Between Nuevo Laredo, located on the Mexican side of the American border, and the city of San Antonio, Texas, stretch 254 small kilometers. A journey of just a few hours that was to lead to freedom and a better life; but which, for about fifty migrants who died of suffocation in the back of a semi-trailer without water or freshness, turned into a death sentence.
Monday evening, in San Antonio, the fortuitous discovery of a mass grave once again awakened the consciences of the whole world on the mortal dangers that camouflage ill-crafted migration policies. Invariably, history sends us these electric shocks which turn the heart. The continents, the countries, the seas change, but the basic plot is always the same: to taste a better elsewhere, adults and children expose themselves to colossal dangers. If the risk associated with the journey is downright to lose their lives, it is easy to deduce that what they leave is harmful, dangerous and draconian.
In 2017, in the same city, the same horror was unveiled, this time in the parking lot of a Walmart. A truck carrying some 39 people was parked there, with 10 dead on board: citizens from Mexico and Central America who died of severe heatstroke and dehydration.
This time, around 60 people were literally abandoned on the edge of Quintana Road, a road known as a landing point for smugglers. The outside temperature was around 38 degrees. Local authorities said the truck found did not have a rear air conditioning system.
Three people were arrested. Survivors of this horrific chapter of human trafficking are still fighting for their lives in hospital. On one side and on the other of the border, the presidents are saddened and wonder about the responsibility of the other in this great fiasco. Joe Biden promises to tackle the networks of human trafficking which often arise in parallel with failing immigration policies or borders that are too tight. In Mexico, the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, points to the “lack of control” of the United States.
The border separating Mexico from the United States is one of the deadliest in the world. In addition to Mexico, migrants are fleeing countries in Central America where levels of crime and poverty are unsustainable. Death by drowning is unfortunately the most frequent, followed by deaths caused by lack of water, food and extreme heat during crossings on foot in the desert. The drama that occurred this week strikes the imagination and reverberates throughout the world; but every day, citizens of the world die in anonymity while fleeing their country. The migration crisis is causing tens of thousands of deaths.
Whose fault is it ? In the United States, the question is burning. The tragedy of San Antonio comes just a few weeks after the failure of the Summit of the Americas, one of the main ambitions of which was precisely to give birth to a new treaty of collaboration between the various American countries on the question of immigration. “Share the responsibility”, such was the wish of the American president, Joe Biden, host of the event which ended with a flabby and uninviting declaration.
The American president is under the wrath of the Republican right, who accuses him of being the source of all the ills of migration, as if the disastrous passage of Donald Trump at the head of the country had not sown the rout in migration matters. In truth, although he wished to relax the strongest locks affixed by Trump during his mandate, Joe Biden did not really succeed in achieving his objectives, hampered first by his lack of responsiveness and then by the courts. , which put a spoke in his wheels – it seems that the legal barrage will be a recurring theme for the future.
Alongside Trump, whose anti-immigration obsession has been akin to building a wall between the United States and Mexico and deporting the Dreamers, Biden is advocating for more humane and people-centered migration policies. respect for rights. But the truth is that he has failed to change the situation, unable to counter an ever-increasing migratory flow, cornered by courts that prevent him from overturning outdated regulations, doubled by the strength of networks of traffickers who profit from these entanglements. The logistical, financial and security headache is immense.
The figures make you dizzy and confirm an issue that will not go away: in 2021, some two million arrests of illegal migrants were made on the line separating Mexico from the United States, a record number. Stopping this flow is utopian. Better supervision is necessary. We bet that this grandiose challenge will be found on the road to the mid-term elections next November.