Migrant caravan finds safety in numbers as trek continues to US

Associated Press

ARRIAGA, Mexico

Kenia Yoselin Gutierrez had long thought about migrating from her native Honduras to the United States, but stories of others who made the trip scared her off: migrants being raped or disappearing, children stolen.

When she heard about the caravan that has now grown into several thousand people traveling through southern Mexico, she saw her chance. Her 5-year-old daughter, sister and niece joined her.

“It’s not so easy to walk this road alone and with children,” the 23-year-old said, sitting with her sister and their daughters under a tarp near the main square in the southern Mexican town of Pijijiapan. “But while we are accompanied like this, it’s not so dangerous.”

The tropical sun may be hot, the road long and Mexican authorities unhelpful and even harassing, but many in the caravan say traveling in a large group helps safeguard them from the dangers that plague the trail northward.

It’s also a relatively inexpensive way to make the trip, as intensified U.S. efforts to seal the border have driven the price smugglers charge as high as $12,000 – a sum those fleeing poverty and violence can ill afford.

At the same time, kidnapping and extorting money from migrants has become big business for Mexican criminal organizations, especially near the U.S. border, making it more difficult for people to attempt crossings on their own.

On Friday, the caravan made its most ambitious single-day trek since the migrants crossed into the southern Mexican state of Chiapas a week ago, a 60-mile hike up the coast from Pijijiapan to the town of Arriaga.

The group has thinned considerably from exhaustion and illness, and was about 4,000-strong compared with its peak of more than 7,000. Still 1,000 miles from the nearest U.S. border crossing at McAllen, Texas, the journey could be twice as long if the group heads for the Tijuana-San Diego frontier, as another caravan did earlier this year. Only about 200 in that group made it to the border.

On Friday, President Enrique Pena Nieto announced the launch of what he called the “You are at home” plan, offering shelter, medical attention, schooling and jobs to Central Americans in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca if they apply for refuge. Pena Nieto said the plan “is only for those who fulfill Mexican laws” and is a first step toward permanent refuge status.