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DESIGNING A REFUGEE POLICY

Mexico as Country of First Asylum

People arrived in long lines, tired, sweaty, pale and sick, seeking Don Toño, to ask him for shelter and a little food. Some stayed in stables, others at the foot of the mountains with makeshift tents against the rain: a multicolored array of plastic sheeting was to be seen everywhere; bins containing corn and rice were quickly emptied; there was no longer anything to eat and everywhere there were hungry, underfed people, with malaria, tuberculosis and gastrointestinal disorders. They started to die.

FELIPE SÁNCHEZ MARTÍNEZ, COMAR

For this reason we want you to understand what we refugees have suffered, so that you will do us the favor and tell all that the murder of Guatemalan campesinos continues.

GUATEMALAN REFUGEE, January 1984

The presence of the Guatemalan refugees in Chiapas caused us Mexicans to turn our eyes deeper within Mexico, reminding us that we also have a southern border.

LUIS ORTIZ MONASTERIO, COMAR

Mexico takes pride in its long tradition of accommodating the persecuted and the displaced. In the twentieth century, over two hundred thousand people fleeing persecution sought refuge in Mexico. These included Irish, Turkish Jews, Spanish Republicans, Eastern Europeans, Lebanese, Cubans, Chileans, Argentines, Brazilians, Dominicans, Uruguayans, and Americans.¹ Given this tradition, a long list of intellectuals and political leaders have exiled themselves to Mexico at some point in their careers: José Martí, Leon Trotsky, Pablo Neruda, Rómulo Gallegos, Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Monterroso, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Fidel Castro, Héctor Campora, and Seki Sano. Even César Augusto Sandino and Farabundo Martí, who inspired the Central American revolutionary movements, lived for a period of time in Mexico.²

Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and to a lesser extent Nicaraguans and Hondurans, are the most recent groups to migrate to Mexico. Of these groups, Guatemalans have the longest tradition of migration, especially to the Soconusco region. There they have worked in the cultivation and harvest of coffee beans, sugarcane, bananas, and other fruits. Their labor has been particularly vital to the Mexican economy since the 1960s. As the young men and women of Chiapas have sought employment in higher-paying industries, the Guatemalans have provided the labor critical to the region's agricultural industry: an estimated twenty thousand to a hundred thousand seasonal workers in Mexico each year.³ Until the 1990s, illegal immigration was tolerated and even encouraged, to maintain an abundant pool of lowwage labor. The border was fluid, and trade, commerce, and family ties extended across national boundaries. Given these connections, Mexico was a logical destination for the thousands of Maya and ladino refugees fleeing Guatemala during the 1980s: it was culturally and geographically accessible, offered safety and economic opportunity, and was close enough to Guatemala to facilitate a quick return once conditions in the homeland improved. These were the same factors that made Mexico an appealing choice for Salvadorans and other Central Americans during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Central Americans were distinct from other twentieth-century immigrants to Mexico simply because of their greater numbers: over two hundred thousand Guatemalans and half a million Salvadorans were believed to be living in Mexico by 1990.With the exception of a few hundred Guatemalan intellectuals who received asylum following the 1954 coup, the majority of Guatemalans who migrated to Mexico were Maya campesinos. It was a young population—63 percent were under the age of twenty—and fewer than a quarter of them spoke Spanish.⁴ Because of the Guatemalan army's “scorched earth” policies, many arrived in Mexico malnourished, suffering from a variety of diseases and psychological trauma.⁵ They settled largely in southern Mexico, especially in the state of Chiapas. The Salvadorans, in turn, were disproportionately young, single males from large towns and cities, who preferred to look for wage-earning opportunities in Mexico's largest cities. Like the Guatemalans, they viewed themselves as temporary residents who hoped to return one day to their homelands, but because of Mexico's restrictive policies, the Salvadorans were more likely to seek refuge further north, in the United States or Canada.

