How much do we know about migrants from the state of Chiapas who are leaving in droves for other parts of Mexico or the United States? The intent of this CIEPAC bulletin is to collect information from journalistic, academic and civil society sources and begin filling in the mosaic. [An earlier version of this article was presented in the "Conversation on Migration" held by Project Counselling Services in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, on Sept. 8, 2006].
Introduction
Every day, some 165 people lose hope and leave Chiapas. They leave due to lack of employment or the starvation wages paid at most jobs. Emigration is relatively new in Chiapas, compared to the traditional "expelling" states in the center of Mexico (Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Jalisco, Michoacán), which have hemorrhaged migrant labor to the United States since the end of the 19th century. The exodus of Chiapanecos started as a trickle some 15 years ago, but now people are pouring out.
The sudden increase in out migration from Chiapas has observers scrambling to describe what's happening and why. Emigration as a topic of academic concern in Chiapas began only when remittances from the US suddenly took on an important place in the state's economy. Years previous though, in rural indigenous communities, migration had been tearing down customs, ways of thinking and acting, and provoking fear over the slow but steady erosion of indigenous culture. But academic papers from barely six years ago rarely mention emigration from Chiapas. The diocese of San Cristóbal started responding to the plight of migrants in an organized way as late as 2004. Even now, civil organizations have barely responded. In spite of appalling human rights abuses committed in Chiapas against migrants, especially Central Americans, there is just one human rights office, the Fray Matías de Córdova Center in Tapachula, with a long-standing migrant outreach program. Society's slow moving responses contrast with the urgency of what one writer has called "an exodus of biblical proportions".(1)
Chiapas obviously cannot free itself from the national context. Much of what we know in general regarding the movement of Mexican migrants applies to Chiapas. The motives for migrating are certainly the same: either man-made disasters, such as misguided economic policies applied since the mid-80s and buttressed in 1994 through NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Or "natural" disasters, such as hurricane Stan in 2005, whose destructive rage also highlighted the folly of human economic activity. But our task here is not to review the structural or circumstantial reasons for migration. [This has already been addressed in a previous Ciepac Bulletin. See http://www.ciepac.org/boletines/chiapas_en.php?id=505] Our sole intent is to answer basic questions regarding the migratory phenomenon in Chiapas to the extent possible given available sources.
Who is leaving?
According to COESPO (Chiapas' state population council), migrants from Chiapas are mostly 15 to 35 years old, and 65% are peasants and indigenous. One surprising fact: 79% of those leaving Chiapas never return. Another characteristic that mirrors tendencies throughout Mexico, migrants are increasingly from the urban sector and now include young university graduates and professionals.(2)
Studies confirm the increasing education among Mexican migrants to the US, whether or not they possess legal documents. In fact, migrants now have a higher educational level than Mexicans in Mexico.(3) Recent tendencies show that migrants have increasingly numbers of women and children. In addition, migrants who reach the US are no longer working principally in agriculture but rather in construction, manufacturing or in services within the urban sector. And Mexican migrants are staying longer in the US than in previous decades.(4)
How many are leaving?
Getting official figures on how many Chiapanecos are leaving is difficult. COESPO, which should know, isn't saying. A study by the World Bank(5) says [the gap between the few rich and the many poor is] "such that states such as Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca are generating enormous emigration that has dropped their population by 2% in barely five years". But simple arithmetic shows that the World Bank is underestimating the outflow, at least for Chiapas. Applying 2% to the population of Chiapas of some 4 million, the result is some 80,000 Chiapanecos. For the WB, then, this is the number of people who have left the state in five years, or 16,000 per year, or some 44 per day.
