1,300 Latin American Migrants Protest At Mexico's South Border

On Thursday, 1,300 Latin American migrants demonstrated at Mexico's border with Guatemala to demand that their migratory status be regularized to transit safely to the United States.

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"We want to pressure local authorities to meet our demands immediately," the migrants stressed, arguing that other 2,000 people from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Haiti will join the demonstration if officials fail to do so

Latin America currently experiences a record migratory flow to the U.S., whose customs and Border Protection Office (CBP) detected over 1.7 million undocumented immigrants on the border with Mexico from September 2020 to September 2021.

So far in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the CBP intercepted one million migrants on its southern border, while the Mexican Interior Ministry Migration Policy Unit deported over 114,000 undocumented people.

To reach the U.S., many migrants walk the roads visibly in caravans to draw the attention of authorities to regularize their migratory status. Others choose to travel clandestinely with the human traffickers' assistance or cross borders in small groups to avoid being detected.

In these journeys, many migrants are killed or seriously injured. On Wednesday, for instance, seven migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras died when the bus they were traveling on clandestinely capsized in Mexico's San Luis Potosi state.

While lamenting the accident, the Mexican Migration Institute (INM) said that it maintains constant communication with the consular representations of the migrants' countries to support the repatriation and funeral services of the bodies.