Mexico Takes In Afghan Refugees…Until They Can Get Into The U.S.
If Afghan refugees on the run from the Taliban can’t get to the United States directly, they come indirectly, as so many “refugees” do: through Mexico.
First came members of the Afghan women’s robotic team, received by Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard at Mexico City’s airport on August 24 to great fanfare.
The Foreign Ministry’s website detailed the forthcoming cultural enrichment this way:
The women are part of the AfghanDreamersTeam, known internationally for the creation of ventilators for COVID-19 patients made from used car parts. The team also received the special prize in the International Robotics Championship, and has been converted into a symbol of the search for human rights for the women of their country.
[México recibió, por razones humanitarias, a jóvenes afganas (“Mexico Receives, For Humanitarian Reasons, Young Afghan Women”), Gob.mx, Aug. 25, 2021]
So Afghans can be DREAMers, too! Who knew?!
Because everyone wore a mask at the event, you couldn’t tell whether the women plan to veil their faces in traditional Islamic fashion.
One woman’s husband arrived, but he didn’t get as much publicity [Mexico welcomes arrival of its 1st group of Afghan refugees, The Associated Press, August 24, 2021].
Next day, Ebrard greeted a planeload of 124 refugees, mostly journalists and their families [México recibe a periodistas de Afganistán que solicitaron visa humanitarian (“Mexico Receives Journalists from Afghanistan Who Requested Humanitarian Visas”), Milenio, Aug. 25, 2021].
The journalists, who worked for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, expect to enter the United States.
“Who knows if they will stay temporarily or permanently in our country?” reported Jorge Fernandez for Excelsior. “The majority are in the process of obtaining visas to live in the United States, but that will be delayed for at least a year” [Periodistas de Afganistán en México (“Journalists from Afghanistan in Mexico”), Undated].
I strongly recommend that these journalists give up the profession if they stay in Mexico. In 2020, eight journalists were killed there, more than in Afghanistan or any other country in the world [Number of journalists killed worldwide in 2020, by country, by Amy Watson, Statista, May 3, 2021].
Down in Tapachula, a city near the border with Guatemala, refugees from a nation closer to the U.S. hope to head north and jump the border.
“[T]here are more than 120,000 migrants stranded in Tapachula, 30,000 of whom are Haitians, according to local authorities,” reported Mileno’s Julio Navarro and Alejandra Zarate. “The number of persons who arrived from Haiti to Mexico with the intention of arriving to the U.S. increased in the last month” [Haitianos, uno de cada 4 migrantes en Tapachula (“Haitians, One of Every 4 Migrants in Tapachula”) August 21, 2021].
Haitianos, uno de cada 4 migrantes en Tapachula - Milenio https://t.co/oHdsW4um0z pic.twitter.com/B8poC285iR
— Alerta Noticias del Perú (@AlertaPeruana) August 22, 2021
The Haitians hope to pull together the money for the trip while they await the trek north.
Meanwhile, they don’t always get along. In early August, the “migrants” battled each other as they tried to force their way into a government refugee office:
In Tapachula, Chiapas, elements of the National Guard are guarding the installations of the offices of the Mexican Commission for Assistance to Refugees (COMAR) and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (ACNUR) after a fight among Haitian migrants who attempted to enter these installations by force, to obtain appointments for the application to be a refugee in the country. The migrants began to bunch up and push to get a place ahead in the line. There were verbal aggressions and tension, with the result that more than 40 elements of the National Guard had to intervene to guard the place.
[En Chiapas, Guardia Nacional custodia oficinas para refugiados tras una riña entre migrantes (“In Chiapas, National Guard is Guarding Offices for Refugees After a Fight Among Migrants”), by Julio Navarro Cardenas, Milenio, August 5, 2021]
Shockingly, the Haitians behave just like Haitians in Haiti.
Haitian migrants demonstrate in front of the facilities of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (Comar), in Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico. 📷 epa / EFE / Juan Manuel Blanco#migrants #Haiti #Mexico #epaphotos #visualizingtheworld pic.twitter.com/qybBIljord
— EPA Images (@EPA_Images) August 24, 2021
The locals are not amused. Navarro reports:
[They] have expressed their discontent with the lack of utilization of face masks and sanitary measures among the migrants, besides using the streets as dormitories, public bathrooms and even improvised dining areas, which generate an accumulation of trash and lack of hygiene in the area,”.
These Mexican xenophobes just don’t appreciate diversity!
AMLO On The 500th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Tenochtitlan
August 13, 2021 was the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, to the Spaniards and their Indian allies. Now, Tenochtitlan is Mexico City.
The Vox Party of Spain posted this entirely accurate and therefore “controversial” comment on Facebook and also on Twitter:
On a day like today 500 years ago, a troop of Spaniards headed by Hernan Cortes and native allies achieved the surrender of Tenochtitlan in Mexico. Spain achieved the liberation of millions of people from the bloody terror regime of the Aztecs. Proud of our history.
