Word: tapachula
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mexico, whose officials are campaigning for an amnesty for the millions of its people illegally in the U.S., is turning on its own undocumented migrants. Tapachula, a city of 170,000 in the state of Chiapas, 10 miles from El Carmen Frontera, is the headquarters of the "Southern Plan" against illegal migrants--nearly all of them Central Americans heading for the U.S. to look for work. Even before the campaign began, Mexico was stepping up deportations--93,563 during the first six months of this year, a huge increase over the rate in 2000. Originally, the deportees were simply taken...
Mexico has never been exactly gentle with illegal migrants. Marco Herazo Diaz, 26, a Honduran farmer, is waiting at Tapachula's Catholic-run shelter, the House of the Migrant, to see if his sister in Compton, Calif., can send him money; he gave his last $50 to a man who said he was an immigration agent. Southern Mexico is full of bandits, some of them Central Americans themselves. "The migrant's route is a cemetery without crosses," says Father Flor Maria Rigoni, who runs the shelter...
...right. At night, along the railroad running north from Tapachula, Jose Pedro Tello Cuevas, southern operations chief of the government's migrant-protection unit, listens to a 25-year-old Salvadoran electrician named Edwin Oswaldo Portillo tell of handing over $4,000 to the state police. "File a charge," Tello Cuevas tells him. But few of the Central Americans would ever dream of taking a case to court; hence a tradition of official corruption continues unabated...