‘They Take Jobs,’ ‘Cause Crime Wave’ : Mexico’s Border Problem: Illegal Aliens From South

The comments on illegal immigration were jolting, given the often sentimental pronouncements in Mexico about Latin American brotherhood and solidarity.

“The immigrants are causing a crime wave,” said an aide to the mayor of this Mexican town near the border with Guatemala.

“They bring diseases,” said another. “They openly practice prostitution--on the city streets!”

“They are taking jobs from our citizens,” the editor of a local newspaper complained.

“We are gradually losing our sense of nationality,” a labor leader said.

The scene was Tapachula, a border city in the state of Chiapas, where Mexico meets Guatemala. Yet the emotions that have arisen over the issue of immigration seemed to evoke a setting far from the lush greenery of southern Mexico--south Texas, perhaps.

Mexico is grappling with an unprecedented flow of immigrants from Central America. An unknown number of them go on to the United States, but most stay in Mexico. Roman Catholic Church officials estimate that more than 300,000 Central Americans have settled in various parts of Mexico since 1980.

The immigration, persistent and mainly illegal, presents Mexico with special problems.

Mexico boasts a history of granting refuge to individuals persecuted for political reasons, but no one, Mexican officials say, foresaw the massive flight of poor farmers fleeing the war zones to the south.

Chiapas plantation owners, with the tacit approval of immigration authorities, have long been willing to exploit cheap, temporary labor from Guatemala. But no one expected that Mexico’s marginally better standard of living, and its relative tranquility, would become a magnet for permanent immigrants from Central America.

As it is, jobs in Mexico are scarce here for Mexicans, not to mention undocumented aliens. Chiapas is one of Mexico’s poorest states.

Furthermore, Mexico is the source of thousands of workers who enter the United States looking for jobs. That makes any perceived mistreatment of foreigners in Mexico’s south doubly embarrassing for Mexican officials.

“We have to be hospitable,” said Jose Antonio Cruz, a spokesman for the mayor of Tapachula. “We ask for the same treatment of our migrants in the United States.”

No End in Sight

The problem is not going to disappear soon; neither the fighting in Central America nor the economic woes of Mexico show any sign of coming to an end.

In many ways, Chiapas is where Central America begins. Under Spanish colonial rule, viceroys in Mexico and Guatemala alternately ruled the region. According to Mexican history books, Chiapanecas joined the Mexican republic voluntarily after its independence from Spain. But some local citizens contend that an occupying army tipped the scales in favor of Mexico and that, otherwise, Chiapas, and a Pacific coastal area called Soconusco, would be independent nations of Central America instead of remote provinces of Mexico.

Chiapas’ population-- mestizo lowland farmers and indigenous highland descendants of Mayan tribes--resembles the racial blend of Guatemala. High, pine-covered ridges interspersed with plots of coffee and scraggly corn bring to mind similar landscapes in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

No Traditional Patterns

Now, in the persons of refugees and immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador, Central America’s distress has descended on Chiapas. More than 300 miles of rugged country bordering Guatemala ensures that it does so with ease.

“It is clear that illegal immigration has broken through all its traditional patterns,” said Juan Roque, a regional official of the Mexican immigration service.

A few months ago, Amerina Gomez crossed the Suchiate River into Mexico with her 4-year-old son, Aristides, and a host of bad memories of her native El Salvador.

“It ruined my nerves,” she told a reporter. “The army comes and goes, the guerrillas come and go. One is never safe.”

Blended in Easily

From her home in Cojutepeque, El Salvador, Gomez traveled by bus through Guatemala to the border with Mexico. She paid 300 pesos--less than a dollar--to a guide who swam across the Suchiate towing her on an inner tube. She arrived carrying a sack of onions, as if for sale, and she blended easily into the normal cross-border crowd, thus avoiding the police shakedowns said to be common on the frontier.

“The police mainly went after the men,” she said. “They would ask them for money and threaten them with deportation.”

Since her arrival, Gomez has worked as a maid for the equivalent of $15 a month, although the Mexican minimum wage is about $2.50 a day.

“I have no choice,” she said. “I will not go back to El Salvador until things calm down, and I don’t have the resources to go north.”

Political Problem

Gomez insists that she came to escape the war, but the Mexican government classifies her and thousands like her as undocumented workers, not refugees.

“It’s a little like the problem in the U.S.,” said Manuel Lomeli, spokesman for the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, the government refugee agency. “Some enter legally and some not. You have to distinguish between refugees and aliens of the economic sort.”

In this, the government is opposed by activist Roman Catholic priests who insist that Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants are coming to Mexico essentially to flee violence at home.

“It has become a political problem: To accept them as refugees would mean condemning the human rights situation in neighboring countries,” said Father Javier Ruiz Velasco, a parish priest in San Cristobal de las Casas.

Blamed for Crime Wave

In six years, the influx of Guatemalans and Salvadorans has swelled the population in and around Tapachula to an estimated 250,000 from 100,000, town officials say. It is a population boom they seem unhappy with. The entire population of Chiapas is officially listed as 500,000.

“The immigrants are causing a crime wave,” Cruz, the Tapachula city hall spokesman, said. “They are not like the old-time immigrants that came to work and then went back home. These come to rob and stay.”

