MEXICO CITY (AP) – Under U. S. pressure to reduce migration, the Mexican government has embezzled cash from a fund to bring regional progress to life to renew immigrant detention centers and keep migrants away from the U. S. -Mexico border.
According to data received through Requests for Public Documents from the Associated Press, the management of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador allocated more than $4 million from the Mexican Fund last year for the goal of controlling immigration.
In May 2019, President Donald Trump threatened to devastate the price lists of all Mexican imports unless Mexico acted to stop migrant trafficking across its territory, which led to an agreement that averted the crisis, and Mexico deployed its newly created National Guard to intercept migrants and agreed to expand a program that allowed the United States to keep asylum seekers from other countries in Mexico while its instances were dealt with through U. S. courts.
An adjustment that the Mexican government made in June 2019 to its Mexican Fund, which supported progression projects in Central America and the Caribbean, not detected at the time. In a decree, the government said the fund “needs a new vision for greater use of resources” and that it can now also be used to “record, track and track “migration flows and equip detention centers.
When asked about replacing the fund’s objectives, officially known as the Mesoamerican and Caribbean Infrastructure Fund, and whether this was done under pressure from the U. S. government, the Department of Foreign Affairs first provided only a list of innovations for migrants. detention centres. It also stated that the deviated amount was “very small”, less than 4% of the total fund.
A few hours after the publication of the article on Tuesday, however, the ministry said in a letter to the AP that “our immigration policy, like our foreign policy, is decided exclusively through the Mexican government, not through the United States. or any other country. “
Tonatiuh Guillén, who resigned as head of the Mexican immigration firm a week after the agreement with the United States, said that misappropriation of the progression budget was a “radical change” at the bottom of the project and illustrates what happened last year: “a reorganization of immigration, a vision absolutely geared towards containment that leaves us without the equipment or resources to design progressive strategies , which is the government’s goal.
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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had campaigned for another more humanitarian technique to immigration: Mexico would be the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America, which are the main exporters of migrants, to make migration an option and not a necessity. In the first 3 months of his presidency, Mexico issued 15,000 humanitarian visas to Central Americans traveling in caravans.
Obrador has maintained the same language and introduced progression systems in Central America, but government movements have replaced after Trump’s tariff threat: guards swept thousands of migrants off Mexican roads, Guillén replaced by Mexico’s prison director, increased deportations. And border towns, already hit by cartel violence, were filled with some 60,000 asylum seekers who returned across the United States to await a procedure that lasts for months or even years.
Many asylum seekers have been assaulted, abducted and extorted; some, who travel with children, have given up.
Documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs detailing that in July 2019, the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation sent about $3. 3 million from the fund (at the exchange rate at the time) to detention centres and in September 2019, more than $700,000 went south for shipments. asylum seekers.
The Mexican government has not said how many of these migrants were bused to the south of the border, however, the Chancellery said months ago that more than a portion of those waiting had to voluntarily return to their country.
“They invite others to self-deport” without the mandatory data and without explaining the effect it would have on their asylum records, said Maureen Meyer, mexican vice president and director of the Washington Office for Latin America advocacy organization.
“The Mexican government’s misappropriation of the budget to combat the economic points driving migration to the United States in favor of moving asylum seekers from mexico’s northern border to southern Mexico, and to situations in Mexican detention centers, is a transparent sign of how Obrador’s leadership has replaced its migration priorities in reaction to demands from Trump’s leadership.
The asylum seeker return program to Mexico blocked in March when the United States suspended its southern border asylum procedure well due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the U. S. government continued to return migrants who had crossed illegally to Mexico.
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In April, the Mexican government redeployed for more than $700,000 for “free and voluntary ground transportation of others in the national territory”, almost the same amount as in 2019. from the northern border to the Guatemalan border, many remained there with no way to continue because the pandemic had closed the borders.
Since 2011, the Mexican Fund has dispensed about $150 million to 11 countries, of which a maximum were designated in the last two administrations for infrastructure projects in Central America.
Last year, the labor administration allocated more than $62 million from the Mexican Fund to expand two social systems to combat the structural reasons for migration in Honduras and El Salvador, the portion of this cash that had been dispensed is unclear. The ministry said the two systems had recruited some 10,000 participants in Central America.
When asked to comment on the use of the fund, the Mexican Chancellery said that “there is no effective” and that in May the government ordered the completion of the fund once its commitments, which may take years, under the program had been fulfilled. from Lupez Obrador, to such bribes that he sees potential corruption targets.
Guillén, the former chief of the immigration agency, said: “It is transparent that the initial objective of this fund has been distorted and it is also transparent that we do have enough spending data. “