The Central American migration provided Mexico with one of its greatest challenges. For the first time in its history, it was forced into the role of country of first asylum for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing repressive conditions. Like Honduras, Mexico was not a signatory to the UN Convention and Protocol, and thus not bound to accept the Central Americans. It was a signatory to two regional conventions—the 1954 Convention on Territorial Asylum and the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights (or San José Pact)—but neither convention legally bound Mexico to accept refugees. The San José Pact did recognize the principle of nonrefoulement if the refugee's personal liberty was in danger for reasons of race, nationality, religion, social conditions, or political opinions. It was the American Convention on Human Rights that Mexico theoretically violated when it deported thousands of Central Americans in the early 1980s.⁶ However, government officials skirted the issue when they argued that the deportees were economic immigrants who had entered the country illegally, and thus were not protected under regional conventions.⁷

Nor did the Mexican Constitution offer a legal mechanism for granting refugee status. Mexican legislation only recognized the category of “persons granted asylum,” but asylum was rarely granted—and then only to those who applied from outside the country and could demonstrate that they had been persecuted strictly for political reasons. None of the other UN categories—persecution based on race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group—qualified an applicant for asylum as they did in other countries. In the early 1980s, only one hundred Central Americans were granted the FM-10 visa (asylee), but none were granted this status from 1986 to 1990.⁸ An endorsement from the UNHCR (or any other international NGO) did not automatically secure recognition and protection. In 1982, for example, the UNHCR recommended 242 Central Americans for asylum, using Mexico's stricter criteria; of these the Secretaría de Gobernación (Secretariat of the Interior) allowed only 73 to legalize their status, and then mostly through the nonimmigrant FM-3 (visitor visa) or the FM-9 (student visa). Nor did Mexico's support for the Contadora peace proposal and the Declaration of Cartagena, which recommended adherence to the UN Convention and Protocol as a means of addressing the problems of refugees and displaced persons, lead to remedial legislation. However, despite Mexico's exclusionary policies, it accommodated one of the largest numbers of UNHCR-recognized refugees.⁹

It was the Central American refugee crisis—the questions it raised at all levels of society, as well as the pressure directed against the government by the church, the NGOs, and the news media—that forced Mexico's reexamination of its role as a country of safe haven. For decades, the United States—Mexico border and out-migration to the United States had dominated all national discussions of migratory issues. Bilateral diplomatic and trade negotiations always inserted some discussion of work visas, illegal immigrants, detention and deportation policies, and/or border control. However, the Central American refugee crisis—and specifically, the criticisms directed at Mexico for human rights violations—forced a reexamination of state policies. Mexico's credibility and moral authority in the Central American peace initiatives, as well as in migratory issues related to its northern boundary, became dependent on its response to the migration across its southern border.

REFUGEES, “BORDER VISITORS,” OR ILLEGAL ALIENS?

The first group of Central Americans to arrive in Mexico during the 1970s, albeit in comparatively small numbers, was the Nicaraguans fleeing the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista war. Most of those who comprised this first wave returned to their homeland. A second wave arrived after 1979, fleeing Sandinista policies and the Contra war, but like their predecessors they received no official recognition or assistance from the Mexican government. Most sources claim that they were simply transiting through Mexico on their way to the United States. By 1990, however, a few thousand Nicaraguans were believed to be living and working without documentation in Mexico, particularly in Mexico City, relying on church groups and their networks of family and friends for assistance.¹⁰

According to UNHCR sources, the Guatemalan refugee migration to Mexico began in 1980. The refugees were mostly Maya Indians, especially Kanjobal, Chuj, Jacalteca, and Mam. They came from the heavily populated departments of El Quiché and Huehuetenango, but also from Petén, San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Totonicapan, Solola, Chimaltenango, Alta Verapaz, and Baja Verapaz. These departments were regarded by the government as the seat of the guerrilla movement, and thus targeted by the counterinsurgency campaign. It was a communal migration: the surviving members of families and communities migrated and settled together just across the six-hundred-mile Guatemala-Mexico border.¹¹

