On Southern Border, Mexico Faces Crisis of Its Own

This is a heart-rending situation, w/o an easy or obvious solution.

This article makes it sound like Mexico's attempt to keep out excessive numbers of immigrants from countries to its south is new, which is not the case. You have to read quite a bit to find out that before 2010, it was a crime to be in the country w/o authorization. A lot of people would never read that far.

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD JULY 19, 2014

For years, Mexico’s most closely watched border was its northern one, which generations of Mexican migrants have crossed seeking employment and refuge in the United States.

But the sudden surge of child migrants from Central America, many of them traveling alone, has cast scrutiny south, to the 600-mile border separating Mexico and Guatemala.

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Mexico has quietly stepped up the pace of deportation of migrants, some of them unaccompanied children. It announced plans to stop people from boarding freight trains north and will open five new border control stations along routes favored by migrants.

“Never before has Mexico announced a state policy on the border, and now it has,” the interior secretary, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, said in an interview. “It is absolute control of the southern border.”

The Mexican government and President Enrique Peña Nieto emphasized in a speech at the border that Mexico and Guatemala are planning a new guest worker program and a temporary, three-day transit visa. The program and visa — both free — would allow access to four border states in an effort, the interior minister said, to have an “orderly flow.” The program may be extended to Hondurans and Salvadorans in the future, he said, adding that controlling the process would make migration safer and outweigh any concern about attracting more people.

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Last year, Mexico deported 89,000 Central Americans, including 9,000 children, the bulk of the returnees coming from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, officials have said. In the fiscal year that ended last September, the United States sent back 106,420 from those countries.

So far this year, Mexico has detained 53 child migrants a day, mostly Central American, double the pace of the same period last year. It has deported more than 30,000 Central Americans so far this year, including more than 14,000 Hondurans, driven home on packed buses at least three times a week.

Francisco Alba, a migration scholar at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, said the influx creates a conundrum: It is almost impossible to stop the flow, yet the country cannot support a large population of refugees.

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Mexico revised its immigration law in 2010 after a criminal gang massacred 72 Central American migrants. The new law made it a civil offense rather than a crime to be in the country without authorization and established procedures for migrants to get temporary visas so they would not have to travel at the mercy of criminal gangs.

But human rights advocates say that in practice, few qualify for the transit visa, which requires travelers to have enough money for lodging during the trip. Fewer still qualify for a humanitarian visa because, aside from those mutilated on the train, they cannot prove they have been harmed during their transit.

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Ruth Maribel Flores, 28, carried her 2-month-old baby, Genesis, mostly by car from Honduras after gang members demanded the family home in Tegucigalpa under threat of death, accusing her 9-year-old son of being a lookout for a rival faction.

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Dunia Ruiz traveled with her 14-year-old daughter from Honduras mostly by hitching rides, she said. She decided to leave with her daughter after gang members raped a young cousin

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