Mexico Cracks Down on Illegal Immigrants

At daybreak, Mexican immigration agent Raymundo Palomec marched eight young men down to the bank of the Suchiate River, Mexico’s southern border, piled them onto a makeshift raft and dispatched them to Guatemala.

The eight--illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic--had been nabbed the night before in the town of Tapachula, the first stop on a clandestine journey north to the United States.

“We tried to return them at the bridge, but the Guatemalans wouldn’t accept them. So I sent them back the way they came,” Palomec explained.

‘It’s in Their Hands’

The agent kept watch on the jungle river bank until he spotted the Dominicans marching single file behind a Guatemalan border guard. “That’s it!” he shouted triumphantly. “Now it’s in their hands.”

That deportation Friday was unorthodox at best, and quite possibly illegal, but it nonetheless illustrates the Mexican government’s new, aggressive policy against illegal immigration by Central and South Americans and people from other countries who use Mexico as a trampoline to the United States.

In the first eight months of this year, officials say they have deported 46,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico, most of them Central Americans. While amounting to less than one-tenth of deportations made by the United States during a similar period, that figure is more than all of the deportations from Mexico during the previous three calendar years combined.

For every illegal immigrant who is caught, however, countless others make their way north. Thus, Mexican officials say they are doing battle on both borders. Days before Palomec’s maneuver in the south, Baja California state police carried out a pincer operation with the U.S. Border Patrol that netted nearly 500 people attempting a dash across the Tijuana-San Ysidro border.

The administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has come under attack at home for launching such pro- Yanqui police operations against the border crossers, a majority of whom are Mexican citizens. But Mexican officials say the raids will continue. They say that illegal immigration, particularly from Central America, has become a Mexican problem, too.

“Those who don’t make it to the United States stay in Mexico,” a senior Mexican official said.

Overjoyed by Cooperation

U.S. officials are overjoyed by the new, bilateral cooperation, and they also insist that the joint sweeps “are absolutely necessary,” even though, one conceded, “they look terrible, like a binational roundup of human beings.”

The official, who declined to be identified, said the cooperation between U.S. and Mexican immigration officials has been developing since the outset of the Salinas administration. “Under this administration, the Mexicans are more receptive to intelligence that we pass on,” he said.

In another sign of the change, President Salinas met with Guatemalan President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo at the Suchiate River earlier this month, and the two agreed that their governments would work together against illegal immigration. One immediate step they took was to make the western border area a free-trade zone. Mexican immigration official Baltazar Mejia said the move was meant in part “to try to compensate” local merchants who had been profiting from business with illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigration is big business, particularly for the so-called coyotes , who can earn from $1,500 to $3,000 per person for a trip from San Salvador or Guatemala City to Los Angeles. Along the way, there is money to be made for truck drivers, hotel and boarding house owners and government officials.

Mexican authorities claim to be clamping down on the official corruption that has allowed so many immigrants to make their way into Mexico and north to the U.S. border. Mejia said that he laid off 10 of the 89 agents in the Tapachula sector last April because they allegedly took bribes.

Official Detained

Last week at the Talisman border crossing, Mexican agents reported to Mejia that they had tried to detain a Guatemalan immigration official whom they caught chauffeuring three Salvadorans into Mexico with false documents.

According to their written report, the Guatemalan agent, Joel Mendez Pinto, threatened to punch out his Mexican colleagues before he fled on foot back to Guatemala. The Salvadorans were detained for deportation.

Several immigrants, however, said in interviews that either they or their fellow travelers had been touched for bribes by Mexican officials. A 30-year-old Salvadoran woman from La Libertad province said that twice in her journey to Mexico City she saw Mexican immigration officials demand payment to let Guatemalan immigrants continue north.

Once, she said, a Guatemalan woman paid $70 each for herself and her five children traveling illegally. And a bus driver asked for $100 to make an unscheduled stop before reaching the North Terminal in Mexico City, where immigration agents are stationed.

A 26-year-old Salvadoran from Usulutan province waiting in Guatemala to cross illegally with his wife, 5-year-old daughter and a friend said that he was caught by Mexican immigration agents a couple months ago and had to pay a bribe of about $80 just to be given food. Then he was deported.

“The discourse at high levels is magnificent,” said Bishop Luis Miguel Canton Marin, the Roman Catholic prelate of Tapachula, “but when you talk about reality, it gets very complicated. There are many interests.”

Bishop Canton’s diocese daily feeds illegal immigrants who show up hungry and attends to the spiritual needs of about half of the estimated 40,000 Central Americans who live illegally in Chiapas state.

More Difficult to Get Through

But, despite the ongoing corruption, Canton and the immigrants themselves say it is now decidedly more difficult to get through Mexico.

“They are definitely turning people back,” said Candice de Arteaga, 38, one of a dozen immigrants waiting for deportation at the Manguito checkpoint, about 15 miles north of Ciudad Hidalgo.

De Arteaga, the mother of seven, worked for two years as a maid in Los Angeles before returning home for a visit last year. “The last time I did this, it was nothing. I was crazy to ever come back. . . . But I have my children in Guatemala,” she said.

Like many of the immigrants interviewed, Arteaga said that robbers stole her savings--about $200--as she crossed the border. Juan Mendez, 31, said a fellow Salvadoran whom he teamed with in Guatemala City stole his stash of about $50 one night after he fell asleep.

There are other dangers too. A truck carrying more than 40 Salvadorans and Hondurans overturned on the road to Tonala last week, killing six and injuring 30; five months ago, an unarmed Mexican agent was shot at a checkpoint when he tried to detain a Salvadoran; women immigrants sometimes report rapes.

Typical Frontier

In that sense, Mexico’s southern border is a typical frontier, fraught with prostitutes, bandits, traffickers and too many unknown people passing through. On the Guatemalan side, not far from Ciudad Hidalgo, the town of Tecun Uman is called “the waiting station” or “Little Tijuana” and has grown from 8,000 to 20,000 population in less than a decade.

It is a rough-and-tumble town of dusty pensions and cheap restaurants, its central park teeming with young men carrying tell-tale flight bags full of the few belongings they hope to carry to the United States.

At the river bank, scores of young men make their living by swimming the river with inner-tube rafts tied to their waists by rope. For about a quarter, they will illegally transport anyone who wants to go, including two journalists.

By and large, immigration officials look the other way at the illegal river traffic. Each day, hundreds of shoppers and vendors cross the border that way, as do many of the approximately 50,000 Guatemalan seasonal workers who cross the river to pick coffee on Mexican plantations.

“It’s a natural flow,” said Bishop Canton. “This border is just a political division, nothing else.”