Featured speaker on April 3 was a ski-masked “Captain Marcos,” presumably the same charismatic spokesman once known as “Subcommander Marcos.” He delivered an exegesis entitled: “A Peephole into the Storm in the World: Nation-States Under Attack” (Una mirilla a la Tormenta en el Mundo: Los Estados-Nación bajo ataque). Marcos portrayed a supra-national imperialism under Donald Trump, in which “the nation-state has no decision-making power.” Marcos decried the “kidnapping” of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, and the US oil blockade on Cuba, especially noting that Mexico has been effectively barred from shipping oil to the Caribbean island nation. He hailed the tenacious resistance of the Cubans and Palestinians.

Marcos asserted that in the US-Israeli war against Iran, the big oil companies are the ones who benefit, as the price of oil has dramatically risen. “That’s what needs to be discussed: who is profiting from these wars?” (La Jornada via Mexico Solidarity Media)

Image: Enlace Zapatista

In southern Mexico, where US and Mexican deterrence policies caused a major humanitarian crisis last year, local residents say crossings from Guatemala to the border state of Chiapas have significantly decreased. At the US southern border, numbers apprehended by US Border Patrol dropped from around 61,500 in January to 11,709 last month. And in the Darién Gap—the treacherous jungle migration route connecting South and Central America—crossings have also decreased dramatically, from 25,111 last September to just 408 in February.

But the stifling effect of Trump policies on the movement of people heading north is creating new challenges. People on the move are now stranded in precarious living conditions across Mexico, more exposed to potential abuses and violence, and deeply affected by the uncertainty of further policy changes ahead.

“Even though the number of people on the move may have fluctuated, we still have thousands of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Mexico who have urgent, unmet needs,” said Michelle Van Akin, associate director for humanitarian programs for Plan International USA.

Trump administration funding cuts to foreign aid have forced a reduction in services and are making it harder for humanitarian organisations to provide assistance, according to Van Akin. “The needs are staggering,” she added.

“The main problem is that migrants are stranded with no information about whether they will be able to apply for asylum [in the US] again or if there will be new norms allowing them to transit to the United States,” said Reinaldo Ortuño, Mexico and Central America medical coordinator at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Mounting needs
About 270,000 people were waiting to get an appointment to seek asylum in the United States through US Customs and Border Protection’s controversial CBP One cellphone application when Trump shut it down on January 20, the day he re-entered office.

People relying on the application for an opportunity to enter the US were left stranded along Mexico’s southern and northern borders, in Mexico City, and in more remote areas with fewer resources. Since it was launched in 2023, nearly one million people had been able to enter the US legally using CBP One. But people often had to wait for extended periods of time, living in precarious and often dangerous conditions before they were able to secure an appointment.

Aid groups say that many asylum seekers—having fled gang violence, political repression, and other crises throughout Latin America and the Caribbean—have not given up on the idea of crossing to the US and are waiting for new opportunities, hoping the policies will change.

In Mexico City, they have been setting up unsafe, makeshift camps, and thousands are also living in dire conditions in northern and southern Mexico.

“The main needs that we’ve identified include legal assistance to regularise immigration status, urgent medical care, including mental health support, and access to reliable information as well as basic needs like food, shelter, hygiene materials,” said Van Akin.

Enrique López, field coordinator for Doctors of the World in Tapachula, a city in the state of Chiapas along Mexico’s southern border where many asylum seekers and migrants first arrive from Guatemala, said that although the number of migrants crossing the border dropped in February, people continue to arrive.

Those still entering Mexico are mostly from Cuba, Honduras, and Haiti, and are still hoping to eventually reach the US, according to López. Others are coming to Tapachula from other states in Mexico, trying to return to their home countries, while many already in Tapachula are searching for work to support themselves and planning to request asylum in Mexico.

“They don’t do it by choice, but rather because transiting through Mexico has become more complicated and there are no ways to access the United States, if not irregularly,” López said. “The cases we see are more complex as migrants take more dangerous routes, are exposed to more risks, and don’t have the possibility to travel in large groups [to protect themselves] anymore,” he told The New Humanitarian.

Acute respiratory infections, skin diseases, and gastrointestinal problems are some of the most common health issues. Rape and sexual violence also remain major issues.

“We do case management for survivors of [gender-based violence], and the same number of cases continue to come in,” said López. “There are more risks, less services, and less funding to assist.”

Growing exposure to abuse
Organizations such as MSF have warned that sexual violence against migrants on the route between Colombia and Mexico is on the rise. In 2024 alone, the organisation assisted more than 700 survivors of sexual violence in Mexico and hundreds more in Central American countries—far more than the 232 they assisted in 2023.

