Rise in Mexican cartel violence fuels record migration to US: ‘everyone is fleeing’
- Some 180,000 Mexican migrants crossed the border into the US over the 12 months ending in October, four times more than the previous year
- It is unclear how many of these families will be able to stay legally in the US, as people who flee gangs often do not qualify for asylum
Her daughter’s school shut down, Yomara said, after a shoot-out between rival gangs competing for control of drug and migrant trafficking routes in their southern Mexican town of Chicomuselo.
Then, she said, produce vendors cleared out of the market after they faced demands to affiliate with the gangs; she feared her husband Carlos would be forcibly recruited if he turned up for his job on a construction site.
After the assassination of a prominent local peace activist, Yomara and Carlos, who withheld their full names for security reasons, said they’d had enough, crossing into Arizona with their four-year-old daughter Karla in early November and turning themselves into US border agents.
“It used to be a peaceful town. Now everyone is fleeing,” Yomara, 26, said in an interview in Nogales, Arizona.
Rivalries between organised crime groups in long-violent states and an expansion of these battlegrounds to previously calm parts of the country is fuelling what migration experts are calling the largest exodus of Mexican families in modern history.
Yomara’s hometown in the southern state of Chiapas, once relatively untouched by gang violence, is now the site of a turf war between two of Mexico’s most powerful cartels, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel.