Tal día como hoy de hace 500 años, una tropa de españoles encabezada por Hernán Cortés y aliados nativos consiguieron la rendición de Tenochtitlán.
— VOX 🇪🇸 (@vox_es) August 13, 2021
España logró liberar a millones de personas del régimen sanguinario y de terror de los aztecas.
Orgullosos de nuestra Historia💪🇪🇸 pic.twitter.com/qstez3iytC
How did Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) handle it? A little background:
At his inauguration on December 1, 2018, AMLO gave a shout-out to Spanish King Felipe VI, who attended the festivities and was the first head of state who met the new president. AMLO acknowledged the “the bonds of history and culture that unite” Spain and Mexico [Felipe VI, primer líder que recibe López Obrador como presidente de México (“Felipe VI, First Leader Received by Lopez Obrador as President of Mexico”), EFE, December 1, 2018].
But the following March, AMLO wrote to Felipe VI to ask the monarch to apologize for human rights violations visited upon the natives during the conquest. The Leftist Spanish government brushed him off: “The arrival 500 years ago of the Spaniards on territory that is now Mexican,” it said, “cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations”
Thus do we have the title of this year’s lament about the arrival of Spanish Christians under Hernan Cortes: “Five Hundred Years of Indigenous Resistance.”
Said AMLO:
Today, August 13…we remember the fall of the great Tenochtitlan and offer pardon to the victims of the catastrophe originated by the Spanish military occupation of Mesoamerica and the rest of the territory of the current Mexican republic.
[Versión estenográfica. 500 Años de Resistencia Indígena. 1521, México-Tenochtitlan. Mensaje del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“Stenographic Version. 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance. 1521, Mexico-Tenochtitlan Gob.mx, August 13, 2021]
Why AMLO offered “pardon” to the victims we don’t know, but he segued into a disquisition about the atrocities suffered by Aztecs and other Mexican Indians.
After confessing that Emperor Montezuma “may have been a tyrant” and that the Aztec empire “was imposed by force,” he claimed that history did not prove the bloodthirsty Mesoamericans were cannibals.
That is utterly false. Pre-Columbian cannibalism is a well-established fact, as Hugh Thomas reported in Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico.
AMLO ended by condemning the whole concept of conquest, a not terribly-original observation for a Leftist. Then again, would AMLO’s standard apply to the Aztecs’ conquest of other Indians (who saw the Spanish as liberators)?
A more balanced approach would have been to acknowledge the negative aspects of the conquest, but recognize that Mexico wouldn’t exist without it. Mexicans should honor their Indian and Spanish forebears.
He could have put the matter in perspective by quoting the inscription on a monument in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco plaza:
Heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc,
Tlatelolco fell to the power of Hernan Cortes.
It was neither a triumph nor a defeat.
But the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is the Mexico of today.
Ken Salazar Set To Be A Popular Ambassador—But Whose>
Ken Salazar is the new U.S. ambassador to Mexico, a post vacant since January 20 [Ken Salazar rinde protesta como embajador de Estados Unidos en México (“Ken Salazar takes the oath as US ambassador to Mexico”), Excelsior, August 26, 2021].
A descendant of Spanish colonists of the Southwest from 400 years ago, Salazar was one of Colorado’s U.S. senators and Barack Hussein Obama’s Secretary of the Interior.
Of course, he received good marks from the Mexican media for being a “defender of the rights of the migrants” and for supporting the 2007 Amnesty attempt when he was in the Senate [Ken Salazar, polémico ecologista y defensor de migrantes despachará en México (“Ken Salazar, Polemic Ecologist and Defender of Migrants to be Dispatched to Mexico”), by Manuel Ocano, Excelsior, August 22, 2021].
Memo to Salazar: An ambassador represents the country that sends him. He doesn’t represent the people in the country to which he is sent.
Migrant Covid Deaths In Mexico
WuFlu is killing “migrants” traveling through Mexico. More than 2,000 have tested positive; nearly 100 have died:
In Mexico 84 deaths due to COVID-19 have been reported among migrants, equivalent to a 3.63 mortality rate, much higher than countries such as the United States, which reported 25 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic until today. The General Directorate of Epidemiology [DGE, for its initials in Spanish] reported that from 2020 to August 15 of 2021, 11,915 migrants have been examined under suspicion of COVID-19, of which, 19.4%, that is, 2,312, have tested positive and 84 have died.
[En México, 84 migrantes han muerto por covid-19: DGE (“In Mexico, 84 Migrants Have Died of COVID:19:DGE”), by Blanca Valadez, Milenio, August 23, 2021]
So plenty of contagious migrants are passing through Mexico on their way to our border.
Of course, we knew that. President Biden has been dumping virus-positive migrants all over Texas:
**NEW**: After an incident at a Whataburger, police in La Joya, TX say they’ve learned illegal immigrants who test positive for COVID-19 are being released from federal custody to a local Catholic charity in the RGV which then places them in local hotels without notice. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/cOx4yR5Wiw
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) July 27, 2021
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; his US Inc blog items are here, and his website is here.