For the many migrants escaping violence—and who have been subjected to violence while on the move—the prospect of having to return to their home countries and potentially relive the same abuses is particularly dreadful.

According to a poll led by the Danish Refugee Council, 26% of the migrants interviewed between October and December 2024 in the Mexican cities of Matamoros, Reynosa, and Tapachula said the reasons for leaving their country were threats, violence, and intimidation. Another 21% mentioned insecurity and general violence, and 12.7% persecution.

“It means a huge emotional burden, frustration, and anxiety, because by returning to the places they escaped they put their health and physical integrity at risk,” said MSF’s Ortuño.

A legal limbo
Some efforts have been made to help migrants who want to return to their country of origin. In early February, the UN’s migration agency, IOM, announced it was expanding its Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) program in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama to facilitate safe returns. In January and February, IOM received nearly 2,900 requests—three times more than during the same period last year.

But the Trump-induced crisis in Mexico is being compounded by shortcomings in migration policies across Latin America. There has been no coordinated response to address the situation by scaling up consular services to facilitate returns or by fostering integration initiatives in their respective countries: Migrants are often pushed to leave because of xenophobia and lack of opportunities.

An agreement between Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s administration and the Mexican government reportedly allowed more than 500 nationals to be repatriated. But for many, returning safely to their home countries—or to a country where they will feel safe—is not an easy prospect.

For migrants from other parts of the world—Indians, Afghans, Chinese, and others—stranded in Mexico, the hurdles are even higher. Local humanitarian workers say discrimination is common and language barriers compound other vulnerabilities. The Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (COMAR), which handles asylum claims, and other institutions providing assistance to migrants often don’t have translators or the ability to understand the specific needs of people from all over the world.

Dwindling aid
As humanitarian needs mount, the Trump administration’s decision to massively cut funding for foreign aid makes it all the more difficult for aid groups to respond.

“We [at MSF] still have the capacity to provide support on the health front, but we notice the absence of other actors who play an important role in protection and other services,” said Ortuño.

The Adventist Development & Relief Agency International—a faith-based NGO that provides legal counsel, medical services, and internet access across Chiapas—was forced to reduce its assistance due to funding cuts, and Plan International had to shut down its child protection programs in Tapachula.

The New Humanitarian contacted several other organizations and agencies to find out whether they had to suspend some of their activities, but they refused to comment.

“That decision [to suspend foreign aid] is limiting us a lot, and we will have to see where to diversify funds,” a staff member at one affected organisation told The New Humanitarian, on condition of anonymity, adding: “Now, the salaries will be taken out of an emergency fund.”

The reduced presence of aid groups impacts other factors too, Van Akin said: “It makes it very difficult to have an accurate idea of how migration dynamics are changing because of the suspension of funding. It’s hard for us to be able to paint an accurate picture.”

— Daniela Díaz for The New Humanitarian, March 26 (condensed; some internal links added)

Reporting for this article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. The New Humanitarian used transportation provided by Médecins Sans Frontières to secure access to migrants and staff in the organization’s mobile clinics in Tapachula and Suchiate. Additional reporting by Daniela Mohor and by Eric Reidy. Edited by Andrew Gully.

Photo of Tapachula migrant camp: Daniela Díaz for The New Humanitarian

The diocese remembered him as a “tireless apostle of peace.” At the open-air funeral in San Andrés Larrainzar, retired Bishop José Raúl Vera López of Saltillo said: “Father Marcelo took special care of the poorest, the weakest, the most unprotected, and he protected them from abusive people, from powerful people, from people who feel they own society and the land and who do not mind harming the lives of others to enrich themselves or to acquire greater political power to get everything they want.”

Bishop Vera was coadjutor bishop in San Cristóbal de las Casas when Father Pérez entered the seminary.

Pérez had also apparently been targeted by the authorities. In 2021, he was serving as parish priest in the village of Pantelhó when 21 young people were abducted there by the vigilante group “El Machete.” According to local media, the Chiapas prosecutor general’s office issued an arrest warrant for Pérez in reaction to the case, although it was never carried out. He was subsequently transfered to San Cristóbal because of threats made against him in Pantelhó.

One man has been arrested in the assassination of Father Pérez. (BBC News, OSV News, CNA, DW)

Violence, especially targeting prominent local figures, continues to escalate in Chiapas. On the same day Pérez was buried, an attempt was made on the life of the newly elected mayor of Chilón. Mario Hernández Aguilar, of the Labor Party (PT), was unharmed in the attack in the hamlet of Yaalton. (Sol de Chiapas, Cambio de Michoacán)

On Sept. 3, the mayor-elect of Frontera Comalapa, on the Guatemalan border, was abducted by an armed gang. The mayor-elect, Aníbal Roblero Castillo of the Mexican Ecological Green Party (PVEM), has not been returned. (El Universal, Mexico News Daily)

See our last report on the human rights crisis in Mexico.