During the first months, it was not uncommon for Guatemalan refugees to travel back and forth from their Mexican settlements to their villages (or what remained of them) to determine if it was safe to return to their homeland. But by 1982 and the escalation of Ríos Montt's counterinsurgency campaign, such trips became impossible. Instead, out-migration increased dramatically. In July 1982, the first month of Ríos Montt's counterinsurgency campaign, nine thousand families fled to Chiapas. One report estimated that by 1983 thirty-five thousand Guatemalans had taken refuge just across the border of Mexico, with an additional seventy thousand believed to be living deeper within the country. Another report estimated as many as two hundred thousand Guatemalan refugees in Mexico.¹² Most hid in the jungles of Guatemala until it was safe to cross the “armed curtain” of Guatemalan soldiers that by 1982 patrolled the Guatemala-Mexico border. With the support of Mexican villagers and small landholders who gave them tents, food, and clothing, they squatted on ejidos and private lands, creating their own makeshift settlements.

The historical, cultural, and commercial ties between Chiapas and Guatemala made this six-hundred-mile stretch of land an artificial border. Until 1824 Chiapas was Guatemalan territory, and its loss to Mexico wounded Guatemala's national psyche comparably to Mexico's 1848 loss of northern territories to the United States. Indeed, significant comparisons could be made between the two borderlands. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Guatemalans crossed easily into Mexico to work, trade, and intermarry, just as Mexicans crossed easily into the US Southwest. As in the United States, the migrants were either tolerated or deported, depending on economic conditions and pressure from local interest groups. However, Guatemalan migration differed in that it was a largely indigenous migration, and in Chiapas, migrants found a Maya and mestizo population that shared cultural similarities and a land that was not unlike that which they had left behind.¹³ Historically, the border between Guatemala and Mexico was poorly guarded, in part because of diplomatic policy considerations and limited manpower and resources, but also because of pressure from Mexican growers, who depended on this exploitable labor force.

Because of their small numbers, the first refugees from Guatemala were believed to be part of the usual seasonal migration of undocumented agricultural workers. The Roman Catholic clergy and missionaries were among the first to witness their trauma and to recognize and assist them as refugees. As new settlements emerged in Chiapas, creating a type of “refugee zone” along the border, the different state and federal agencies debated policy and what measures constituted an appropriate governmental response. As one Mexican official told the New York Times, “We've never had to face something like this before and it has taken time to adjust.”¹⁴

The refugees technically came under the jurisdiction of the Secretaría de Gobernación and its Servicios Migratorios (Migratory Services). Given the uniqueness of the situation, in July 1980 the López Portillo administration established a new interdepartmental office, the Mexican Committee for Refugee Assistance (COMAR), with a threefold mission: to oversee emergency assistance to the Central American refugees; to provide them with political representation; and to design temporary and long-term projects for employment and self-sufficiency.¹⁵ In theory, COMAR represented and coordinated the interests and policies of the Secretariats of Foreign Relations, Labor and Social Welfare, and the Interior, and consulted with the Secretariat of Defense. In practice, however, each of these secretariats had its own agenda and maintained contradictory policies that were impossible to coordinate.

The Secretaría de Gobernación and Servicios Migratorios took a more hard-line position than COMAR and the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Secretariat of Foreign Relations). Officials in the Secretaría de Gobernación acted on the assumption that the Central Americans were economic migrants, and routinely used the press to accuse the refugees of taking jobs and land away from Mexican citizens. Their position was starkly exemplified by Diana Torres Arcieniega, the director of Servicios Migratorios, who blamed all of Mexico's social problems on the refugees, including the social disintegration, poverty, promiscuity, ignorance, delinquency, and violence in Mexican society.¹⁶ COMAR, on the other hand, acted on the premise that the Central Americans were fleeing repressive conditions and deserved the generosity of the state. Likewise, officials in the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores argued that Mexico had “international responsibilities” and warned of the foreign policy implications of any official response.¹⁷ During the early 1980s, the hard-line position predominated, in part because of Mexico's economic crisis, which made immigration an unpopular topic. Two thousand refugees were expelled from Mexico in 1981 and thirty-five hundred in 1982, violating the principle of non-refoulement. Refugees suspected of being guerrillas were routinely handed over to Guatemalan authorities.¹⁸ By 1983, COMAR had been subsumed into the Secretaría de Gobernación, theoretically to better coordinate assistance to the refugees, but also to control any dissident voices that challenged official government policy.

