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| Caribbean-Latin America | |
| Mexican town stands up for illegal immigrants | |
| 2008-10-26 | |
| The Sunday afternoon calm was broken by shouts from the small, mission-style house, watched over by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Bloodied hands punched through the windows. The glass shattered. Suddenly, dozens of people were clambering over the back wall and jumping onto the street below. Some dropped into the patios of adjoining houses. Most were dressed only in tattered underwear, their bodies marred by dark bruises and angry burns. One man had the handle of a knife poking from his abdomen. The men and women ran up to shocked townsfolk and pleaded in their Central American accents: We were kidnapped. The local police are involved. Please help. For a moment, the people of this small Mexican migrant town hesitated. It would be easier, and certainly safer, to go back inside and let the foreigners hide in the surrounding cornfields of this high mountain valley outside Puebla. But then they thought of their own relatives living illegally in the U.S. They thought of the times they had fallen victim to government and police corruption, and of the growing crime and violence throughout Mexico. Then, in an act that defied years of resignation in the face of immigrant abuse, they got on cell phones and bullhorns to mobilize the entire town. And in doing so, they launched a powerful challenge to Mexico's long tradition of complaining about treatment of Mexican migrants in the United States, while treating Central American migrants at home even worse
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| Posted by:lotp |
| #1 |
| Posted by: .5MT 2008-10-26 07:23 |