Tag Archives: Border Town

‘Not enough room’: migrant flows strain Mexican border shelters

Migrants, part of a caravan traveling from Central America en route to the United States, wait to hitchhike after resting in a makeshift camp in Juan Rodriguez Clara, Mexico, November 13, 2018. Picture taken November 13, 2018. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

By Lizbeth Diaz

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) – The arrival in the Mexican border city of Tijuana of the first few hundred travelers from migrant caravans is stretching to the limit shelters already overflowing with other people, and sparking signs of friction among the population.

Lugging heavy bundles and small children, an unprecedented caravan of thousands of mostly Honduran migrants set off for the United States in mid-October, many of them fleeing violence and poverty at home. Two other copycat groups of mainly El Salvadorans followed behind.

U.S. President Donald Trump has declared the caravans an unwelcome “invasion,” and threatened to close down the Mexico-U.S. border to keep them out, ordering some 7,000 troops to reinforce the frontier, including in Tijuana with barbed wire.

It has not stopped people trying to reach the border, including those from the caravans, others traveling from Central America independently, and Mexicans fleeing violence in cartel-plagued states.

Jose Maria Garcia, director of the Juventud 2000 migrant shelter, said he had been warning authorities since the Honduran caravan set out that migrant refuges were already operating at capacity in the border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali.

“People are still arriving, but we’re not prepared to receive them,” Garcia told Reuters. He said he believes the incoming caravans would be the largest number of migrants to arrive in the city in such a short time in recent memory.

The buildup in Tijuana will be a test of tougher asylum rules introduced by Trump, which some experts believe will push more people to try to cross illegally. Few of the 20 migrants interviewed by Reuters were aware of the new rules.

Tijuana has a history of absorbing visitors, including Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, a large American population and Haitians who settled in the city south of San Diego in 2016 after failing to cross the U.S. border.

As many as 1,000 people who broke away from the first caravan have reached Tijuana in the last few days, with a similar number expected later this week. Thousands more could soon follow as the main body of the caravans arrive.

Almost 3,000 people – many of them Mexicans – are now waiting in migrant shelters to request asylum alongside hundreds of Central Americans, said Cesar Palencia, head of the Tijuana city government’s migrant outreach team.

U.S. border officials process about 75 to 100 asylum claims a day, so it could be a month before new arrivals are seen, said Pedro Rios, of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that works with migrants.

Of the 14 migrant shelters on the 2,000-mile (3,200 km)Mexico-U.S. border, 10 are totally overcrowded, Palencia said. Dozens of arrivals from the caravan camped on the beach on Tuesday night.

“People have received us kindly, but they say there’s not enough room for everyone, so we decided to spend the night on the beach,” said a Honduran woman in Tijuana as she washed her face in a public bathroom, asking to remain anonymous.

“It was a terrible night for me and my children.”

The bulk of the group that formed after the Honduran caravan began entering Mexico over three weeks ago is now moving up the Pacific northwest coast through the state of Sinaloa, made up of between 4,000 and 5,000 people, authorities say.

FRICTIONS

The Mexican government has urged the migrants to register for asylum in Mexico, or risk deportation. The incoming government of President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has vowed to provide jobs and visas to the Central Americans.

That message has not been popular with all Mexicans, many of whom fear for their own futures.

“We also need help,” said Olga Cruz from the western state of Michoacan, who had come to Tijuana to seek asylum in the United States with her three children.

“Not a day goes by (in Michoacan) without somebody being killed, and I don’t want my children growing up like this,” she said. “But if the government only focuses on helping (Central Americans) they leave nothing for us,” she added.

On Monday, a group of about 80 mainly LGBT people who split from the migrant caravan moved into a building in a wealthy area of Tijuana. Residents shouted at them to leave and demanded that local authorities take steps to eject them.

(Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Dave Graham and Bill Berkrot)

Fairy tales overcome nightmares at South Korea’s militarized border town

Visitors are seen at a shopping mall near the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in Paju, South Korea, July 16, 2017. Picture taken on July 16, 2017. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

By Hyunjoo Jin and Haejin Choi

SEOUL (Reuters) – A half-hour’s drive north of Seoul, along a highway lined with barbed wire, lie two shopping malls the size of several football stadiums, a stone’s throw from the world’s most militarized border.