The Mexican government initially resisted any involvement from the UNHCR and other international NGOs, citing its sovereign right to resolve its own domestic affairs. Financial pressures forced a reevaluation of this position, and in 1981, a cooperative agreement was signed stating that aid programs would be designed and financed with the assistance of the UNHCR but coordinated and channeled through COMAR.¹⁹ Soon after, the UNHCR established an official representation in Mexico City. Over the next decade, the UNHCR provided millions of dollars in aid (e.g. food, construction materials, housing supplies, educational materials, and salaries for refugee assistance personnel) to the Guatemalan refugees in Chiapas, and assisted Central Americans dispersed throughout the country, albeit indirectly, by assisting the Mexican NGOs that provided them assistance in rural and urban areas.²⁰ But the UNHCR was careful not to speak against state policies, or challenge the government in any way, or sabotage the agency's already precarious position.

Mexico agreed to accept Guatemalans as long as they were approved and registered by COMAR, and remained in government-supervised camps and settlements in Chiapas. Those who did so were granted ninetyday renewable visas, the FM-8, which offered them the temporary, nonimmigrant status of “border visitor.” Under the terms of their negotiations, if the Guatemalans traveled beyond the 150-kilometer refugee zone, they received no official status and forfeited their rights to protection.²¹ Central Americans outside Chiapas who contacted the UNHCR for assistance in securing asylum were interviewed and evaluated according to Mexico's stricter criteria, but Mexican authorities ultimately made the final determination, and these decisions were highly subjective. Although the news media and church and NGO representatives commonly referred to the Guatemalans as refugees, Mexico did not have the legal mechanism by which to grant this official status. And despite the continual arrival of refugees each week, the administrations of José López Portillo and his successor, Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), resisted drafting new refugee or asylum legislation or signing the UN Convention and Protocol, arguing that the Mexican Constitution offered its “border visitors” sufficient rights and guarantees. Ironically, since the word refugee did not appear in Mexican law, Mexico officially had no refugees within its borders, only “border visitors” and “agricultural workers.”²² And since there were no refugees, these border visitors had little chance of regularizing their status and becoming permanent residents.

The one issue in which the UNHCR seems to have exerted the most influence during these early years concerned a proposed relocation to third countries. The UNHCR opposed such a policy, except when a refugee specifically requested it, because it made the eventual repatriation of the refugees difficult, if not impossible. Given the uniqueness of the Maya refugees—many of whom did not even identify themselves as members of a nation-state—the Mexican government agreed that it was in their interests to temporarily accommodate them in familiar surroundings until they were able to return to their ancestral lands. As one COMAR director stated, “I believe that receiving and protecting indigenous groups has, and will have, enormous historical significance for Mexico and Central America.”²³ During the 1980s, the UNHCR relocated a few thousand Central Americans to third countries such as Canada and Australia, but only those that requested the transfer.²⁴

By 1984, ninety-two camps and settlements housed forty-six thousand refugees in Chiapas. Access to the camps was restricted: armed agents of Servicios Migratorios patrolled each camp, and only church and UNHCR representatives were granted permission to enter the areas.²⁵ The Mexican government restricted the involvement of other NGOs in the camps, claiming that assistance was adequately provided by the UNHCR and COMAR. Maintaining national sovereignty was an equally important consideration, as was buffering the government from international criticism. “In Mexico we are not accepting either direct or bilateral assistance from another government or from the NGOs,” said COMAR coordinator Oscar González. “[The NGOs] wish to maintain a physical presence in the areas where refugees are assisted, and there's no reason for that. We function in a totally open manner and with an infrastructure that adequately allows the Mexican state to deal with the situation.”²⁶