Hardly. More are leaving. This enormous migration can be measured in other ways, more anecdotal perhaps, but probably more exact. Startling evidence comes from the municipality of Frontera Comalapa, where Sergio González, owner of a make-shift travel agency selling bus tickets to the northern border, says that, after hurricane Stan, migration became "a whole industry". Hundreds of Chiapanecos are leaving their communities, most of them small coffee growers who lost everything when Stan struck. González says that every week some 40 buses, each loaded with at least 40 Chiapanecos, leave for the inhospitable Altar desert or Tijuana. All set on crossing "the line".(6) Although travel agencies require customers to show Mexican identification before selling tickets, undoubtedly quite a few migrants hopping on buses in Frontera Comalapa, bordering Guatemala, come from Central America.
Some journalists say that the yearly outflow is 30,000, some academics, 60,000.(7) But they are enough, perhaps now some 500,000 in total outside of Chiapas, for COESPO to admit that all middle class and poor Chiapanecos have a close relative living in the US or on Mexico's northern border.(8)
The numbers are numbing. Recently, the UN's Population Fund (UNFPA) granted a dubious first place to Mexico as the world's leader in migrant expulsion, ahead of China and India, according to Alfonso Sandoval, UNFPA representative in Mexico. Yet this distinction is based on conservative figures, 400,000 expelled Mexicans every year according to the Fund.(9) The Mexican government's figures are even higher:
Based on [...] adjustments, omitted from both the written report and the supplements that accompany the sixth and last "state of the nation" report [by President Fox], specialists found that over the past six years more than 3.2 million people emigrated from Mexico to escape poverty and the lack of opportunities for overcoming it. New figures state that in each of the past six years, an average of 575,336 Mexicans emigrated, mainly to the United States or Canada. New official estimates for 2006 put the figure at 582,613 Mexicans who will emigrate, the highest in the history of Mexico as a politically independent country.(10)
If we accept the higher figure of 60,000 people leaving Chiapas every year, then one of ten Mexican migrants is a Chiapaneco, from a state with less than 4% of Mexico's population. The need to migrate is so pressing that some sources state-at first glance contradictorily-that the only people who are not migrating are in extreme poverty. There are people mired in such poverty that they simply cannot pay the coyote or the bus fare out. In some municipalities of Chiapas, such as Santiago el Pinar in the Altos region, some socioeconomic indicators are below what they are in Sierra Leone, one of the most impoverished countries in the world.(11) In Santiago el Pinar people aren't leaving because they lack the funds to even think about leaving.
Overall, those who can migrate, leave, or at least help to send a relative abroad. For distinct historic reasons Chiapas hadn't ranked high amongst expelling states. Up to recently, it was ranked 28 among Mexico's 32 states. Now it's number 11, according to COESPO, though other sources says it's in 7th place.(12)
Newspaper accounts fill in anecdotal details of how migration is affecting Chiapas. For example, in the city of Chilón, municipal authorities and teachers from High School Campus 34 say that over a period of 12 months, 70% of their graduates went to the USA.(13) In another municipality, La Grandeza, along the Guatemalan border, half of the students in grade school have parents or a close relative "up North", and every year two students leave to join them.(14)
While multitudes leave daily, others come back in pine boxes. In 2004, the state's interior secretary processed the shipping of the remains of 43 migrants. Yet the figure is not for Chiapas as a whole. That's just one municipality's share of the dead from "up North", La Independencia. Another 30 remains were shipped to Las Margaritas.(15) The interior secretary undoubtedly has the figure for all 119 municipalities, under lock and key. The figure won't be posted soon on Governor Pablo Salazar's website, brimming in the final months of his mandate with upbeat news on "promises fulfilled" by the Governor.
Where are they heading?
For many Chiapaneco migrants, the first option is not a beeline to the northern border. Many young people, especially from municipalities with a large indigenous population, try their luck first in Mexico's glitzy tourist resorts. Cancún and Playa del Carmen are frequent destinations. Yet the few jobs available pay miserable salaries, some US$54 per week for bricklaying or cleaning hotels. For indigenous communities back in Chiapas, the wage is a lot of money, but those who earn it must survive with their US$9 a day in Mexico's most expensive resort areas. Sooner or later young people also succumb to the need to migrate north.
