Terror for Mexico's illegal migrants

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TULTITLAN, Mexico -- Migrants from elsewhere in Latin America, considered felons by the government, fear robbery and rape at the hands of corrupt police.

While immigrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence.

Although Mexico demands humane treatment for its citizens who migrate to the United States, regardless of their legal status, Mexico provides few protections for migrants on its own soil.

The level of brutality Central American migrants face in Mexico was apparent Monday, when police conducting a raid for illegal aliens near a rail yard outside Mexico City fatally shot a local man, apparently because his dark skin and work clothes made officers think he was a migrant.

Virginia Sanchez, who lives near the railroad tracks that carry Central Americans north to the U.S. border, said such shootings in Tultitlan are common.

"At night, you hear the gunshots, and it's the [state police] chasing the migrants," she said. "It's not fair to kill these people. It's not fair in the United States, and it's not fair here."

Undocumented Central Americans complain much more about how they are treated by Mexican officials than about authorities on the U.S. side of the border, where aliens may resent being caught but often praise the professionalism of the agents scouring the desert for their trail.

"If you're carrying any money, [Mexicans] take it from you -- federal, state, local police, all of them," said Carlos Lopez, a 28-year-old farmhand from Guatemala crouching in a field near the tracks in Tultitlan, waiting to climb onto a northbound freight train.

Mr. Lopez said he had been shaken down repeatedly in 15 days of traveling through Mexico.

"The soldiers were there as soon as we crossed the river," he said. "They said, 'You can't cross ... unless you leave something for us.'"

Jose Ramos, 18, of El Salvador, said the extortion occurs at every stop in Mexico, until migrants are left penniless and begging for food.

"If you're on a bus, they pull you off and search your pockets, and if you have any money, they keep it and say, 'Get out of here,'" Mr. Ramos said.

Maria Elena Gonzalez, who lives near the tracks, said female migrants often complain about abusive police.

"They force them to strip, supposedly to search them, but the purpose is to sexually abuse them," she said.

Others said they had seen migrants beaten to death by police, their bodies left near the railway tracks to make it look as if they had fallen from a train.

The Mexican government acknowledges that many federal, state and local officials are on the take from the smugglers who move hundreds of thousands of Central Americans north, and that migrants are particularly vulnerable to abuse by corrupt police.

The National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded agency, documented the abuses south of the U.S. border in a December report.

"One of the saddest national failings on immigration issues is the contradiction in demanding that the North respect migrants' rights, which we are not capable of guaranteeing in the South," commission President Jose Luis Soberanes said.

In the United States, mostly Mexican immigrants have staged rallies pressuring Congress to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens rather than making them felons and deputizing police to deport them. The Mexican government has spoken out in support of the immigrants' cause.