The camps and settlements were located in three principal areas: the first area extended from Tapachula to Comalapa; the second included the municipalities of La Trinitaria, Las Margaritas, and Independencia; and the third area, the most populous, consisted of the municipality of Ocosingo.²⁷ The settlements in Las Margaritas and the Lancandón jungle were the most difficult to assist because of their geographic isolation. Aid was flown in by single-engine plane or transported by canoe, jeep, or pack mules. Conditions in all the settlements and camps were poor, reflecting the general poverty of Chiapas, the UNHCR's stretched budget, and to some extent, government policy. Refugee assistance personnel accused the Mexican government of deliberately making conditions as disagreeable as possible in order to discourage further migration. They also accused some COMAR officials of corruption, charging that UNHCR aid, especially food, was not reaching its intended destination (a charge that eventually contributed to a restructuring of the organization in 1983).²⁸ Clearly, domestic policy considerations played some role in the amount of aid that was directed to the camps. Government officials wished to prevent the resentment and conflict that would inevitably follow if refugee aid exceeded the amount of social services available to the local population in Mexico's poorest state.²⁹ At the same time, the government viewed repatriation as the long-term goal of refugee assistance, and thus little emphasis was given to projects that offered “durable solutions” or opportunities for long-term integration into Mexican society. Whatever the government's rationale, UNHCR personnel learned not to challenge the Mexican government. When Pierre Jambor, the UNHCR representative in Mexico, was viewed as too interfering, Mexico filed an official complaint with the UNHCR and soon after Jambor was replaced.

The refugees provided aid workers with a number of challenges. They arrived malnourished and with a host of gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses. Infant mortality was estimated at two hundred deaths per thousand live births. Doctors, nurses, and midwives from regional clinics and hospitals volunteered and found a population in dire need of health care but distrustful of state-sponsored medicine. In order to halt the spread of disease, aid workers worked around the clock to build wells, sewers, and latrines in settlements that seemed to spring up virtually overnight.³⁰

Refugees were directed to government-run camps, but COMAR also allowed refugees to establish their own settlements, usually consisting of individuals from the same village or language group, in order to encourage the survival of communities and traditional forms of self-government. Residents were allowed to play a role in planning and organizing schools, health care, and cultural and recreational activities.³¹ However, the camps and settlements offered few opportunities for wage-earning labor, land cultivation, or vocational training. The refugees did not qualify for work permits, but in some areas local authorities allowed them to engage in wageearning agricultural work, which unfortunately also exposed them to exploitation.³² The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas reported that over the years the generosity demonstrated by the local Mexican population began to wane, and some ejidatarios (members of cooperatives) began to treat the refugees as servants and peones, punishing them by withholding wages.³³ Not surprisingly, the majority of Guatemalans who arrived in Mexico preferred to remain outside the government's reach, relying instead on their own networks for survival.³⁴

The refugees also presented the Mexican government with one of its most serious diplomatic challenges of the late twentieth century. The governments of Romeo Lucas García and later Efraín Ríos Montt and Oscar Mejía Víctores claimed that guerrillas used the refugee camps and settlements to channel weapons, food, and medicine to their compatriots-inarms. The Guatemalan government demanded that Mexico repatriate the refugees, or at the very least relocate them further away from the border zone. When the Mexican government failed to act decisively either way, the Guatemalan army expanded its counterinsurgency campaign into Mexico. From 1982 to 1984, the counterinsurgency units, known as the kaibiles, crossed the border to kidnap, interrogate, and murder alleged guerrillas and their supporters, and Guatemalan planes and helicopters strafed or bombed refugee camps and settlements to intimidate the population.³⁵ From May 1980 to May 1983, the Guatemalan army conducted sixty-eight incursions into Mexican territory: nine Guatemalan refugees and seven Mexican farm workers were killed; twenty Guatemalans kidnapped; and seven detained, beaten, and/or tortured.³⁶ However, the casualties were underreported, the Diocese of San Cristóbal claimed, because of the isolation of the refugee settlements and the Mexican government's militarization of Chiapas, which restricted access to the camps and to information. The raids occurred regularly along the border and sometimes several miles into Mexican territory, terrorizing the refugees and the local population, and forcing thousands to flee into the jungles or further inward.³⁷