An interesting aspect of Chiapanecos' migration is that it appears to belie at least one theory of how Mexican migrants are spreading throughout the United State since the mid-80s. It is a fact that Mexican migrants (and Central Americans) in the US have left their strongholds, mainly urban centers in California, Texas and Chicago. Outside these areas, there were relatively few Mexicans. This is no longer true. Today, there are Mexicans throughout the US, even in the so-called "non traditional areas of Mexican migration", such as the Eastern coast, New York City, the Southeast (Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida), and now, with the ongoing reconstruction of the damage by Katrina, in Louisiana, in addition to small and mid-sized cities throughout the US.
One theory regarding Mexican dispersion in the US has to do with the so-called "amnesty" granted by the Reagan administration to undocumented migrants in 1986 through IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act). After legalization by IRCA, millions of Latin Americans (mostly Mexicans) were able to travel out of their "urban ghettos" of Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, etc. where they had taken refuge as undocumented migrants, "camouflaged" in cities with large Latino populations. After 1986 legalized Mexicans left urban areas and moved wherever higher paying jobs existed, or wherever their personal desires dictated.
Chiapaneco migration casts doubt on this hypothesis. Given that migration from Chiapas is recent, Chiapaneco migrants have not gone through the process described, i.e., initial "refuge" as undocumented migrants in big cities, later dispersion after the IRCA legalization. Further, anecdotal information places Chiapanecos in 2006 both in non-traditional and traditional migration areas. In other words, Chiapanecos, without having benefited from IRCA, are nonetheless dispersing throughout the US in a way similar to documented migrants. The particulars of how this is happening have yet to be explained.
How much are migrants remitting to Chiapas?
Migration today is truly "a whole industry". But more than an industry, it is a fundamental part of the economy of Chiapas. Although precise information regarding how many Chiapanecos are leaving is hard to obtain, the Mexican government compiles records on money entering the country yearly as remittances through commercial channels (banks, exchange houses and money-transfer companies). For the past seven years, both in Mexico and Chiapas, total remittances have broken the record set the year before. In 2004, remittances to Chiapas totaled US$500 million, in 2005 they rose to US$655 million, and a similar amount, or slightly greater, is expected in 2006. Presently Chiapas is receiving US$1,755,000 a day, an amount greater than what is remitted to Zacatecas,(16) one of Mexico's traditional "expelling" states. Nationally, remittances in 2006 may exceed US$24 billion, surpassing India's remittances, with a startling increase in one year of 20%.(17) The figure does not include funds that enter Mexico in migrants' pockets when they return or visit relatives.
Interestingly though, recent studies by the College of the Northern Border (Colef) have questioned the Mexican government's figures, not in terms of the amount flowing into the country but rather the recipients. The Mexican government maintains that billions of dollars are reaching migrants' homes. But scholars at Colef attribute the surprising yearly increases in remittances to money laundering by narcotics traffickers. "Money exchange and fund-transfer companies based in the United States with branches in Mexico are often used by narcotics traffickers to send money", according to Colef. A report by several US government agencies states that "an important amount of laundering goes on with small quantities of money, since the only control of these systems is the detailed registration of transfers that exceed three thousand dollars".(18) For this reason, the president of Colef, Jorge Santibáñez, sees no accountability within the Bank of Mexico:
Incredible as it may seem in a country that calls itself democratic and is proud of being an example to the world in matters of official information transparency [...], the Bank of Mexico is not even willing to discuss the matter on a technical level, e.g., all that money is reaching homes in Mexico and period; take it or leave it...It's difficult to understand why the Bank of Mexico opposes serious, responsible, institutional and technical discussion of a such an important topic and its relevant political implications. We're not taking about discussing whether the money is entering the country or not, rather if it is reaching homes, and what are its true impacts...until this debate settles on some conclusions, every time new data, or new records, are reported, a shadow of a doubt will continue to emerge.(19)
So while narcotics traffickers are transferring billions of dollars, laundered of sins and guilt, migrants are losing billions through outrageously high and hidden commissions that commercial firms are unscrupulously charging to transfer funds. Migrants lose billions unjustly, since modern technology makes financial transfers overseas too easy to justify gouging the public.
