There’s a major surge of activity taking place at the Mexican border right now. This is probably not news to anyone, of course. We have been keeping a close eye on the situation since it began to unfold. However, we are going to be talking about a different aspect of the border that is not always considered or discussed.
We are not referring to the American side of the border, we have already talked about that enough lately. This is a story about Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Security officers and immigration agents are deployed at this border regularly, as it functions as a common crossing point.
This is how they work to stop the illegal flow of immigrants that makes its way towards our country. The Associated Press has some reports that are very alarming, however. Apparently, Guatemalan merchants who will typically purchase their desired goods in bulk when they travel to Mexico are being harassed at this border. Some are still allowed to cross, as long as they leave their paperwork with the agents.
They are allowed to collect the paperwork once the border is crossed. Other merchants are not even being given the benefit of the doubt at the moment. Let’s take a closer look at what the Associated Press has to say about the current situation.
“The Mexican government has interrupted the usually free-flowing cross-river traffic here before, infuriating merchants on both sides. In recent years, as migrant caravans arrived in Tecun Uman, Mexican troops lined the Mexican side of the Suchiate and largely stopped the raft traffic.
The last time was in January 2020 when hundreds of soldiers blocked large groups of migrants trying to cross.
This time there is no large migrant presence across the river, but Mexico is again under pressure to slow the flow of migrants north as the U.S. government wrestles with growing numbers, especially of families and unaccompanied minors.
Many of those, however, are believed to be traveling with smugglers who can simply choose among the hundreds of unmonitored crossing points on Mexico’s long jungle borders with Guatemala and Belize,” reads the AP report. This begs a very important question: why President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador decide to send in the troops and start cracking down?
According to the linked report, Mexico has been pressured to slow the spread of migrants but no one mentions where the pressure is coming from. Trump was the sort of president who was always ready to lay their cards on the table. Biden is not. He’s the type of president who would rather play his cards close to the vest.
In some instances, this is fine. In cases like this one? It’s not nearly as preferable. The situation at the border gets cloudier and cloudier by the day, as Biden fights to make himself look like the most progressive president possible. It’s an awful, tragic occurrence that was entirely avoidable. All Biden had to do was avoid the urge to give the “all clear!” for migrants to start rushing the borders.
He couldn’t avoid that simple temptation and now multiple countries are going to suffer because of it. Biden backed out of the deal that Trump had in place with Mexico but he didn’t come up with a viable replacement for it. These are common sense mistakes that are entirely avoidable. That’s probably the most frustrating aspect of this whole thing. It could have been so much more simple than it has been.
There’s another obvious ploy happening here. The United States has recently decided to fork over 2.5 million vaccines to our southern neighbors. All of a sudden, they are taking great interest in their borders. If we had to guess? Biden put the call in and now Mexico is taking more responsibility for what takes place on their side of the border. As for President AMLO, he gets to look like a master negotiator. It’s a win/win for both men, sadly enough.
