A group of fifteen chicas -and a young gay man- arrived this March in Nogales, Sonora after five days of travel from Mexico City. The group will turn themselves in to the US border patrol on Friday and seek to highlight the problems they face as migrants.
A group of fifteen chicas -and a young gay man- arrived this March in Nogales, Sonora after five days of travel from Mexico City. The group will turn themselves in to the US border patrol on Friday and seek to highlight the problems they face as migrants.
Jocelyn, a young trans woman from Nicaragua, tells us from a refuge for migrants in Mexico that she had to leave her country because many of her friends were murdered. In Guadalajara, she says, she was kidnapped and forced to work in prostitution, under threat of death.
Adriana, a 17-year-old trans woman from Guatemala, describes a life of “discrimination, humiliation and verbal and psychological abuse”.
Génesis recounts rapes suffered in the state of Tabasco, by organized crime gangs and even by agents from Mexico's National Migration Institute. “They forced me to have sex in exchange for later gaining my freedom”, says the young trans woman.
The three women are part of a group of fifteen young Central American LGBTI women, who are traveling north in an organized way as the “Primera Caravana Trans Gay Migrante Ya Basta”. Some had been living and trying to get refuge in Mexico for some time, while others had just arrived from Central America, said the group's spokespeople.
The objective: to ask for asylum in the United States and to pay attention to the abuses and violations suffered by trans women in Central America and migrants who dare to escape north.
The group began this stage of their journey on July 20 from Mexico City and this March 25 they arrived in Nogales, Sonora, from where on Friday they will hand themselves over to the US authorities asking for asylum, said Nakay Flotte, organizer of the Caravan and part of the Diversidad Sin Fronteras group.
Flotte spoke to La Opinión by telephone from Nogales and explained that the Caravan has several objectives, among them “to be able to observe and put a magnifying glass on the migration of trans people and prevent the systematic violence they are subjected to”.
Flotte, whose full name is Roberto Nakey Flotte, is from Chihuahua and is studying the phenomenon of sexual abuse against trans migrants in Mexico, as part of his doctoral thesis in Anthropology at Harvard University.
“When I started my research, I realized that sexual violence against trans women is a critical issue,” said Flotte, who is also trans. “The majority of trans women who arrive in Mexico from Central America are raped by organized crime or by the same authorities.”.
In addition, the media attention offers a certain protection to the group of trans women, against the abuse and insults and violations that they sometimes suffer when they move through certain areas of this country, said Flotte.
On Friday, the fifteen LGBTI migrants, including migrant chicas, mostly from Guatemala and Honduras, a gay man from El Salvador, a young nica and a chiapaneca, will hold a press conference in Nogales on the Mexican side, while trans groups and activists will hold a parallel event on the Arizona side.
Margo Cowan, an attorney from Tucson, Arizona, will legally assist them with political asylum cases, and the activists hope to convince the border authorities to release “most of the girls”, Flotte said.
The young trans women, whose ages range from 20 to 25, with the exception of the underage girl mentioned above, “come mentally prepared for the possibility of being arrested” by the US authorities, but hope to have a better time with the US law than they did in Mexico, where most of them were unable to obtain refuge.
Source: La Opinion