Global Courant 2023-04-11 18:40:22
This Holy Thursday, April 6, hundreds of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and those who are in transit through Mexico, participated in a mass and in the traditional washing of feet practiced by the Catholic Church this Holy Week.
A migrant woman from Guatemala, who gave her name as Amalia Rosales to protect her identity, and is traveling with two minors, represented, along with 11 other Central American migrants, the 12 apostles whose feet, according to Catholic tradition, were washed by Jesus.
“For me it was an honor to share and participate and have that faith that God will help us along the way, he has given me many tests that I have gone through and overcome,” Torres told EFE, who arrived in Mexico on January 31 and He has already served two and a half months waiting for his immigration documents.
Another migrant, Modesto Urrutia, from Nicaragua, who has been in the shelter for six months awaiting his refuge card and humanitarian reasons, said he was proud to participate in the staging of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
“It fills us with emotion to follow the traditions as Catholics that we are and strengthen our faith, even though we are far from home, since we all have a great need to go to our destination,” said Urrutia, who, being away from home and away from his family together he remembered the days when his country celebrated the so-called Greater Week.
But in the midst of this religious commemoration, the Catholic Church of the state of Chiapas, Mexico, asked the Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to put an end to the violence and implement more humane immigration policies for people who cross the country. .
This happens after the fire that occurred on March 27 in a migration station in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where 40 migrants died, 19 of them Guatemalans, Torres’s countrymen.
“The Mexican government does not serve and does not help migrants, because they are not doing their job as they should be and a clear example is the bad immigration policy that exists,” César Augusto Cañaveral Pérez, the priest responsible for the Pastoral of Human Mobility of the Catholic Church in Tapachula, Chiapas.
He added that “it’s been four years since the current government – headed by López Obrador – and there have been more than 100 deaths of migrants in Mexico, those of the trailer accident in Chiapa de Corzo in December 2021 and in this 2023, in less than 4 months the 40 from Ciudad Juárez, in addition to those who have died along the way.”
After the religious act of washing the feet of migrants on this Holy Thursday, which took place inside the “Belén” shelter, located in this city, on the border with Guatemala, the priest accused that the Mexican government deceives activists and migrants .
He pointed out that more than 570 migrants live in the shelter, including women, children and entire families and therefore it has “an overpopulation.”
Given this, he denounced that the Mexican government “always deceives them and has never provided them with support” while pointing out that the shelters carry out the work that corresponds to the Mexican authorities.
“The Government maintains a policy of not helping and scaring away migrants with persecution by migration agents and the military,” he said.
