1/12/20
By Arun Gupta
It is simply heartbreaking to see the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico where more than 2,200 people live, including 500 children. Everywhere you see little kids playing with balls and toy cars, digging in the dirt, running around. Toddlers wearing just shorts waved at us. Little kids in pajamas ran up to us to hug us.
Women cook over mud stoves using firewood and laundry hangs in lines strung between trees on the banks of the Rio Grande not far from where Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter drowned while trying to swim across and reach safety in the U.S.
We talked to asylum-seekers from Mexico to Central America to Cuba. The overwhelming majority are mothers and children. Many are fleeing from cartel violence.
One woman says drug traffickers executed the father of her children in front of her children at their school. Others say they were threatened with extortion by gangs, to pay a ransom or die. If you don’t pay, you and your family will be killed.
One woman fled political violence in Nicaragua. Two men from Cuba said Mexican police kidnapped them, stole their I.D.s, and extorted $4,000 from relatives. In nearly all cases, the United States destroyed their country through wars, coups, economic predation, and drugs. Mexico is wracked with violence because of our appetite for drugs and devastating economic policies.
The thousands of people is a new development. Last summer it was only a couple of hundred in the camp and people would rotate out as they got asylum hearings in the U.S. This is the result of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that is completely criminal in every way.
There is also a growing movement to bear witness and raise noise to Trump’s policy. If thousands of people went to Brownsville and other border cities, it could be a new Standing Rock. Mass people power could create a political crisis that could potentially stop this criminal policy.
Everyone in Brownsville believes Trump’s policies can be stopped. People just need to start going down to see for themselves, to witness, to give aid, to hear stories, and go back home to spread those stories.