We met with Francisco Aceves Verdugo, the director of Grupo Beta in Tapachula. With a thin mustache and his hair slicked back, he told us that Grupo Beta is a branch of the Mexican immigration services. The government started a pilot program in 1990 in Tijuana and moved southward to Tapachula in 1996. They did it to provide migrants with basic human rights protections at both the American and Guatemalan borders —first aid, legal representation, etc.
In the beginning Grupo Beta agents carried weapons and were authorized to arrest traffickers. But there was an inherent conflict between guns and the job of working with migrants. If a criminal comes to a doctor with a wound, it’s not the doctor’s job to judge the crime. It’s her or his job to treat the wound. Grupo Beta is a doctor disposed to a national illness of migration. For the coyotes and drug runners there is always the military, but for migrants there is now Grupo Beta. It can be corrupt, but it is one of the few resources available to migrants.
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