Nick Miroff: Mexico Has Key Role in Confronting Surge of Central American Migrants Nick Miroff - The Washington Post
go to original August 6, 2014

Honduran migrant Juan Daniel Pérez, 24, dries his clothes on July 28, 2014 as he waits for a freight train outside Huehuetoca, Mexico. (Washington Post/Nick Miroff)

HUEHUETOCA, Mexico — A few weeks ago, just about the same time that Mexican officials said they were putting a stop once and for all to the rolling horror show nicknamed “The Beast,” Jhonny Torres left Honduras for Houston. He reached southern Mexico and scrambled onto a boxcar with hundreds of other migrants.

Gang members stopped the train near the Mayan ruins of Palenque and took his last $50. In Orizaba, another dreaded shakedown site farther north, gunmen put a pistol to his temple and said he was a smuggling guide who had not anted up. They let him go, Torres said, only when they figured out it was his first trip and he had nothing left to steal.

By the time Torres reached the tent-camp migrant shelter here on the northern outskirts of Mexico City, he’d been held up five times by armed gangs, including a group of commandos claiming to be members of the Zetas cartel. But he never encountered any Mexican police or soldiers.

“There were some guys with military uniforms,” said Torres, 26. “But I think those were the Zetas.”

In the two months since U.S. President Barack Obama called the surge of Central American minors and families crossing the U.S. southern border a “an urgent humanitarian situation,” he has asked the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to do more to stem illegal migration to the United States.

But it is the big country between them — Mexico — that may actually have the power to do something.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

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