Thanks to @GeopoliticalJD for alerting me to this situation. Via Diario de Chiapas in San Cristobal de las Casas, in southern Mexico: Declare a humanitarian crisis over the African migrants. The Google translation, edited, and then a comment:
The Jesuit Refugee Service Mexico considers that the situation faced by African migrants stranded outside the 21st Century migratory station should be considered a humanitarian crisis and, therefore, be attended by immigration authorities, regardless of the legal status of those people.
"Are the immigration authorities waiting for someone to die?" asked the activist Claudia León, whose organization provides legal and psychosocial support to migrants who request shelter or some type of protection.
“The situation we see with the population that comes from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, such as Cuba or Haiti, is more visible, because of the precarious condition in which it has been since they left their country, added to the fact that the government it has forced them to remain in Tapachula,” she added in an interview.
The situation of the people of Africa “is already of despair, of frustration and anger. They protest the lack of an answer.”
Outside the aforementioned immigration station, dozens of people talk or sleep on makeshift beds made of cardboard while they wait for a safe passage cerificate to travel through the country as, they say, they were granted in other Central American nations.
A man who identifies himself as Diddy, who claims to be originally from Congo and strives to speak Spanish, says that "migration should not leave one alone."
His shirt, shorts and tennis shoes, he says, he was given in the countries where he has been. He has scruffy curly hair and a beard, which is irregularly cut. But that's the least; his biggest concern is to get a piece of bread.
For more than three months "I eat what I can," he says, what they give him, what others leave. After spending the night in the camp, he leaves very early to wander the streets of the city in search of help or something to eat. That same pattern has been repeated the last three months.
In the migrants' place, the temperature exceeds 36 degrees Celsius, for which tarpaulins are placed that protect them from the sun and rain. There are no portable toilets or drinking water to which they have direct access.
Other reports in the Chiapas media say about 150 African migrants are in the fifth day of a protest against being kept away from the government office that could give them transit passes to continue north. Of course they want to reach the US; as bad as their reception would be, it would be better than what they left.
Reports like this have been filtering out of Mexico since the spring, often related to imaginary Ebola scares about Congolese arriving in Texas. The migrants' real health problems stem from the conditions under which they're being kept in Mexico and perhaps on various Central American borders.
I am trying to find out how migrants like these are trafficked out of Africa and into Central America and Mexico. The traffickers are clearly imaginative and enterprising, but they're no better than the Libyan creeps who send migrants out to drown in the Mediterranean.
