US-Bound Migrants Face Racist Abuse and Torture in Mexico: Human Rights Groups Agence France-Presse
go to original July 23, 2014

This mural is painted on the wall of the La 72 Refugio Para Personas Migrantes migrant shelter in the border town of Tenosique in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. It illustrates the cargo train route crisscrossing Mexico. The map includes a legend indicating locations of migrant shelter, sites of extortion, regions where kidnappings and assaults occur, U.S. border fence, and a demographic breakdown of the various cartels and the regions they control. (Michelle Frankfurter/Smithsonian)

Human rights groups on Tuesday said that US-bound migrants passing through Mexico routinely face abuses, discrimination and even torture.

With the United States gearing efforts to curb a surge of unaccompanied minors mostly from Central America, human rights groups here aired concerns about bad treatment migrants young and old alike face in Mexico.

US-bound “migrants may face jailing, accused of crimes they never committed” and legal rights, such as the right to consular assistance, “essentially almost do not exist where they are concerned,” said Denise Gonzalez of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center.

“Mexico is a deeply racist and discriminatory country… and that is accentuated in the cases of migrants,” said Amnesty International’s representative in Mexico, Perseo Quiroz.

Read the rest at The Raw Story

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