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Tag: Guatemala

  • Six People Shot Dead Near Guatemalan Border After Mexican Army Opens Fire On Truck Carrying Migrants Including Indians | world news

    Mexico City: Six migrants are dead after Mexican soldiers opened fire on a fleeing truck near the border with Guatemala, Mexico’s Defense Department said on Wednesday. The department said in a statement that soldiers claimed they heard shots as the trucks and two other vehicles approached their position late on Monday in the southern state of Chiapas, near the town of Huixtla.

    Two soldiers opened fire on the truck, which was carrying migrants from Egypt, Nepal, Cuba, India, Pakistan and at least one other country. Soldiers then approached the truck and found four of the migrants dead, and 12 wounded. Two of the wounded later died of their injuries. There was no immediate information on the condition of the other 10. The department did not say whether the migrants died as a result of army fire, or whether any weapons were found in the truck.

    There were 17 other migrants in the truck who were unharmed. The vehicle was carrying a total of 33 migrants. The area is a common route for smuggling migrants, who are often packed into crowded freight trucks. The department said the two soldiers who opened fire were relieved of duty pending investigations. In Mexico, any incident involving civilians is subject to civilian prosecution, but soldiers can also face military courts martial for those offenses.

    It is not the first time Mexican forces have opened fire on vehicles carrying migrants in the area, which is also the object of turf battles between warring drug cartels. In the same area in 2021, the quasi-military National Guard opened fire on a pickup truck carrying migrants, killing one and wounding four.

    Irineo Mujica, a migrant rights activist who has frequently accompanied caravans of migrants in that area of ​​Chiapas, said he suspected the migrants or their smugglers opened fire. “It is really impossible that these people would have been shooting at the army,” Mujica said.

    “Most of the time, they get through by paying bribes.” If the deaths were the result of army fire, as appears likely, it could prove a major embarrassment for newly-inaugurated President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office on Tuesday. Though the events took place a couple of hours before Sheinbaum formally became president at midnight on Monday, she has followed the lead of former president Andres Manuel López Obrador in giving the armed forces extraordinary powers in law enforcement, state-run companies, airports, trains. and construction projects.

  • Loads of migrants heading to the United States stopped in Guatemala

    A migrant caravan made up of a number of hundred males, girls and kids used to be stopped via government in Guatemala.

    Government mentioned the crowd, who had activate from the Honduran town of San Pedro Sula on Saturday, used to be making an attempt to make its approach throughout Mexico to the United States border, just about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) away.

    The migrants, many from Honduras and Nicaragua, had arrived within the Honduran border the town of Corinto on Saturday afternoon. They then crossed into Guatemala, the place loads of safety staff had been looking forward to them.

    There used to be a violent disagreement with safety officers, all through which stones and different items had been reportedly thrown. Guatemalan police mentioned {that a} dozen officials were injured as they tried to show the crowd again.

    In step with the Guatemalan Migration Institute, discussions on returning the migrants to their house nations have begun.

    “Individuals are being returned, the whole thing so as, humanely,” the institute’s basic director Carlos Emilio Morales mentioned.

    “We’re protective our borders; we’re protective the well being of all Guatemalans,” Morales added.

    Migrants wishing to stay in Guatemala are required to have identity, evidence of vaccination, along side a damaging COVID-19 take a look at.

    A photographer with AFP information company reported seeing other people with out the ones required paperwork being grew to become again to Honduras.

    Searching for a ‘higher lifestyles’

    A Nicaraguan guy referred to as Ovaldo advised AFP that his number one worry used to be “a greater lifestyles for his or her circle of relatives.”

    “There is not any paintings,” Pablo Mendez advised Reuters information company. The Honduran father used to be sporting his 2-year-old daughter in his palms. “Because of this individuals are leaving on this caravan.”

    In January 2021, a far higher caravan numbering a couple of thousand used to be additionally intercepted in Guatemala, forcing many to go back to Honduras.

    The ones in Saturday’s staff mentioned they had been making the laborious adventure to flee poverty and violence and start new lives. Many were sufferers of herbal failures like floods and drought.

    Complaint of US migration coverage

    In September 2021, the Biden management confronted a flood of complaint over its dealing with of the 1000’s of migrants who had accumulated beneath a bridge at Del Rio, on the US-Mexico border.

    Photographs of US border guards on horseback chasing down migrants aggressively to forestall from continuing had been broadly condemned via rights teams.

    On the time, the White Area mentioned what had came about used to be unacceptable and beside the point.

    Later in September 2021, the Biden management introduced that it could elevate its cap to soak up 125,000 refugees and their households beginning in 2022.

    On the other hand, in December, the United States introduced it could be reinstating a contentious Trump-era border program that forces asylum-seekers to attend in Mexico pending US immigration hearings.