Tribunal Takes Up Mexico’s Migrant ‘Hell’
David Bacon in The Progressive reports on hearings on migration last week at the Permanent People’s Tribunal in Mexico City, interior secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told the press that the speed of the trains — frequently used by migrants onthe journey North to teh United States — would be doubled. Osorio Chong said Mexico would require the companies operating the trains to hike their speed to make it harder for the migrants. In the Tribunal, young people, giving only their first names out of fear, said they would see many more severed limbs and deaths as a result, but that it wouldn’t stop people from coming. Armed gangs regularly rob the migrants, they claimed and young people get beaten and raped. If they’re willing to face this, they’ll try to get on the trains no matter how fast they go. “Mexico is a hell for migrants already,” fumed Father Pedro Pantoja, who organized a Casa de Migrantes in Saltillo.
Outrage wasn’t limited to the Tribunal hearings. Former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, now the head of one of Mexico’s left parties, the Movement for National Renovation, asked, “How can the government keep them from freely moving through Mexico, when they’re trying to stay alive, and find work so their families survive?” If Osorio Chong really wanted to reduce migration, he told La Jornada, “he’d support the farmers, so that people have work and don’t have to leave to seek life on the other side of the border.”