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Soon after the horrific discovery of more than 40 dead migrants (the number will eventually rise to 53) and several injured in a San Antonio tractor trailer, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) tried to use the tragedy to win a political point. . “These deaths are from Biden,” Abbott tweeted. “They are the result of his deadly policy of open borders.”
His statement was insincere. In fact, the conditions that have caused dozens of human beings – including several children – to accumulate in a truck without water or adequate ventilation are not the sole responsibility of the US president. It is a failure shared by many regional actors, including the governor of Texas himself, who has turned the dehumanization of the immigrant community into a recurring political ploy.
The details of the horrors in San Antonio also illustrate the failure of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. According to the Consul General of Mexico in San Antonio, at least 27 of the immigrants killed were Mexicans. This figure confirms an alarming trend: after years of stability in which more Mexicans returned to Mexico than those who emigrated to the United States, the displacement of Mexicans to the north increased again.
During the 2018 presidential campaign and the first days of his presidency, Lopez Obrador explicitly promised that by the end of his administration in 2024, migration from Mexico would decrease, if not disappear. “People will work where they were born, close to their relatives, their environment, its customs and culture,” he wrote in his campaign. “No one will necessarily be forced to leave their homeland to alleviate hunger and poverty.”
The Post’s view: More bodies of migrants and cynicism found on the southwestern border
Four years later, the opposite happened: in 2021, Mexico was the largest source of illegal migration to the United States, with 608,000 Mexican citizens arrested by the border patrol.
“When President Lopez Obrador’s government began, we had 12 years of stability in the migration flow from Mexico to the United States and we are now four or five times above that level,” Tonatiu Guillaume Lopez, who was the first director of migration policy for Lopez Obrador, told me. . “The government has received a period of very low migration and will leave in very large numbers.”
For Carlos Heredia, a professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and an expert on migration, current migration trends stem from the increasing number of Mexican migrants in the United States, violence in many parts of the country and the struggling national economy. Between 2020 and 2021, during an alarming spike in killings, the number of people displaced by violence in Mexico quadrupled. The economy remains stagnant. These factors combine to leave many increasingly desperate to make the precarious journey to and across the border.
“Not enough jobs have been created in Mexico,” Heredia said. Guillen agrees. “The number of Mexican deaths in Texas depicts exactly this reorganization of the Mexican flow,” he told me.
The Mexican government’s responsibility goes beyond its failure to discourage the flow of Mexican migration to the north. The proliferation of human trafficking networks, which often operate with impunity in Mexico and the United States, is directly linked to the horror in San Antonio. “Criminal organizations dedicated to human trafficking have found more rude and dangerous methods for those who want to get to the other side,” wrote Mexican journalist Carlos Puig. “And that includes accumulating them in a trailer at 100 degrees heat.”
According to migration expert Heredia, the Mexican government has “failed almost everything” in its efforts to curb trafficking networks. In 2021, Mexican security officials reported a 228 percent increase in human trafficking offenses compared to 2020. “This is an extremely lucrative business that has avoided restriction by securing on both sides of the border.”
With the growing flow of migrants from Mexico and increasingly aggressive smuggling networks that do not bother to expose dozens of people to suffocation and torture, the humanitarian crisis at the border will continue. For Lopez Obrador, this could be a costly failure.
In an interview at the beginning of his rule, Lopez Obrador reflected: “There will come a day during my government when Mexicans will not go to work in the United States because they will have a job and be happy where they were born. Dozens of Mexican bodies piled up inside this truck in the scorching Texas heat are undermining that promise in the most tragic way possible.
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