Credit: Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas via CNA

Sheinbaum indeed has her own populist creds, having taken a leading role in the campaign against privatization of Mexico’s oil resources when the conservative National Action Party (PAN) was in power 15 years ago. And she pledges to continue with López Obrador’s basic policies.

Sheinbaum’s win represents two firsts in Mexico’s two-century history as an independent country. She will be the first woman president, and (although she has chosen not to emphasize this) the first president of Jewish heritage.

Despite the ongoing plague of femicides, recent years have seen significant advances for women in Mexico, at least in the sphere of formal politics. A 2019 constitutional reform mandates gender parity in government-appointed positions and requires that political parties present equal numbers of male and female candidates for all offices. The reform was approved by a unanimous vote of Mexico’s Congress. Some 50% of lawmakers in Mexico’s lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, are women, and women lead close to a third (10) of Mexico’s 32 states. In 2021, Mexico’s Supreme Court voted to decriminalize abortion.

Sheinbaum’s chief rival in the election was also a woman. This was Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of an unlikely coalition of the PAN, center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the country’s former entrenched machine, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Gálvez, of indigenous Otomí background, served as indigenous affairs adviser to President Vicente Fox of the PAN, but stepped down in protest of budget cuts to the office under the subsequent PAN president Felipe Calderón. Another candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the center-left Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano), placed a distant third. (NewsHour, Al Jazeera, PRI, FastCompany, CarbonBrief, ClimateChangeNews, NYT, AP, AFP, LatinoUSA)

Wave of assassinations
The ongoing human rights crisis in Mexico that will obviously pose a grave challenge for Sheinbaum was dramatically exemplified by the record number of political assassinations that marred the elections. On May 31, just days before the polls opened, Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a municipal council candidate with the Mexican Green Ecological Party (PVEM, a MORENA coalition partner) in Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla state, was gunned down in an attack near his home, in which his wife was wounded.

This marked the 37th assassination of a candidate or campaign worker over the course of this year’s political season. On May 29, Alfredo Cabrera Barrientos, PRI-PAN-PRD candidate for mayor in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez, Guerrero state, was shot in the head as he took the stage at his final campaign event. The assailant was shot dead by the National Guard, which had been deployed to protect the candidate, who had survived previous attempts on his life.

Mexican consulting firm Integralia provided an updated political violence report in early May revealing that most candidates who were assassinated were running at the municipal level. Although candidates from all parties were targeted, the greatest number of victims were from MORENA. The most impacted states were Guerrero, Michoacán and Chiapas.

Chiapas continues to be plagued by paramilitary violence. On May 16, Lucero López Maza, a young woman running for mayor in the village of La Concordia with the local Popular Chiapaneco Party (PPCH), was killed along with five people accompanying her in a street attack by a group of armed assailants, who all got away.

And on March 14, the Tzotzil indigenous mayoral candidate with the PRI in the Chiapas village of San Juan Cancuc was killed in an attack near his home, in which his wife and son were wounded. (Jurist, BBC News, MexicoNewsDaily, Aristegui, Aristegui, Aristegui, Aristegui)

Finally, on the same day that Sheinbaum’s victory was announced, June 3, the PAN mayor of Cotija, Michoacán, Yolanda Sánchez Figueroa, was killed in a hail of bullets, struck 19 times, just outside the municipal palace. She had survived a three-day abduction last September, and was waging a campaign against attempts by local narco gangs to co-opt the police in her municipality, especially naming the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel. (AlDíaDallas, VozMedia, InfoBae)

These political assassinations come along with ongoing violence related to drug cartel turf wars throughout Mexico. Five people were killed and another wounded on May 23 in an armed attack in Acapulco, the once fashionable tourist resort city in Guerrero state. The deaths came when gunmen shot up a handicrafts market on a main tourism strip. This came just three days after 10 bodies were found in the streets of famous Pacific coastal city. (CBS)

Constitutional reform pending
Human rights activists and civil society voices have also been critical of President López Obrador, or AMLO as he is popuarly known by his initials. In February, AMLO sent a package of 20 legislative proposals to Mexico’s Congress, including 18 proposed constitutional reforms. These incude some seemingly progressive measures, such as increasing the autonomous powers of indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. But the package also contains some worrisome measures.

One would define the National Guard, a new enforcement body created by AMLO, as a branch of the armed forces, attaching it to the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). This is AMLO’s second attempt to bring the National Guard under SEDENA, after Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down a similar legislative reform in 2023. Currently, Article 129 of the Constitution restricts SEDENA’s power to engage in internal law enforcement. AMLO’s proposed reform would now weaken this restriction. And AMLO created the National Guard in 2019 in the first place after the Supreme Court ruled against a proposed measure to formally bring SEDENA into drug enforcement.

