the rescued migrants.

The Rio Grande swallows three more migrants

Three migrants of still unknown nationality—sadly including two minors—drowned last Friday while trying to cross the Río Bravo at an area known as Shelby Park, in Texas, whose control had been monopolized by Greg Abbott's state forces hours earlier, according to this AP's account of the unfortunate event. Recall that at the end of the year, a Venezuelan and a Haitian were also engulfed by a river whose victorious crossing is a coin flip. At times it seems to be tame, but at others, even with the dreamed American land within reach, it becomes violent and deadly. "We are no longer going to allow the Border Patrol on that property", said the controversial governor in the antipodes of Biden on immigration and other issues. The federal government says that the state of Texas prohibited access to the area where—according to a warning from their Mexican counterparts—there were migrants in distress in the river. The Abbott administration reports that when Biden's agents knocked on their door, the migrants, whose bodies were finally recovered on the Mexican side, had already drowned. In other words, a shameful game of volleyball in which the most important thing is to focus once again on the meaninglessness of this dynamic of dangerous crossings of the Río Bravo (Rio Grande in the United States). Washington has set a deadline until Wednesday for Texas to resolve the problem of Border Patrol access to Shelby Park, on pain of opening another legal case against the state.

_Source

The quick regional roundup

• Without leaving Mexico yet, it is reported that authorities in the southern and violent state—we might wonder if there are any that isn't—of Guerrero are looking for nine people who were kidnapped by an armed group in the municipality of Buenavista de Cuéllar. According to a report from police agents there, the incident occurred Saturday night in a community known as Santa Fe Tepetlapa, at a family party where heavily armed men burst in with camouflaged clothing. Under threat of killing everyone present, the criminals took all the men out of the house, regardless of their age.
  

• In a chaotic day whose development we reported in advance here, the now president of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, was indeed actually sworn in as such in the early hours of Monday, in a delay of more than 8 hours, unprecedented in the history of the country. The outgoing Congress took as long as it wanted, disrespecting the then president-elect and also the international delegations attending his inauguration, abusing its power by appealing to procedural tricks. Until the last moment the entrenched and true power behind the power in Guatemala, of a conservative nature, tried to derail the train commanded by the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) on its way to the symbolic National Palace of Culture. Arévalo's persecuted political party finally managed to be recognized as such by the new legislature, whose president came from its ranks, but in my opinion, the confrontation with the country's flawed and disputed judiciary will not cease. There are many favorable expectations about the new government, and many social demands on the table—elimination of flagrant corruption, greater participation and power for the indigenous, who defended democracy like no other social group, combating the unfathomable poverty or the shameful malnutrition that embraces Guatemalan children—, but it will have to be seen first how far Arévalo, whose ideological directionality is irregular, is willing to go.
  

• In Ecuador, about 50 people escaped from the prison in the coastal city of Esmeraldas, in an event that calls into question the police and military forces that are intervening in the penitentiary system in an attempt to tame it. The inmates apparently took advantage of the context of the past week, marked by the retention of prison officers and service personnel there and in six other prisons throughout the country, to escape. The agency in charge of the prison facilities reported that they managed to recapture five of the 48 prisoners. It was also known that one prisoner died there, although it is not clear if it was due to the intervention or if he was already dead before the entrance of the State forces. I share below part of the material seized there, exposed here by the Ecuadorian Army.
  

And this is all for our report today. I have referenced the sources dynamically in the text, and remember you can learn how and where to follow the LATAM trail news by reading my work here. Have a nice day.