Border 102: Casa de la Misericordia, Arriaga

After a five-hour bus ride from Tapachula, Lois, Ryan and I arrived in Arriaga. Juan, a young volunteer from Casa de la Misericordia, greeted us. Right away he took us to the railway in the center of the city, where we got the opportunity to meet with the migrants and talk with them about their journeys. The migrants had been waiting for a train that leaves every three days. For some it was their second or third attempt at reaching the States without luck. Others had been deported and separated from their families in the United States.

After some heavy conversation we turned to a light game of soccer. Players from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador all came together, with a spice of Danish and North American. For those two hours, I forgot what these people were going through. I heard that migrants are categorized as terrorists and criminals, but in these moments I realized that they were just people chasing a dream for a better life as they were chasing soccer balls. Now we were all just playing this game, fighting together to win.

I was the only woman there, but Juan told us that ten percent of the migrants passing through Arriaga are women—women who experience a lot of discrimination, women who are robbed, women who are raped. They go through such an inhuman travel to reach a human life, I thought to myself. The three of us left at the whistle of the train, a whistle that rang loudly to us because we knew what it meant to the migrants.

Later we were invited to speak with Father Heyman Vásquez. He started the albergue two and a half years ago. When the migrants come to the albergue, they often are very tired, hungry and sick because of the long walk from the border. They often spend two to three days at the albergue to recover before they seek the railway at the center of the city and wait for the next train to leave.

The Father has seen a lot of migrants and how they are treated. “Where are human rights?” he asked us. Migrants, he said, can’t really do anything about the corruption and violence of the police. “La situación de los inmigrantes es terrible.” He wishes that the government would spend more money on something to solve this problem, for example, by giving more money to the under-funded Grupo Beta.

From inside the office, we could hear the train give another long, loud whistle. We ran outside to say goodbye, but when we reached the railway the train had already passed and the migrants were on their way to their next stop: Ixtepec, Oaxaca.