TAPACHULA, Mexico — Thousands fleeing conflict or poverty in Nigeria, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Haiti and Cuba have travelled across oceans, through the jungles and mountains of South America, up through Central America, on a route that — so far — ends here: the steamy, crumbling Mexican city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border.
Now the Mexican government is trying to get a better handle on the flows — and perhaps even limit transit visas — amid pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to clamp down on migration to the U.S. “The Mexican government’s decision to detain as many migrants as possible, after President Trump put pressure on them to do so, has made it clear just how many third-country nationals from outside Central America are actually in the country,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.
One of the longest routes was that travelled by Musa Kolo, a welder from Nigeria. He said he fled violence from the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram in Nigeria’s Borno State several months ago and made his way to the Ivory Coast, where he stowed away on a freighter. Once he was discovered, the crew took pity on him and left him off in Brazil, and he made his way up through Colombia and on to Panama.
At the Panama-Colombia border, Lwanga was lucky. “My group wasn’t robbed,” though others were, and he said, “Some people just died out of exhaustion … We saw bodies, fresh bodies, and skeletons of people who died some time before.” Romero, who hopes to get a job in the United States and send money back to his wife and two daughters, flew from Cuba to French Guayana, then made his way through Brazil and Colombia to follow the Panama route north, suffering the same brushes with bandits the others did.