Mexico’s own illegal immigrant woes

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One sure way to start a heated conversation or clear a barroom north or south of the Rio Grande these days is to utter the phrase ‘illegal immigrants.’ But you’d probably get a similar reaction on either side of the Salinas River, which partially separates Mexico from its southern neighbor, Guatemala. According to a May 2004 story in Business Mexico magazine, in 2003 nearly 86,000 of the roughly 190,000 illegal migrants detained after crossing into Mexico were Guatemalans, many en route to U.S. border states. Those numbers have held steady in succeeding years.

As with Mexican illegals entering the U.S., many Guatemalan immigrants are driven by poverty, plus the ripple effects of the country’s 40-year civil war. The immigration issue is as touchy for Mexicans and Guatemalans as it is for Californians, Texans and Arizonans, and political rhetoric in the two nations’ capitals frequently only fans the flames of mutual hostility.

But at his official inauguration on Monday, new Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom and Mexican president Felipe Calderon pledged greater cooperation ‘to assure that the flow of persons between both countries occurs in a documented, secure, orderly manner and with open respect for the the human rights of the persons,’ as the Mexico City newspaper Reforma reported. The two leaders also pledged to step up patroling of their countries’ porous frontier, where drug-trafficking and rampant femicide occur with impunity. (Hundreds of Guatemalan women have been murdered along the border region in recent years.) Time will tell whether the agreement amounts to anything more than token diplomacy.

— Reed Johnson in Mexico City