The Guatemalan army was assisted in its actions by Mexican allies, some of them on the government payroll. In 1982, for example, in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chiapas, the local director of Servicios Migratorios, César Morales, unilaterally decided to continue deporting Guatemalans en masse, whether or not they had protected status. Gobernación eventually transferred Morales out of the area but only after COMAR officials threatened to withdraw.³⁸ Refugees were often detained and starved and tortured while interrogated.³⁹ Soldiers, lawyers and prosecutors, and local police and security guards were implicated in these actions.⁴⁰ Local caciques (power brokers), many of them wealthy ranchers and growers, also conducted their own immigration policy. Fearing the impact leftist guerrillas might have on Chiapas's politics and economy, they funded their own paramilitary groups, popularly referred to as the Guardias Blancas (White Guards), to safeguard their interests. The Guardias kidnapped and murdered refugees, clergy, and aid workers suspected of guerrilla sympathies.⁴¹ In March 1982, for example, the Reverend Hipólito Cervantes Arceo, the parish priest of Mapastepec, was found murdered, both thumbs tied behind his back and his head beaten in with a church statue.⁴² Local government officials claimed that he had been a victim of robbery, but residents and church officials blamed the paramilitaries as well as the government that gave them carte blanche to operate. Over the next few years, dozens of clergy, nuns, and aid workers were threatened, kidnapped, and assaulted. In June 1984, for example, Mexican police kidnapped three aid workers from the Puerto Rico camp, a doctor and two nuns, and transported them to secret locations, where they were bound, blindfolded, and interrogated at length on their—and the church's—suspected ties to guerrillas.⁴³

The Mexican government clearly feared the role the refugees might play in destabilizing the state of Chiapas, which in spite of its poverty was of strategic importance to Mexico's long-term development programs. Chiapas was the agricultural heartland of southern Mexico, producing coffee, corn, cacao, tobacco, sugar, fruit, vegetables, and honey for export. It was also a key state for the nation's petrochemical and hydroelectric industries. By 1990, 82 percent of PEMEX's petrochemical plants were located in southeastern Mexico; and 21 percent of Mexico's oil and 47 percent of its natural gas were extracted in the Chiapas-Tabasco region.⁴⁴ Fifty-five percent of the nation's hydroelectric energy and 20 percent of its electricity were produced in Chiapas. Corporations made enormous profits from the land and the labor, but contrary to the federal government's assurances, the wealth did not “trickle down” to the municipalities. In 1990, two-thirds of Chiapas's 3.5 million residents did not have sewage service, and half did not have potable water. Despite its energy production, only a third of the homes in the state had electricity. More than half of the schools in the state offered only a third-grade education, and seventy-two out of every hundred children dropped out of school by the first grade. There were more hotel rooms for tourists than hospital beds for the local population (seven hotel rooms per thousand tourists versus 0.2 hospital beds for every thousand inhabitants). Each year during the 1980s over fourteen thousand people died—most of them from curable diseases such as malaria, dengue, measles, and gastroenteritis—who could have been treated if there had been more doctors, clinics and hospitals, and paved roads to facilitate transportation.⁴⁵

The indigenous people, numbering over half a million, were overrepresented in the poverty rolls in Chiapas. A 1983 study by National Bank of Mexico warned that the continued exploitation of the indigenous peoples would potentially lead to rebellion. As recent Central American history suggested, the unequal distribution of power and economic resources made Chiapas receptive soil for revolutionary movements—or so the elites feared. Its geographic proximity to the centers of revolution in Central America, and its large and historically exploited population, who saw in the refugees a mirror image of their own experience, contributed to Chiapas's potentially volatile state. (Not surprisingly, when the Zapatista rebellion began in Chiapas on January 1,1994, demanding a variety of legal reforms, local officials initially blamed the insurrection on Central American leftists in the refugee population.)⁴⁶ Mexican journalists reported on the unequal power relationships as they played out in land and labor struggles involving the actions of big landowners, the corruption of agrarian officials, and the delays in implementing agrarian reform. Often these articles were juxtaposed with reportage on the wars in Central America as if warning the Mexican population of their fate.⁴⁷