Didier Cruz, who is the mayor’s son, his namesake and sometime assistant, said that prostitution is booming because it provides steady work.

“On the city streets!” he exclaimed. “They are everywhere. Right outside city hall. A few years ago we dismantled the red-light district here, but now we will have to reinstall it in order to maintain some control.”

Cultural Changes

Economics is the basis for much of the complaining.

“Not only do they take jobs from our own citizens, but they start businesses with smuggled goods, and our merchants can’t keep up,” said Augusto Villareal, editor of Diario del Sur.

Some Mexicans see signs that a foreign culture is taking root.

“Everyone is listening to Guatemalan music, news, speaking like Guatemalans,” complained Roberto de los Santos, head of a government-affiliated labor union.

Immigration officials recently visited Tapachula to try to calm the growing public storm over immigration. At an open meeting, complaints from residents about the immigrants brought retorts not only from the Mexican officials but from the Guatemalan consul here as well.

Can’t Stem the Flow

Cesar Alfonso Samayoa, the consul, said, “I assure you that the great majority of Guatemalans who come here are honest and only want to work.”

Roberto Guerson, president of the local bar association, said: ‘We can’t go on a witch hunt to stop foreigners from coming. There are too many, and we have too long a border.”

Like their U.S. counterparts, Mexican officials are ill-equipped to stem the flow of immigrants. Government action is centered on stepped-up border patrols. For every foreigner caught crossing illegally, four evade capture, the national immigration office reported recently.

This poor performance is blamed on the length of the border and the willingness of some immigration officers to accept bribes.

U.N. Refugee Camps

“We know there is corruption, but we are working on it,” Roque, the immigration official, said.

While the issue is boiling, an earlier controversy over refugees has cooled somewhat. About 40,000 refugees from Guatemala are living in U.N.-sponsored refugee camps in Chiapas and in the neighboring states of Campeche and Quintana Roo.

Two years ago, a problem developed when the Mexican government tried to persuade--some say force--the refugees to move to camps in adjoining states, far from the border. Officially, the move was prompted by attacks on refugees near the border by the Guatemalan army, but some observers felt it was designed to better control refugees who might create political problems for Mexico.

A 1984 report from Americas Watch, a New York-based human rights organization, said, “It is feared that some refugees may be sympathetic to the Guatemalan guerrilla movement and that this kind of left political ideology may find fertile ground.”

Partial Success

The relocation program proved to be only partially successful. Of about 46,000 Guatemalans recognized as refugees by the government, about 18,500 moved to four new camps in Campeche and Quintana Roo. Another 20,500 preferred to stay on in 77 dispersed settlements in Chiapas near the border.

About 5,500 of the refugees disappeared. The government says they went back to Guatemala. The church says they scattered into Mexico.

Only 1,500 refugees have voluntarily gone home, at the invitation of the year-old elected Guatemalan government.

Nonetheless, the Mexican government intends to persevere in its effort to persuade the refugees to relocate.

Influx Began in 1981

“The decision to move the refugees is still in force,” said Oscar Gonzalez, head of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, overseer of the refugee camps. “It is merely on hold for the moment. We are trying to convince the refugees.”

The influx of Guatemalan refugees began in 1981. They fled a military sweep of rebel strongholds in western Guatemala in which anyone caught and suspected of having rebel ties was killed. Most of the Guatemalans settled along the border in the mountainous middle of Chiapas.

At first, the Mexican government tried to discourage the refugees. Some were sent back into the war zone. Then the government set up camps near the border, and these became targets for attacks by the Guatemalan army.

In 1984, with aid from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the Mexican government tried to encourage the Guatemalans to move on to Campeche and Quintana Roo. The refugees would be safer there, the authorities said, and would receive land and resources to make a living.

Threadbare Camps

As an incentive to the refugees to move, the Mexican government concentrates its development money in the new camps, providing only minimal assistance--food and medicine--to the border camps.

As a result, the frontier camps are threadbare. At one, called La Cieneguita, houses are made of sticks, sometimes roofed with rusty metal, sometimes thatch.

Little work is available for the refugees. They live mainly by U.N. handouts. A few grow corn alongside their shacks, some own a pig or two. Going barefoot is the norm for children and women. About 1,500 people live in La Cieneguita.

The refugees on the border show little willingness to move, and repatriation also seems out of the question. It was thought that the democratic election of the government of Vinicio Cerezo might lead many of the Guatemalans here to return to their country. But not many are sure that they could return safely.

‘The War Goes On’

The refugees point out that the war is continuing and that the army is pressing peasants into service as civil guardsmen as part of the government’s counterinsurgency drive.

“I just don’t think there is peace in Guatemala,” said Miguel Beltran Velasquez, 43, who fled the village of San Miguel four years ago. He said the Guatemalan army killed 150 people in his village who were said to be suspected of helping the rebels.

“We understand that the war goes on,” Beltran said.

Some of the more politically vocal are demanding punishment for Guatemalan military leaders involved in peasant massacres and payments for lost property.

“That is our idea of peace,” said Estanislao Velasquez, 55, a self-described camp leader.

That kind of peace seems far off. The refugees may well be in for a long stay in Mexico.