Kate Linthicum,
Los Angeles Times, Dec 01, 2016
Click aquí para una versión en español de este artículo
Tenosique, Mexico
Growing numbers of Central American immigrants have decided to stay in Mexico, because it's too hard to reach the U.S. The burden on Mexico is likely to grow under a Trump presidency, officials fear.
Unable to find work and terrified by the street gangs that brazenly roamed the streets, Karen Zaldivar was one of tens of thousands of young people who fled Honduras in 2014.
Caught trying to slip across the U.S.-Mexico border, she was promptly deported.
Last year, Zaldivar set out again, but with a new destination: Mexico. She now lives in a small city just north of the Guatemalan border along with growing numbers of other Central Americans who have concluded that if they can't reach the United States, the next best thing is Mexico.
"I decided to make a life here," she said at a small open-air restaurant in Tenosique, where she works in the kitchen, frying fish. "It's calmer, and safer."
Estimates of how many Central Americans are living in Mexico are hard to come by, in part because some, like Zaldivar, have obtained forged Mexican identity documents. But statistics show more and more are staying legally by seeking political asylum or humanitarian visas.
Asylum applications in Mexico nearly tripled over three years, hitting 3,424 in 2015. Asylum requests this year are poised to be twice that, human rights advocates say, with most filed by Hondurans and Salvadorans.
I decided to make a life here. It's calmer, and safer. Karen Zaldivar, Honduran immigrant in Mexico
Secret Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails
"This Man Will Almost Certainly Die":
The Secret Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails
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| http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/9/this_man_will_almost_certainly_die |
A shocking new investigation about private prisons has revealed dozens of men have died in disturbing circumstances inside these facilities in recent years. The investigation published in The Nation magazine documents more than 100 deaths at private, immigrant-only prisons since 1998. The investigation’s author, Seth Freed Wessler, spent more than two years fighting in and out of court to obtain more than 9,000 pages of medical records that private prison contractors had submitted to the Bureau of Prisons. We speak to Wessler about his piece, "This Man Will Almost Certainly Die."
40 percent of the people inside of these prisons are incarcerated for the criminal offense of crossing over the border. In the early '90s, 4,000 people were prosecuted criminally for crossing over the border. By 2013, at the peak of these prosecutions under the Obama administration, 91,000 people were prosecuted criminally for illegal entry or illegal re-entry, for crossing the border—something we usually think of as a civil offense. You know, usually, people are detained and deported as a result of crossing the border without papers. But we've started to incarcerate, sometimes for years, tens of thousands of people.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/9/this_man_will_almost_certainly_die
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