Mexico’s Migrant Crisis: Dozens Vanish Along Cartel-Controlled Routes in Chiapas
Mexico’s Migrant Crisis: For migrants, Mexico is no longer a transit country, but a destination. Many settle in one of its cities, others disappear into the clutches of drug traffickers, and many more die on the journey to Mexico City or another city in their attempt to reach the border with the United States.
There is a town in Chiapas, San José El Hueyate, that has become known for the dozens of missing persons who have announced that town as their last destination before losing contact with their families.
In this town, the entrance is also the exit. Along the roadside, sometimes a lone house, sometimes many unplanted fields. The town begins where a few houses cluster together. In one of its first palapas, facing the sea, Cindy Bueso was with her baby, Daniel, and Valentina, her three-year-old daughter, on October 21, 2024. From here, this young Honduran woman said goodbye to her mother and boarded a boat with a group bound for Oaxaca. They were never heard from again.
Further down the street, near a tortilla shop, in a fenced-off area, stands an unfinished concrete structure with bars on the windows. It’s the most hidden building on the block. Jorge Lozada, Elianis Morejón, Meiling Bravo, Samei Reyes, Lorena Rosabal, Dayranis Tan, Ricardo Hernández, Jefferson Quindil, and Karla, along with dozens of other people, stayed there for a couple of days. They split into two boats and on December 21, 2024, set sail for the ocean. Their trail ends at a point near the shore.
The group of 23 migrants who left by boat from a little further south, from Puerto Madero, with the same destination, also never reached Oaxaca. They vanished on September 5, leaving behind only a final farewell video. In the last four months of 2024, at the height of the migration crisis in Mexico, in the final throes before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, at least 83 migrants disappeared. A year later, only their families are searching for them.
Mexico’s southern border was long a land of misery. Thousands of those dreaming of a new life in the United States arrived in Chiapas, the poorest state in the country.
They crossed on foot and in hopeful caravans. But in 2020, the door closed, and they were trapped between the cruelty of immigration enforcement operations and the hardships of seeking asylum in Tapachula, a city that is both a trap and a home. This precarious and unequal city of some 350,000 inhabitants has never had the necessary infrastructure to provide work or decent living conditions for those who ended up sleeping, sick and hungry, in its parks and on street corners. Yet, even then, the terror remained far from here.
The owners of the palapas remember when “the mafia” hadn’t yet wreaked havoc. It seems remote, improbable, but until 2022, the Sinaloa Cartel’s total control of the state had made it one of the safest in the country. The split within the group and the offensive by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel turned this border into a minefield. The criminals wanted it all. “And migrants were a gold mine,” summarizes a worker from a humanitarian organization.
Illegal trafficking always happened. One family had a taxi and used it to pick up migrants heading north; they had a boat and took them ahead by sea. “There are many families here who got rich that way,” acknowledges Israel Hernández, municipal delegate of Puerto Madero, the closest coastal town to Tapachula. It was an illicit, but artisanal, operation. One of the biggest dangers of these attempts was shipwrecks, and another was arrest.
Currently, the destination is uncertain; the whereabouts and fate of most migrants who have passed through those lands are unknown.
