The hypocritical attitude that the Mexican public opinion has sustained over time in terms of migration is well known: we sympathize and tear our clothes for the harsh reality of our co-nationals in the north, we despise and avoid the ordeal of the pilgrims of the south. Given the rampant dominance of criminal groups throughout the Mexican Republic, the human trafficking business has become one of the most lucrative for criminal gangs.
The discovery of more than seventy bodies in San Fernando Tamaulipas, the bodies stacked in Mexican forensic services without claim and, more recently, the mass exodus of people (the so-called caravans) have forced a more thorough and deeper analysis of the issue.
This has been attended from the trenches of the cinema (for example La jaula de oro by Diego Quemada-Díez), literature (Las tierras arrasadas by Emiliano Monge or La fila india by Antonio Ortuño) and, of course, from the journalistic front, especially through the strength, courage and intelligence of a Salvadoran digital medium called El Faro, whose captain's badge is worn by journalists Oscar Martínez (Migrants that don't matter and El Niño de Hollywood) and his brother Carlos (among many, many more).
Recently, an unprecedented alliance between two media outlets, El País and El Faro, has produced a series of reports in a format that displays the arsenal that digital journalism offers today (deep immersion, photography, video) and allows us to enter in these thousand kilometers of border that Mexico shares with Central America to better understand the social, economic and political dynamics, as well as the dramatic humanitarian crisis in the region.
Thus we have learned of how an old fishing village on the border between Mexico and Belize has changed its ways to collect the cocaine packages that the planes from Colombia drop in the region, of the siege to the rainforest, of the total co-optation that police forces have suffered from drug trafficking, how Tapachula has become a perfidious Babel that changes languages ??from time to time depending on the wave of migrants in turn (Haiti, Africa, Cuba, Honduras or Bangladesh, between many other nationalities) and of how prostitution on this site has gone from operating in a zone of tolerance, to being one of the economic cores of a place where the circulation of black money has, paradoxically and perversely, raised the average rental prices .
The panel held at the Guerrero Garden counted with the luxury presence of the American journalist Jon Lee Anderson. He was accompanied by the aforementioned journalist Óscar Martínez, who spoke of the pusillanimity and lack of self-determination of the governments of Central America and Mexico in the face of American pressures as well as that once beloved figure, today sinister, that are the coyotes; the journalist Elena Reyna who gave an account of the discretion and arbitrariness with which the National Guard manages the flow of people in the checkpoints on the southern border and the Spanish journalist Jacobo García, who shared the stories of, among other things, the strange Mennonite settlement that exists on the border between Mexico and Belize, forming a lacerating contrast between the productivity and functionality of this community, and the decades (centuries?) of abandonment of the surrounding communities.