The malls are in the city of Paju, gateway to the U.N. truce village of Panmunjom, where military officers from the combatants of the 1950-53 Korean war discuss armistice matters — when the two sides are on speaking terms, which they aren’t these days.

“Fairy tales come true in Paju”, is the advertising lure from the Korean Tourism Board. But it was nightmares that were all too true here during the Korean war, when Paju featured some of its fiercest battles. Paju is home to the country’s only “enemy’s cemetery”, where the remains of Chinese and North Korean soldiers are buried.

That’s all but forgotten history now. On the rooftop of the Lotte Premium Outlet, children and their parents can view North Korea across the Imjin River through binoculars. The mall also features a merry-go-round, cinema, and a mini-train.

At Shinsegae Paju Premium Outlet, about a dozen children jump and scream around a fountain inside the mall on a sizzling, July summer day. Just a couple miles away is a village modeled after France’s tourism center of Provence, where restaurants, bakeries and clothing shops are decorated like a children’s playbook.

Elsewhere in Paju, kids carved wood to make Pinocchio dolls at a museum, while adults tasted wine made of meoru, a Korean wild grape, at a farm.

Paju, indeed, shows little signs of the tensions that have arisen since North Korea marked the U.S. July 4th holiday with a successful launch of what it said was an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile test prompted the United States and South Korea this month to conduct air force bomber exercises in the skies near here.

LITTERING LAND MINES

But at Paju’s Provence Village, Kim Ki-deok, a 41-year-old office worker from south of Seoul and father of a 4-year-old boy, said he doesn’t feel any more danger from being close to the border.

“If North Korea really wants, they can shoot missiles far away,” said Kim. “I feel refreshed and would like to come here again.”

The sense of insouciance can even be seen at the U.S. military’s Camp Bonifas on the outskirts of town, home to a three-hole golf course that Sports Illustrated once called the “world most dangerous golf course” because of the Korean War vintage land mines littering the area.

The Korean War, in which the United States fought alongside South Korea and China with the North, ended in a truce that has yet to be replaced by a peace agreement and has left the two sides technically at war.

It means South Koreans have long grown accustomed to living in a doomsday scenario, one that includes up to 10,000 artillery guns pointed toward the South and capable at any moment, in the words of North Korea’s propaganda machine, of turning Seoul into a “sea of fire” and a “pile of ashes.”

For 30-year-old Park Chol-min, it’s nothing more than empty threats.

“It’s just a show or performance. I think North Korea has a lot more to lose than to gain by turning Seoul into a sea of fire,” said the video game producer from Seoul, visiting the Shinsegae mall with his girlfriend to buy her a birthday gift.

DEFENSE MECHANISM

Paju stepped up North Korea-related tourism in the 2000s, when liberal governments launched a “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea. Foreigners and locals flocked to Panmunjom to see stony-faced North Korean soldiers on guard and an underground tunnel built by the North, and to Imjingak, which houses the Bridge of Freedom, where prisoners of war were traded at the end of the war.

The tourism push took a huge leap late in 2011, when two massive premium outlets run by South Korean retail giants Shinsegae and Lotte opened. More than 12 million visitors went to the two malls last year — more than Seoul’s population of 10 million.

It was not long after the malls opened, though, when North Korea dramatically stepped up the pace of missile and nuclear tests under Kim Jong Un, who took power in Pyongyang when his father Kim Jong-il died in December 2011.

“The tests have not dented visitor interest at all,” said a Paju city official in charge of tourism, who asked not to be named. “It has become just part of a daily life, although it is sad to say so.”

Normalizing the North Korean threat is part of a “defense mechanism” for South Koreans, says Kwak Keum-joo, a psychology professor at Seoul National University.

“I feel anxious about North Korea when I travel overseas. Once I return to Korea, I forget it,” Kwak said.

That’s not so easy for 74-year-old Woo Jong-il, who lives in a small village of Manu-ri, just south of the Imjin river that divides the two Koreas.

Woo built a bunker in his backyard, one of several residents in Manu-ri who did so in the early 1970s, when bullets fired from North Korea wounded several in his village and damaged a house next door.

“I don’t think this is obsolete even now,” he said, showing a visitor around a dark basement shelter just big enough to accommodate his seven family members.

“I feel anxious. How can I not be? We are at the front so we can be victims. If the relationship with the North worsens anytime, this bunker makes me feel safe.”

(Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang,; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Bill Tarrant)