Advocates Suggest Another Option for US-Bound Central Americans: Stay and Work in Mexico Valeria Fernández - PRI's The World
go to original January 4, 2017

A different image of migrants is spreading across Mexico. A grassroots public awareness campaign is seeking to break prejudice against migrants, and it has been designed by themselves. (teleSUR English )

Esteban, 19, grew up on a farm in a small town in Honduras. He played drums in church and soccer at school — he likes to joke that he become a fast runner and that came in handy when he had to outrun immigration authorities.

When gangs arrived in his town and demanded that his family pay a cuota, a monthly fee, they couldn’t afford it. So Esteban set off for the US in June to earn enough money to help his family move somewhere else in Honduras.

...Once Esteban crossed into Mexico, he traveled on foot and on top of freight trains to avoid immigration checkpoints. But it didn’t take long for him to run into the very problems he was trying to escape. One day, when he was walking along the train tracks with other Central Americans, gang members stopped them and held them at gun point. They made everyone take off their clothes to see if they were hiding money — and also to check if any of them had tattoos from rival gangs.

One of them did.

“When he took off his shirt, they saw his tattoos. I didn’t dare open my mouth because if I said anything they’d think I was his friend,” Esteban says. “Just as they were about to shoot him I bowed my head and I prayed to God: ‘Forgive him.’ They didn’t forgive him. They shot him in the head and took his body away. I don’t know why.”

Esteban shakes when he talks about what he saw. He eventually made his way to Ixteptec, Oaxaca, where human rights advocates put him on a bus to the shelter in Mexico City, 500 miles away.

They also presented him with a new option: stay and work in Mexico.

Esteban is one of a growing number of Central American migrants who have applied for Mexico’s humanitarian visas. The visas are temporary — usually one year — but they can be renewed, and they’re faster and easier to get than refugee status. The number of humanitarian visas granted in the past year has more than doubled, from 1,303 to 2,951, according to immigration records. Most of them have gone to Central Americans.

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