The federal and state governments, corporate interests, and local elites took a keen interest in containing the spread of revolutionary ideas, and in so doing, trumped Mexico's own revolutionary heritage. Indeed, Mexico's 1917 Constitution, regarded as a model in Latin America, enumerated social and economic guarantees and protections that were not extended to the refugee population. The government contained the refugees' influence physically, in state-monitored and geographically isolated refugee camps and settlements, but also symbolically, through intimidation and the threat of violence and deportation. In order to protect its international reputation, the Mexican government discouraged international observers from visiting the camps and settlements.⁴⁸ Army barricades were a common sight on the major roads and highways in Chiapas, and those few who were allowed entry to the refugee camps faced yet other discouragements, namely, the remoteness and inaccessibility of many of them. The limited information that came out of the region during the 1980s came largely from the Roman Catholic Dioceses of San Cristóbal de las Casas and Tapachula, which publicized the refugees' cause and provided the few journalists with contacts and information.

In 1983, the government assumed a more aggressive immigration policy. Under the direction of Mario Vallejo, who at one point headed both Servicios Migratorios and COMAR, more than a hundred additional immigration agents were sent to Chiapas to assist in the roundup of illegal Central Americans.⁴⁹ The requirements for tourist visas were also stiffened. As further sign of the government's concerns about Chiapas, the de la Madrid administration announced a new “development” program, Plan Chiapas: to construct new roads, ports, and a major airport and theoretically to increase production and trade, as well as opportunities for wage-earning labor and upward mobility. However, for many campesinos, who had never benefited from such programs in the past, development programs were simply another pretence of redressing exploitation. Not surprisingly, by the time the Zapatistas launched their war against the Mexican government ten years later, Plan Chiapas had failed to significantly change any of the socioeconomic indicators.

The administrations of José López Portillo and Miguel de la Madrid were pressured by a wide range of domestic groups each arguing for a specific policy response. In favor of limiting the number of refugees were the conservative news media (e.g., Televisa, Impacto, El Heraldo, Summa, Ovaciones); the major rival opposition party (Partido de Acción Nacional); and ranchers and growers in Chiapas, who increasingly associated the refugees with the Mexican campesinos' land reclamation efforts and the challenges to their authority. More than a few editorialists explored the destabilizing long-term influence the new immigrants might have on Mexican society. One editorial compared the Guatemalan migration to the colonization efforts of North American immigrants in Texas in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ Also supporting immigration restriction was the Reagan administration, which feared not only the expansion of revolution into Mexico but also the Central American transmigration through Mexico to the United States.

Defending refugee rights, in turn, were the more liberal sectors of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas (the fourth oldest diocese in Mexico) and its bishop, Samuel Ruiz García. “Solidarity committees” such as the Movimiento Mexicano de Solidaridad con el Pueblo de Guatemala and the Comité Mexicano de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Salvadoreño emerged to lobby on behalf of the refugees. Four of Mexico's political parties made pronouncements in defense of refugee rights;⁵¹ and the moderate-to-liberal press, especially Mexico City's La Jornada, published sympathetic articles and editorials reminding the government of its international responsibilities.⁵²

Given the Mexican government's critiques of right-wing regimes, many found its reserve toward Guatemala surprising, especially in light of the incursions into Mexican territory and attacks on Mexican citizens. However, policy was tempered by the reality of a six-hundred-mile shared border: any diplomatic or military response would have domestic consequences. A military response would also compromise Mexico's leadership role in the regional peace initiatives. A diplomatic solution was made particularly difficult by Guatemala's long-standing grievances about territorial boundaries, trade, commerce, and labor.⁵³ One editorial in the Mexican press warned:

We need to be courteous and even affectionate with our brothers to the south, but we must also treat them with kid gloves. We must support them in all reasonable causes in the international arena. We must give them preferential treatment so they can sell the few surplus products that we need here. We must facilitate the entrance of their tourists and their students so that they can continue to educate themselves here. But we should not invest in Central America, and above all we should not try to influence their internal affairs. We should follow the precept that we so readily proclaim: nonintervention.⁵⁴

At first, Mexican officials avoided any public condemnation of Guatemala. When asked to comment on the border raids, for example, Luis Ortiz Monasterio, the director of COMAR (1981-1983), simply noted, “We have established a causal relationship between reports of burnings of and attacks on villages and the arrival of refugees in Mexican territory.”⁵⁵ Likewise, the government's failure to draft new legislation to offer the Guatemalans refugee status or asylum was an attempt to remain neutral, because such refugee assistance would be interpreted as a condemnation of the Guatemalan state. Protests were largely symbolic. Twice López Portillo canceled goodwill trips to Guatemala (one of the trips after threats of assassination by ultra-right-wing groups in Guatemala), which the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores called “postponements” to allow for the possibility of renewed diplomacy.⁵⁶ And in 1982, Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda de la Rosa delivered seven official protests to the Guatemalan ambassador in Mexico City. In his fifth “state of the union” address, López Portillo commented on Mexican foreign policy, especially with regard to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, and a number of other countries, but conspicuously absent from his speech was any reference to the troubles with Guatemala.⁵⁷

Officials in the Secretarías de Defensa and Gobernación sent equally mixed messages. At the same time that COMAR was establishing dozens of camps and settlements, Servicios Migratorios increased its deportation of undocumented Guatemalans, deporting between 250 to 1,000 each week via Talismán and Ciudad Hidalgo.⁵⁸ Under pressure from the governor of Chiapas, the Mexican army increased its helicopter surveillance of the region, but this offered the refugees and local population little protection or assurance.⁵⁹ Indeed, there was growing evidence that the Secretaría de Defensa was assisting the Guatemalan government in its hunt for subversives. In 1982, Guatemala's defense minister, General Oscar Mejía Víctores (who several months later replaced Ríos Montt), was invited to observe the Independence Day military parade, a gesture that supporters interpreted as cautious goodwill diplomacy and critics interpreted as complicity.⁶⁰

In June 1983, partly in response to US pressure to improve its human rights record, the Guatemalan government announced an amnesty program and initiated a campaign to convince the refugees to return to Guatemala. Guatemalan radio stations broadcast news of the amnesty across the border, while the Guatemalan consul in Comitán broadcast his own messages on Mexican radio stations, assuring refugees that their safety would be guaranteed by the International Red Cross. Members of the Guatemalan civil patrols and missionaries of the fundamentalist sect Gospel Outreach (to which General Ríos Montt belonged) entered the camps and settlements to persuade the refugees to return home. However, there was no cessation of violence that might have persuaded the refugees to return. The kaibiles continued to intimidate, raid, and bomb on both sides of the border;⁶¹ and Ríos Montt himself warned that if the refugees did not take advantage of the amnesty program, the state would “come in and get them.” Not surprisingly, the campaign failed to convince any sizable number of refugees that Guatemala's “model villages” provided a safer alternative.

By 1984 COMAR publicly advocated that the government relocate the refugees to other parts of Mexico as a means of protecting them from continued attacks. The Dioceses of San Cristóbal and Tapachula and Mexican campesino organizations also supported the idea of relocation, but only if the refugees accepted the idea, and only to other parts of Chiapas, more distant from the border. Relocation to other states, they argued, would undermine cultural identity and community networks of the refugees.⁶² In January 1984, COMAR secured government permission to relocate five thousand refugees from six border camps to the Ixcán camp in Ocosingo, and asked diocesan officials for help. These officials opposed the move on the grounds that the Ixcán population would grow to ten thousand: too large a concentration of people in a small and fairly inaccessible geographic area.⁶³ After months of debate between the different parties, COMAR abandoned this specific plan but continued to press the case for relocation.