What about women migrants?
In general less is known about women migrants. Data from the Mexican government are not segregated according to sex. Undoubtedly more women have been migrating in recent years, both in absolute and relative numbers, as is true of other categories, such as children and the elderly. The Center for Women's Human Rights in San Cristóbal de Las Casas has recent information regarding women and children being entrapped in narcotics networks as drug runners. Tzotzil and Tseltal women are under detention in the Cancun penitentiary accused of drug trafficking. Indigenous women also leave for the tourist resorts but fall prey to prostitution or drug-trafficking rings. Those who find work in the formal sectors send remittances home much like the men, but typically in greater amounts, even though they are generally paid less than their male colleagues.(20)
Even when they don't migrate, women remaining in rural communities suffer ill treatment. Alone at home they are often sexually harassed or their lands are taken away. Current laws in general do not back women's rights to land.
A recent study undertaken by Project Counselling Service says of Guatemalan women who arrive in Chiapas:
They generally integrate as paid domestic labor in cities such as Tapachula where 90% of the maids are Guatemalans, although there are some Hondurans and Nicaraguans. Many of them are underage (between 12-13 years old) and work six days a week with a very long workday. Their salary varies between US$27-81 [per month!] and they rarely receive medical attention when they become ill. Discrimination of these women occurs on multiple levels, as foreigners, undocumented, poor, indigenous and peasants. Their lack of human rights is evident.(21)
Chiapas and Mexico: journey to hell for Central Americans
The Mexican government is currently applying migratory policies designed in the United States which call for using the narrow straight of Tehuantepec as a seal to detain and deport Central American migrants. Some analysts believe that Mexico willingly accepted the assignment from the US, in the belief that there would be an implicit, if not explicit, quid pro quo, e.g., Mexico would do the dirty work of keeping Central Americans from traveling north, in exchange for US acquiescence in letting in a greater number of legal Mexican migrants.
The strategy was destined to fail for several reasons:
· United States accepts quid pro quos from no country, much less a weak country like Mexico.
· US migratory policy is decided unilaterally through agreements worked out among domestic, not foreign, interests.
· All of Mexico's police forces are too corrupt for effective control of Central Americans to be exercised in a manner suitable to the US.
At the start of his administration, Vicente Fox implemented Plan South in order to carry out the control the US was seeking over Mexico's southern border. Shortly afterwards, however, the name Plan South officially disappeared, but its programs, operations and militarization of Mexico's southern border were kept intact. This subterfuge might have to do with the sullied image that Plan South created vis-à-vis the Central American governments in particular, at a time when Fox was traveling about the region in an effort to sell the supposed virtues of the Plan Puebla-Panama to Central American leaders.
The upshot is that greater control of Mexico's southern border has meant "open season" for hunting down Central American migrants by Mexican authorities. With one hand Mexican authorities detain and rob Central Americans of everything of value, while simultaneously, with the other hand, they receive generous bribes from polleros or coyotes to allow the human traffic to flow on roads, railroads, through airports and along ocean routes. Human trafficking is the second most lucrative illicit activity in Mexico, after drug smuggling.