The National Guard, currently under AMLO’s newly created Public Security & Citizen Protection Secretariat, has been heavily deployed to intercept undocumented migrants headed north, leading to accusations that it was serving as proxy force for Trump (and Biden). It was also seen by critics as ironic that AMLO, who took office in 2018 declaring the “war on drugs” to be over, appeared to be moving back toward the militarized drug enforcement policies of his predecessors. It was the PAN’s Felipe Calderón (AMLO’s bitter rival, who he accused of stealing the 2006 elections from him) who first unleashed the army on the cartels—a move which was constitutionally dubious and only escalated the endemic violence. AMLO’s sexenio, or six-year term, has seen a further militarization of previously civilian government functions.

The current proposed reform package follows AMLO’s “Plan B” reform of the electoral system—so called because it, in turn, followed congressional rejection of an earlier, more wide-ranging reform package in 2022. Plan B was rushed through Congress but struck down by Mexico’s Supreme Court before it could take effect in May 2023, due to irregularities in its passage.

But the new package calls for all judicial authorities, including Supreme Court justices, to be elected by popular vote. This is portrayed as a measure against corruption and unethical practices. However, as the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) independent rights group states: “There is no reason to believe that electing judges would achieve these ends. On the contrary, the reform would weaken the judiciary as a democratic counterweight and encourage penal populism.” (Reuters, WOLA)

This could begin to reverse the progress represented by the 2006 constitutional reform in which Mexico switched from its old “written inquisitorial” legal system to the new “oral adversarial” system.

WOLA expresses hope that Sheinbaum will reconsider provisions of the pending constitutional reform that would weaken the judiciary and accelerate the militarizaton of society.

Sheinbaum is to take office Oct. 1.

Map: PCL

Some of this, especially the elevated ocean temperatures, was due to the 2023 El Niño climate phenomenon. But University of St. Thomas researcher John Abraham told PBS NewsHour: “This is off the charts. And it’s more than we would have normally expected, even with an El Niño.” He added wryly: “The scientific term is bonkers year.”

The proliferation of extreme weather events in recent years has also been described as “global weirding.”

Photo: CounterVortex

On June 8, several thousand people marched in Mexico City and elsewhere in the country, including the Chiapas highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas, to demand an end to attacks by paramilitary groups against Zapatista communities. (EFE)

Wikimedia Commons via Mexico New Daily

Mexico also dispersed thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants from the southern city of Tapachula, close to the Guatemala border, where many first enter the country.

From The New Humanitarian, Sept. 29

Map: PCL

Moisés Gandhi is part of the Zapatista “autonomous municipality” of Lucio Cabañas, a rebel zone of control within the “official” municipality of Ocosingo. Although the Zapatistas have honored a ceasefire with the government for a generation now, government-aligned paramilitary groups have sought to reduce their territory through a campaign of attrition. ORCAO is an acronym for the Regional Coffee Growers Organization of Ocosingo, but following similar attacks by the group in September 2021, the Zapatistas released a statement charging that it is “a political-military organization with paramilitary characteristics: they have uniforms, equipment, weapons, and ammunition purchased with money they receive from [government-sponsored] ‘social programs’… They fire on the Zapatista community of Moisés Gandhi every night with these weapons.” (Mexico News Daily)

The new statement was signed by leading left-wing intellectual figures around the world, including Noam Chomsky.

Photo: Chiapas Support Committee

The border dispute began in 1950, when the Chiapas government granted five logging concessions to two companies on 100,000 hectares of communal forest traditionally used by the Zoque communities. To legitimize the concessions, these communal territories were designated as national lands within what was then the municipality of Cintalapa, Chiapas. Later, the Chiapas government opened much of these areas to settlement by displaced Tzotzil communities from the state’s conflicted Highlands. In 2018, the Chiapas state congress created a “Special Commission to Address the Chimalapas Case,” which sought to maintain the region as part of Chiapas. However, the commission seems to have been disbanded since the SCJN decision. (Mexico News Daily, Mexico Daily Post, El Heraldo de Chiapas, Cuarto Poder, IstmoPress, Aqui Noticias)

The Chimalapas, which border the Selva El Ocote Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, are currently being hit hard by forest fires, which the remote Zoque communities are mobilizing to extinguish. (El Universal Oaxaca)

Map via Wikimedia Commons

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Production by Chris Rywalt

Books discussed: Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction by Helen Anne Curry, University of California Press, 2022; War On the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America by Bill Weinberg, Zed Books, 1991

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Image: Sin Maíz No Hay País