Migrants from southern Mexican states are most at risk of 
death and other travesties while trying to cross the US-
Mexico border. A new report by Mexico's National 
Population Council (Conapo) arrived at the conclusion 
after examining data from the 1993-2003 period. According 
to the federal agency, southerners are more prone to cross 
the deadly Sonora-Arizona desert than are northerners. 

While noting an overall increase in crossings along the 
dangerous border corridor, Conapo found that 40 percent of 
the crossers were from the Mexican south, 30 percent from 
the north and 22 percent from the center and other regions 
of Mexico. The US Border Patrol recently reported that 56 
percent of more than 400 migrant deaths last year occurred 
in the border area of Arizona. The data culled by Conapo 
coincides with the years when the US government 
implemented Operation Hold-the-Line and other border 
closure deployments that led illegal crossers to use more 
remote routes. 

Migrants from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and 
Guerrero were most likely to use the Sonora-Arizona route. 
Jorge Santibañez, the president of Tijuana's Colegio de la 
Frontera Norte, argued that southerners are more 
vulnerable than northerners to the border's death traps 
because they lack experience in making illegal crossings. 
According to Conapo, only 17 percent of southerners have 
had a previous migrant experience compared to 42 percent 
of those who come from longtime migrant-expelling states 
like Jalisco or Zacatecas. 

"Traditional migrants have a cousin that returned with a 
broken leg or they  know someone who didn't come back, but 
this isn't the case in the zones that are being 
incorporated into the migrant stream," Santibañez said. 
The immigration expert contended that southern migrants 
are more exposed to dealings with unscrupulous individuals 
in undertaking unsafe desert crossings. 

"Out of the 3,200 kilometers along the border, the parts 
that are barb-wired, protected and highly watched don't 
constitute 100 kilometers," Santibañez said. "The problem 
is that you put migrants in more vulnerable scenarios, 
with less scrupulous human traffickers who charge more 
money and put them at greater risk. Until now, we have 
been mainly reactive and behind the process." 


Source: El Sur/Agencia Reforma, November 30, 2005. 


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