22/02/2021
COW HEAD POLICE KILLS DREAMS OF MIGRANTS IN TAMAULIPAS
(PHOTO: HECTOR GUERRERO | VIDEO: EPV).
Taken from the newspaper EL PAIS, DE ESPAÑA ...
To pay for their daughter's trip to Florida, where a friend of the family was waiting for her, Don Ricardo and his wife, Olga Pérez, had requested a loan that they guaranteed with the deeds of their house, a house with adobe walls, a roof of sheet and soil of earth at the top of a hill. They also gave the title to the four ropes of land that surrounds it - the equivalent of two soccer fields - where they grow the corn that the family feeds on.
With the 25,000 quetzals they raised (about $ 3,200, 2,650 euros), the couple was able to pay an advance to the coyote and buy Santa Cristina clothes, shoes and a new mobile for the road. The money they gave the guide was not even a quarter of the 110,000 quetzals that he asked for the journey (more than $ 14,000). But they believed that once her daughter arrived in the United States, she could pay the debts, just as migrants who have left their community for the north have done for decades.
On January 12, when she said goodbye to her mother and her 10 siblings, the young woman was calm. She was smiling. For months, she persevering as she was she, she had insisted on her parents to support her financially with that trip. Before leaving the room with four beds in which the whole family sleeps, Santa Cristina said that she did not want tears and promised that, as soon as she arrived in the United States, things would change for everyone. Her plan was to work by day to pay off the debt, and by night to operate on the cleft lip of the youngest of her sisters — Angela, one year and four months old; and to intervene with her father, who suffers from eye problems. Furthermore, she wanted her family to have access to a better home.
Her father accompanied her to the center of Comitancillo, where she was going to begin the trip. “I am not going to die. I'm going to work, ”she reassured her when they said goodbye. "His last words from her were:‘ If the Saint comes to the United States, your life will change, ’" remembers Don Ricardo. At the coyote's house, Santa Cristina met with the rest of the group that headed to Mexico the next day. Among them were his cousin Marco Antulio, a 16-year-old adolescent who was the eldest of nine siblings, and his neighbor Iván Gudiel, 22, recently married with an eight-month-old son, who dreamed of being able to send money to his mother for diabetes to be treated.
Also in the group was Marvin Tomás, known as El Zurdo, a promising left back from the local team Juventud Comiteca, from the Guatemalan third division. At 22 he was studying at the university on weekends and was the economic pillar of his family. He also wanted to build a better home for them and ensure that his mother, who had become a widow shortly before he was born, could have surgery for the hernia that she has suffered for more than ten years. But with wages of 50 quetzales a day (less than $ 6.5) for working in the fields or with what he earned in temporary jobs as a bricklayer, he only had enough to live a day.
Like them, the majority of those who joined the trip were under 25 years old - some were even minors -, came from large families and fled from the lack of opportunities in Comitancillo, a municipality (of about 60,000 inhabitants and to which Tuilelén belongs) where almost 90% of the population lives in poverty and more than 26% in extreme poverty. About 20% of its inhabitants have emigrated to the United States, a country that has become a kind of emergency exit for millions of Central Americans since the 1980s due to the violence and political and economic instability in the region. Currently, it is estimated that there are more than 3.5 million citizens of that origin in the United States.
Interview with the relatives of the murdered migrants Marvin Tomás and Santa Cristina García.
The origin of the migrants who were murdered in Tamaulipas was not different from that of thousands of Guatemalans who undertake the same journey every year. If they had not been the victims of a massacre, their deaths would have gone unnoticed in the eyes of the world, as their lives often do. Many of the remote villages and hamlets from which the migrants, whose names escape even the omnipresent eye of Google, are accessible only by ATVs or by walking for hours on dusty and steep mountain trails. There, most families survive on what little they produce - mainly potatoes, corn and beans -, raising chickens and turkeys, herding cows and sheep, or what they earn working in the fields or in construction.
The signs of existence of the Guatemalan State are few, contrary to what happens with remittances. Among the traditional adobe houses, one can distinguish the block and cement houses built with the money sent by him.