According to father Eiman Vázquez Medina, who runs a migrants' refuge home in Arriaga, Chiapas:
The first invisible wall is found in southern Mexico; it's a wall more dangerous than the one in the United States, made up of robbers of migrants, whose members come from the law-enforcement agencies and the National Migratory Institute.(22)
Not even Grupo Beta escapes charges of corruption and abuse, in spite of its mission to "protect and help" migrants. [For additional information and analysis on Grupo Beta, please see http://www.ciepac.org/boletines/chiapas_en.php?id=157] . The "Fray Matías de Córdova" Human Rights Center in Tapachula says it has
Very serious documented accusations of abuse by Grupo Beta, for example, accusations that migrants have been robbed of their belongings...supposedly they [Grupo Beta] now have trained and sensitive personnel but it's a fact that abuse continues to this day.(23)
Corruption is so prevalent among authorities in Mexico that some undocumented migrants enter the country "through the main gate", e.g., the Mexico City International Airport (MCIA). Fortuna magazine reports that
[Migrants'] passage to a third country is guaranteed thanks to the stream of greenbacks that they unleash to the human traffickers as they exit their home country. The money benefits the mafia that operates in the MCIA, in other words domestic and international delinquents. They are joined by "forgetful" Migration agents, judicial police and private security guards, and also the security details that are assigned to foreigners in the MCIA, all of which is denied by Mexican authorities.(24)
Salary differentials
Lastly we explore salaries in Mexico as a reason for emigrating, keeping in mind that salaries in Chiapas are lower than the Mexican average. Academic studies undertaken in the United States commonly overlook the catastrophe caused in Mexico by free-trade policies as the main reason behind emigration. It seems to be a taboo subject in the US, given the dearth of academics willing to explore it and its implications. US academics prefer to look at other possible reasons. One of the more intuitive motives for migrating is the salary differential between Mexico and the US. Historically the difference between the minimum wage has been a factor of 10 or more in favor of the US, and 7 to 8 times for similar jobs in the industrial sector.
One way of looking at the lag in salaries in Mexico is to recall that on January 5, 1914, Henry Ford decreed new working conditions in his automobile factories, considered "revolutionary" for the time. Ford shortened the working day from 9 hours to 8, reduced the work week from 6 days to 5, and more than doubled the minimum wage from $2.34 to $5 a day. Ford was criticized by certain elite groups in the US for paying "so much", but he defended the measure, the legend goes, because he wanted workers in his factories to afford to buy the cars they were building. Sadly, 92 years later, most workers in Mexico would relish the conditions that Ford decreed in 1914 if they could find them. The minimum salary in Mexico in 2006 is still lower than US$5 per day. With luck, the minimum wage in Mexico may reach US$5 before the 100th anniversary of Ford's decree.
Returning to modern times, salaries in Mexico and the United States have not behaved as some politicians and researchers predicted when in the early 90s they were hawking the supposed virtues of NAFTA to skeptical audiences. They forecasts called for the salary gap to begin to close. Now, almost 13 years into NAFTA, the result has been the opposite, since Mexican salaries have fallen further behind those in the US. In a detailed study, "NAFTA's Promise and Reality", the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace maintains that "real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than when NAFTA took effect [and...] Mexican wages are also diverging from, rather than converging with, U.S. wages".(25)
In any event, rightly or wrongly, US researchers focus on derisory wages in Mexico and conclude an initially self-evident truth: Mexicans emigrate because they aspire to earn more. Yet an intuitive truism presents researchers with an unresolved contradiction. A study on Mexican migration undertaken by the University of California related salary differentials and emigration of Mexico over several decades and could not explain, if salary differentials between the two countries are abysmal and continue to widen, why Mexicans are not migrating in even greater numbers. (26) In other words, the study finds that Mexican emigration should be higher than it already is, a concern that should be shared on both sides of the border.
Worse, the final stake has yet to be driven into the heart of the Mexican countryside. NAFTA decrees the removal in 2008 of the remaining Mexican duties on sensitive agricultural products (corn, beans, powdered milk). Also slated for elimination are the paltry subsidies to peasants still maintained by the Mexican government via programs such as Procampo. Maybe more of us should be packing our bags in anticipation of 2008 or, better yet, struggling to eliminate policies that generate misery, suffering and migration.