Keep Out! How the U.S. Is Militarizing Mexico’s Southern Border

by

Marvin Garcia looks out over the Suchiate River from the Guatemalan side of Mexico’s southern border. For twenty-one years, he has ferried numerous people across this river who were making their way to the United States. But the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has changed that.

“In past years, there were many people crossing the river to migrate northwards,” Garcia, forty-four, told me. “But now with the politics in the United States, and the number of people being deported, the number has drastically declined here.”

An elderly man, who declined to give his name, added, “But we know that people are still going because we see them being deported in buses.”

As recently as three years ago, this was a popular border crossing for people migrating to the United States. The walls of the Mexican side of the border reflect this, with giant murals with messages to migrants, and promotion of mobile applications from the United Nations that offer information and support to migrants. But the boom in roadway checkpoints throughout Mexico has caused many migrants to make the journey to the United States by foot, which is more dangerous. Robberies and assaults are common.

“As a result of the politics of Trump, there is a very significant decrease in the number of migrants heading north,” said Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, an analyst with the San Cristóbal de las Casas-based human rights organization Voces Mesoamericanas. “But there is a significant increase in the violence and brutality against migrants. There are fewer migrants, but greater violence against them.”

During the campaign, Trump promised to build a wall along the border between Mexico and the United States to stop illegal migration. But the lesser-known focus of this administration is the border more than 1,600 miles south, between Mexico and Guatemala. This 541-mile-long stretch has become the frontline in the United States’ campaign against migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America.

“The southern border between Mexico and the Northern Triangle is, I think, quite secure now,” said Vice President Mike Pence during a June 22 speech at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. “And that’s a great credit to Mexico.” Pence added that the northern border between the United States and Mexico is also “working better” and achieving its goal of keeping out “bad people.”

The “bad people” that Pence refers to are men and women like Juan Mendez, a twenty-four-year-old young man from the highland town of Nebaj, Quiche, Guatemala. In early 2016, after years of consideration, Mendez (a pseudonym to protect his safety) left his wife and two children to migrate to the United States. He hoped to help his family escape the clutches of poverty.

After one failed attempt in May 2016, Mendez set out again that November, just days before the election of Donald Trump. He made it through the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas but was caught at a migration checkpoint in Chihuahua, a state in northwestern Mexico.

“I was taken off the bus,” Mendez told me one night on a street in Nebaj. “My voice was quivering and hands were shaking as the agent asked me question after question. The last question he asked me to sing the Mexican national anthem, and I did not know the words.”

Mendez was taken to the immigration detention center in Chihuahua, one of many across Mexico. “I was so sad and angry inside [that] I began to cry in front of the agents,” said Mendez. “They were looking at me as if it was funny.”

Mendez had been caught in the intensified border security that exists across Mexico.

The threat of Central American migration—that is, people fleeing violence and repression—has long been an animating force in U.S. policy. Alan Bersin, President Barack Obama’s “Border Czar,” declared back in 2012 that “the Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border.”

But it was the immigration crisis caused by arrival of thousands of unaccompanied minors to the United States border in 2014 that provided the catalyst for further strengthening the border between Guatemala and Mexico. The plan, known as Programa Frontera Sur, was announced by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, flanked by then Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina.

“The crisis of 2014 gave the excuse for the implementation of the Programa Frontera Sur,” Salvador Lacruz, a migrant advocate working with the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center in Tapachula, Chiapas, told me at the group’s offices. “Since then, there has been the consolidation of the plan, and the establishment of a border that is the southern border of the United States. Mexico is doing the United States’ dirty work.”

Since the plan’s establishment, the number of migrants captured and deported from Mexico has steadily increased. In 2016 alone, more than 110,000 people were deported back to Central America, according to statistics from Mexico’s National Institute of Migration. The previous year, Mexico caught and deported more than 150,000 people.

“Here in the southern states of Mexico, we have nearly two-thirds of all migrants detained and deported,” said Vidal Olascoaga. “Since 2014-2015, Mexico has deported more Central Americans than the United States. This represents the success of the strategy of the United States to have the government of Mexico carry out the detention and deportation of migrants.”

