[Yahoo] In the impoverished Mexican town of Tapachula, a short distance from the Guatemalan border, patience is wearing thin. “We’re used to seeing them [migrants] pass through but they didn’t stay before. Now it’s out of control," says Maria at her taco stand.Business has been dire for her since a squalid migrant camp sprang up a stone's throw away in the town's central plaza - one of many makeshift camps for the thousands stuck between Trump's America and chaos back at home in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
There was a time when caravan after caravan of migrants were welcomed with open arms on their way north. But tightening border controls in the US and a calamitous visa policy in Mexico has triggered an accidental crisis of its own.
The mood has turned so sour in some nearby towns and villages that bands of migrants have been blocked from entering by stretched authorities.
Locals have run out of good will and refugee agencies are warning they are totally overwhelmed.
The mood has turned so sour in some towns and villages where bands of migrants have been blocked from entering Credit: Encarni Pindado
“The first caravan that came through was welcomed with food and even mariachis, but now they’re ungrateful,” says, Rosario Hernandez, who lives around the corner from Mexico’s Refugee Commission (COMAR) in Tapachula.
Hundreds of migrants, mostly from Central America, are staying on the pavements outside the agency day and night, waiting to be processed for papers that give them the legal right to stay in Mexico.
Without those, many are afraid of being detained and deported and even kidnapped and killed by criminal gangs and corrupt immigration officials.
Populist-leftist Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also known as AMLO, began his presidency in December last year by expediting humanitarian visas for migrants, in sharp contrast with Trump’s hostile, anti-immigrant rhetoric. But the surge in applications saw a reversal in his policy just two weeks later.
Now AMLO, who has warm relations with Jeremy Corbyn, is trying to keep thousands of migrants in southern states via a new regional visitor visas. The pass limits them to states such as Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Quintana Roo and the Yucatan, which are some of the country’s poorest and will struggle to support this new influx of people. Towns close to Tapachula are already resisting migrants, and local politicians with stretched municipal budgets are stoking xenophobia in cynical efforts to keep migrants at bay.