Let’s make our radical hospitality with the #CaravanaMigrante

BY MMMESOAMERICANO
October 30 ,2018

Translated by: Building Bridges – Human Rights Vancouver

Mesoamerican Migrant Movement

RELEASE

Mexico City, October 19, 2018.- The Migrant Caravan travelling from Honduras to where they can find a livable life crossed the southern Mexican border. It is estimated that about 7 thousand migrants are collectively walking towards a place where hope can settle.

The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement calls upon the population residing in Mexico, the people of Mexico, intellectuals, artists, academics, activists, trade unions, civil organizations, and above all to the neighbours along the routes that the caravaneers travel in their transit through Mexico to express their active solidarity.

We invite everyone to #CaminarConLaCaravana [WalkWithTheCaravan], to accompany and embrace this caravan with our own bodies and resources, walking along these 4 thousand migrants, opening the doors of our neighbourhoods, making our radical hospitality visible by placing welcome signs, guiding directions, food, water, whatever each neighbourhood and / or community can provide.

In addition to the legal and political battles already lead by the pro-migrant network of organizations in Mexico, it is vital as migrant people we are, that we show our support to those who are travelling with children in their arms, fleeing from state and private violence and from the economic violence of neoliberalism.

We can not help comparing this exodus, with the almost coinciding CARAVAN OF CENTRAL AMERICAN MOTHERS who are looking for their missing children in transit through Mexico which begins this October 23, and ask us the painful question of how many of the thousands who crossed today will feed the scandalous census of the invisible disappeared.

The collective demands of these organizations are compelling:

Unrestricted respect to the freedom of movement of this caravan

Guarantee for the human rights of its members

That the best interest of the child are put ahead of any law or immigration rule

That real, face-to-face and quality attention be guaranteed by COMAR [Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance] agents

That our borders be demilitarized, because we are opposed to the use of our taxes (many of which come from remittances from our relatives in the US) to finance the strategy of Total War against migrants that the government of Donald Trump has been deploying.