Statistics back him up. In 2016, for instance, U.S. immigration enforcers deported 77,267 Central Americans from the United States. Mexico, meanwhile, booted 110,258.

U.S. immigration enforcers deported 77,267 Central Americans from the United States. Mexico, meanwhile, booted 110,258.

Vidal Olascoaga said this increase in enforcement has been accomplished by a major escalation of resources. “There is a significant increase in technology that is arriving to the southern border of Mexico [from] the United States,” he said. This includes biometric identification machines, vehicles and drones, and additional training to help Mexican police and military detect migrants.

And there are a new series of checkpoints through which travelers must pass. The first opened outside Huixtla, Chiapas, in 2013. I was on a bus that was stopped at this checkpoint in July 2017. It was the sixth time we were stopped along Federal Highway 200. Armed soldiers stood next to immigration officials as we stepped off the bus to enter the imposing facility where we went through a screening that looked a lot like airport security before we were allowed to get back on the bus.

Similar facilities opened in Catazajá, Chiapas, in 2014 and La Trinitaria, Chiapas, in 2015. These checkpoints are part of Programa Frontera Sur, which established three bands of security across the state of Chiapas. The goal is to catch migrants before they reach the U.S. border with Mexico.

In previous trips through southern Mexico, I have observed officials target Central Americans at these checkpoints. In 2016, at the checkpoint in La Trinitaria, a Mexican immigration official opened the door of our shuttle, peered in, and focused in on one indigenous woman holding a baby in the back row.

“Show me your identification,” he ordered.

The woman said she did not have her Guatemalan identification, and was traveling only as far as Comitán.

“Get off this bus now,” the immigration official shouted. “You have to go back to Guatemala. You can come back when you have your identification.”

She refused, prompting a standoff that lasted nearly twenty minutes, until finally the immigration official closed the door, and we continued to Comitán. At the bus station, the woman with the infant quickly disappeared in the chaos.

At the detention center in Chihuahua, Mendez said officials grilled him about his life, family, and identity. Throughout his incarceration, the agents tried to get him to bribe them for a quicker release, and warned that by seeking migration he might disappear.

“They wanted me to be scared, and not want to come back,” Mendez told me. He was held in the facility for sixteen days before being transferred to Tapachula, the largest immigration detention facility in Mexico. The authorities took his money, shoelaces, and belt, then gave him a sanitation kit and blanket.

“I entered into the detention center known as the freezer,” said Mendez. “It was extremely cold in there. I mean really, really cold. They asked me if I had brought any other clothes and a jacket, but I had not.”

According to Lacruz, the detention center in Tapachula serves as a holding tank for about 100,000 people a year, most of whom are deported back to their home countries.

The intensification of security along Mexico’s southern border is supported in part through the Alliance for Prosperity, which was proposed by the Obama Administration in 2014 to stem migration from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Of the $750 million approved by Congress for fiscal year 2016, the Alliance allocated nearly $120 million to the governments of both Mexico and Nicaragua to further secure the borders.

While Trump’s budget request calls for reducing this amount to $460 million, top Trump officials hope to expand the use of security forces. In mid-June, Vice President Pence, Secretary of Homeland Security (now White House Chief of Staff) John Kelly, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with the presidents of Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central America to negotiate changes to the plan. They called for the governments to consider increased private sector involvement for improving infrastructure, as well as intensified border enforcement.

“This was a profound restructuring of the Alliance for Prosperity plan,” said Vidal Olascoaga. “They have intensified the military and security aspects of the plan, as well as guaranteeing the increased investment by U.S.-based companies in the Northern Triangle of Central America.”

At the center of the plan is the creation of task forces to combat drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the movement of contraband across the borders.

“The model that the task forces take is because the Guatemalan government understands that just one expression of the state is not sufficient to respond to these new threats,” Colonel Oscar Pérez Figueroa, the spokesman for the Guatemalan military, told me. He and other officials have claimed these forces have nothing to do with migration.

