NOGALES, SONORA
When migrants fleeing violence arrive at the border in Mexico, they haven’t really escaped and continue to feel a gnawing fear.
This has come across to me in interviews with Mexicans and Central Americans in Tijuana and Mexicali but really struck home with a family from Guerrero whom I met in Nogales, Sonora.
The family, whom I’m not naming for their protection, had lived in their hometown in rural Chilpancingo county for generations. But then June arrived, and the wind changed direction in their town — a new criminal group moved in, they told me.
The 39-year-old mother in the family has 11 siblings, most of whom lived in their hometown. But her three brothers, metalworkers, would not agree to work with the new criminal group or pay them protection money, she said.
“They said that since they weren’t involved in anything, since they were working cleanly, they had no reason to run away from the village,” the mother said.
In late June, three of them were killed, two of them taken from her house while her family watched. After police found the bodies strewn on a roadside, the extended family buried the men quickly and arranged with one another to leave the next day, the father said.
Thirty-six family members fled, many of them walking eight hours through the mountains to avoid criminals’ checkpoints on the roads. They left seven houses empty in their hometown.
The extended family stuck together initially, as they went to Mexico City and Hermosillo, but eventually split up as some members went to the northern cities of Agua Prieta, Sonora; Janos, Chihuahua; Tijuana, Baja California; and Nogales, Sonora, where I met nine family members.
There they have been waiting for months for their number to come up in the “metering” system that decides when asylum seekers can have an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They pass their nights in a shelter and their days at a Mexican migration agency office and the Kino Border Initiative’s dining hall.
But like many asylum seekers I’ve met, they’re stalked by fear, in part of local criminals but mostly of other people from the area where they’re from. They have seen some of them in Nogales and worry that all it would take for their own family to be targeted is a phone call.
“We’re afraid of them because they want to disappear the family,” the mother said. “They don’t want anybody who can get in their way.”
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