Border securityMexico fights illegal immigration on its own southern border
The United States isn’t the only country — nor Texas the only state — with a long history of illegal immigration over a porous southern border. Where the Mexican state of Chiapas touches Guatemala, undocumented immigrants and smugglers don’t have to worry about a border patrol, customs agency, or immigration authorities of any kind.
The United States isn’t the only country — nor Texas the only state — with a long history of illegal immigration over a porous southern border.
Where the Mexican state of Chiapas touches Guatemala, undocumented immigrants and smugglers don’t have to worry about a border patrol, customs agency, or immigration authorities of any kind.
They can hire a “balsero” — a rafter — to ferry them across the Suchiate River at one of dozens of informal crossing points. Or just walk across, particularly in times of drought. They do it in plain view of international authorities manning both sides of an official border crossing at Ciudad Hidalgo, a gritty little border town that sits across the river from another gritty little border town, Tecun Uman, Guatemala. On this stretch of the Suchiate, the trickle of legitimate border crossings and the 24/7 illicit trade co-exist in a state of mutual noninterference.
Much of the unauthorized traffic is illegally traded goods — eggs, soda, toilet paper, you name it — crossing from Mexico into Guatemala, where trucks park along the riverbank awaiting their uninspected cargo. Migrants crossing the river on northward treks to the United States merely blend in with the day laborers and tourists pouring into Mexico. Given the vibrant-but-illicit trade and its considerable economic impact in these otherwise impoverished border towns, there’s no will to shut down the informal crossings, said Sergio Seis Cabrera, head of migrant affairs at city hall in Ciudad Hidalgo.
“For that reason, they leave it open,” he said. “And the migrants take advantage of that to cross the river.”
The culture of impunity at Mexico’s southern border underscores the challenge of stanching the flow of Central American migrants, whose exodus from their homelands en route to the United States recently registered in a noteworthy shift in Border Patrol apprehensions: In 2014, for the first time since authorities started tracking it, more non-Mexicans than Mexicans were taken into custody at U.S. borders.
The largest group by far: immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America — where murder rates have skyrocketed amid clashes between warring street gangs. During the last three federal fiscal years, from October 2013 through September of this year, more than half a million immigrants from those three countries were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol — a whopping 88 percent of them in Texas, figures obtained from the agency show.