But migrants get caught in the middle of these operations, and U.S. officials have expressed that the migrants themselves represent a threat to U.S. security. In July 2014, General Kelly, then head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the Defense One site that the arrival of unaccompanied minors represented an “existential” threat to the national security of the United States. Kelly became an architect of the Alliance for Prosperity.

Despite denials from official quarters, activists believe the United States is attempting to construct a new military base in the region, which will expand its military presence. In April 2017, representatives from Voces Mesoamericanas issued a statement demanding “a halt to the militarization of our borders.” The statement has been signed by more than sixty organizations and networks from the United States, Mexico, and Central America.

Meanwhile, the United States has been helping form and fund these interagency efforts, including $22.5 million for the Tecún Umán and $13.4 million for the Maya Chortí task forces. It has also provided vehicles and radio equipment.

According to U.S. and Guatemalan military officials, the task forces have also received significant trainings from U.S. military and security agencies, including the United States Army South, Customs and Border Protection, the Texas and Georgia National Guards, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

“The United States continues to provide advice and trainings to the task forces,” said Pérez Figueroa. “This is not just to the military, but to the police, the functionaries, as well.”

But a 2015 report by the RAND Corporation cast doubt on the operational success of Task Force Tecún Umán, which it noted had participated in just five joint operations: “Although there is political will at the highest levels of the government for its sustainability, this is not mirrored at key positions further down the chain of command.”

One hundred and seventy-seven miles from the border with Guatemala sits the town of Arriaga, Chiapas. The quiet little town has become an important stop on the migrant trail. It is where the train known as the Beast leaves for the north.

A short distance from the bus station is the Arriaga Casa de Migrantes, where migrants can stop and rest on their journey north. These houses, run by Catholic groups, offer such services as food, housing, showers, and medical attention for migrants across Mexico and Central America.

It is here that I meet Eddie, a twenty-two-year-old from Guatemala City, and his uncle, Juan Carlos, forty-two. (Both declined to give their last names.) Other migrants sat and watched television as we spoke. They had been there for four days, after walking for nearly forty days from the border.

The two had worked as bus drivers in the chaotic streets of Guatemala City, but like many migrants decided to leave Guatemala to escape the threat from the gangs in their neighborhood. “If you do not pay the gangs, they kill you,” said Eddie, softly, as we sat in the common area of the Casa de Migrantes.

Eddie and his uncle were forced to pay three different gangs. On average, they were required to hand over 300 quetzales, or about $40, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Moreover, the gangs were threatening to kill Eddie if he did not join them. Said Juan Carlos, “We decided that he had to get as far away from them as he could.” But the pair have found their journey to Mexico City to be just as dangerous as where they came from. At one point they were attacked by bandits.

“We were walking along the trail through the mountains when we came across a group of men carrying machetes,” Juan Carlos said. “They surrounded us and demanded that we pay them the money we had, 1,500 pesos. They then beat us, and left us there alongside the trail as they ran away.” They feared for what the journey ahead will hold for them.

Another migrant I met was nineteen-year-old Selvin (a pseudonym) from northern Honduras, who had been traveling for twenty days with his wife. The two walked much of the journey to Arriaga. Just days prior to our conversation, they were assailed by bandits outside Huixtla, Chiapas.

“It has been a difficult trip so far,” said Selvin, shyly. “We were just before Huixtla when thieves came up behind us, and attacked us.” The couple, though not beaten, was robbed of what little money they had.

Tens of thousands of migrants have disappeared along the journey north. Yet despite this, they continue to set out in search of the “American Dream.” But the heightened border security forces migrants into these dangerous situations.

“The need to use different, more hidden routes is having a disastrous effect on migrants, and making the journey more dangerous,” said Lacruz. “Both women and men face the threat of sexual violence, extortions, and even being disappeared. This is a direct result of the militarization of the region.”

Jeff Abbott is an independent journalist currently based out of Guatemala. His work has appeared in Truthout, In These Times, and North American Congress on Latin America. Follow him on Twitter @palabrasdeabajo.