Mexican troops kill six migrants hours after President Sheinbaum’s inauguration

Mexican National Guard troops massacred six migrants in the southernmost state of Chiapas on Tuesday, just hours after the inauguration of nominally “leftist” President Claudia Sheinbaum, who replaced her mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Mexican National Guard soldiers suppress a migrant caravan, October 29, 2020 (Photo: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos)

Soldiers rained bullets on a pickup truck carrying 33 migrants. The driver then lost control and the vehicle overturned. Those who died had been shot in the head and back, and ten survivors were injured, some with critical wounds.

Three of the dead were from Egypt, the others from Peru, Honduras and El Salvador. The survivors included migrants from Nepal, Cuba, India and Pakistan.

The Defense Department claims three pickup trucks evaded a checkpoint at high speed at 8:50 p.m., leading to a brief chase. Soldiers then shot at a truck after reportedly hearing “two explosions.” The migrants were unarmed.

The statement said the trucks resembled those used by gangs, but are the types of trucks, with closed cattle pens in the back, that are used to transport both migrants and Mexican workers traveling to farms and other workplaces.

The massacre took place along the Villa Comaltitlán-Huixtla highway that is often used by migrants as they leave the town of Tapachula, which sits on the border with Guatemala.

At a press conference Thursday, Sheinbaum said coolly: “First, this is a deplorable act and must be investigated and punished.” The two soldiers involved were taken into custody, she added.

The only point she emphasized was that the Federal Public Prosecution Service will investigate the case and not leave it in the hands of the military. However, a few hours later, the federal prosecutor released its own statement supporting the military’s story, adding that the soldiers were responding to a call about “armed people,” and that the soldiers not only reported hearing explosions, but ‘that they also heard explosions’. attacked… and therefore repelled the attack, apprehending a green pickup truck while the other two vehicles fled.”

At no point did Sheinbaum question the use of soldiers trained to kill and who have a long record of extrajudicial killings, torture and other human rights abuses for “migrant conflict” and “public security.”

So much for her campaign promises of a human rights-based approach to migration, which has become the first casualty in terms of her credibility.

She has also defended López Obrador’s last major act in office: using the supermajority his coalition won in Congress to pass a constitutional reform that would put the National Guard under the control of the army and the ministry of Defense places.

Since his administration created the National Guard in 2019, its main function has been to harass and detain migrants as an extension of the U.S. Border Patrol, working with tens of thousands of troops from other branches of the military and migration officials.

In the first five months of 2024, the Mexican government detained 590,401 migrants and is expected to surpass the record of 782,176 apprehensions in all of 2023.

The government maintains an extensive system of 198 migration checkpoints, 54 permanent migrant detention camps and 348 ‘provisional’ camps. Although initially aimed at migrant workers, this forms the basis for a police state regime aimed at suppressing the coming mass struggles of Mexican workers.

A publication by Guadalupe Chavez, a researcher at the University of Oxford, discusses migration policy under López Obrador and concludes that his government ‘used the northern border as a bargaining chip’. The result is a record of “increased detentions, violence and deaths among migrants.”

Chavez adds:

The INM (National Migration Institute) and the National Guard have been accused of raiding shelters and harassing migrants. In 2023, both sides raided the Border Line Crisis Center, a shelter for women and children in Tijuana. In 2021, the National Guard killed a Cuban migrant after opening fire on a pickup truck carrying migrants. That same year, a Guatemalan migrant was killed by Mexican soldiers at a migrant checkpoint. Migrants in transit face various forms of violence from the INM, National Guard and law enforcement agencies, forcing them to use dangerous routes controlled by criminal organizations.

To this record you could add the 2023 fire at a detention center in Ciudad Juarez, where officials burned alive 40 migrants, and the 2021 Camargo massacre, in which 17 Guatemalan migrants and two Mexicans were targeted by police.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration has declared the US-Mexico border the deadliest in the world, with more than 2,980 deaths since 2014, undoubtedly just a fraction of the real toll.

A massive escalation of the crackdown in Mexico was primarily responsible for halving the number of U.S. Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the southwest border after they reached a historic peak in December 2023. After Biden closed the border to asylum seekers in June, encounters fell by more than 50 percent.

Sheinbaum has said she will work with whoever wins the US presidential election, even as both Democrats and Republicans have made scapegoating of migrants central to their presidential campaigns.

Trump has promised to act as dictator on day one and use the military to round up and deport millions of migrants, including those under humanitarian parole and temporary protected status. His campaign has spread the Hitlerian lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s dogs and cats and that crowds of “noncitizens” are voting in elections. Trump has threatened to impose massive tariffs on cars assembled in Mexico and invade the oppressed neighbor of US imperialism, ostensibly to fight the cartels against the wishes of the Mexican government.

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris responded to the fascist Republican campaign against migrants by visiting the border in Arizona last Friday and vowing to try again to push through what she called “the strongest border security bill,” which would cut funding for the border police increases. , further restricts access to asylum requests and effectively grants the authority to close the border.

The lives of migrant workers, including the millions of Mexican migrants and their families in the United States, are seen as merely a “bargaining chip” for Sheinbaum in negotiating with U.S. imperialism to shift a greater share of profits to the Mexican ruling class let go. the super-exploitation of the working class in Mexico. The threat of a fascist dictatorship in Washington overseeing the mass detention of migrants and worse has not changed Sheinbaum’s course.