CNN
 — 

A bus crash in the Mexican state of Oaxaca killed 16 people on Friday, according to local authorities, who say most of the passengers were migrants.

Three children and two women are among the victims, all of whom are from Venezuela and Haiti, the Oaxaca state attorney general said. At least 27 people were injured and transported to nearby hospitals.

Pictures posted by authorities on Facebook show the large bus flipped over and heavily damaged on a curve of the mountainous Oaxaca-Cuacnopalan highway.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the accident, which took place at 5 a.m. local time (7 a.m. ET). The Oaxaca state attorney general’s office had first said 18 people died in the crash, then revised its count late on Friday evening.

The tragedy follows the deaths of at least 10 Cuban migrants, including a child, on Sunday, when the truck they were traveling in also overturned in southern Mexico, according to local authorities.

Venezuela and Haiti are sources of large numbers of migrants traveling northward, fleeing insecurity and economic crisis at home.

US and Mexican officials have struggled to respond to the arrivals, with Washington putting increasing pressure on Mexico City to shoulder more responsibility for people crossing its territory.

Food shortages and limited access to health care have driven more than 7.7 million people from Venezuela alone – a scale of displacement that outpaces Ukraine, where there’s an active war.

On Thursday, senior officials in the Biden administration said the US would restart deporting Venezuelans directly to Venezuela in an attempt to curb the record influx, marking a major shift in policy.

Haiti meanwhile is waiting for a new multinational mission to help bring order to the country, currently roiled by unchecked gang violence, kidnappings and food insecurity.

Bogota
CNN
 — 

Venezuelan authorities on Thursday issued an arrest warrant for opposition leader and former interim president Juan Guaido, who dismissed the move as politically motivated.

During a press conference in the capital Caracas, Attorney General Tarek William Saab alleged that Guaido had used the state-owned oil company PDVSA’s resources to finance himself and pay his legal expenses.

“Juan Guaido used PDVSA resources to finance himself, pay his legal expenses, and forced PDVSA to accept his financing terms. These decisions caused losses to the nation of $19 billion, resulting in the almost definitive loss of Citgo,” Saab said, adding that Venezuela will request a red notice from Interpol.

“For this reason, we have opened a new investigation against former deputy Juan Guaido, and we have requested an arrest warrant against him,” he said.

Guaido served as the interim president of Venezuela’s transitional government from 2019 until late 2022 – when he was ousted from his leadership role after struggling to make significant gains against the authoritarian regime of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

This spring, Guaido traveled to Miami, where he has remained. Speaking to CNN on Friday, he said, “Of course, I want to be back in Venezuela, but at least here I am alive and free, which is not the same for many Venezuelans who are behind bars or have been murdered by the dictatorship.”

Saab said the arrest warrant against Guaido will be for the alleged crimes of treason; usurpation of functions; profit or extraction of money, securities and public goods; money laundering; and association.

He also said that least 28 investigations are ongoing in the country against Guaido for a raft of alleged crimes including usurpation of functions, money laundering, terrorism, arms trafficking, and treason.

“Those who at some point believed in this guy and went out to march; they see that they found it to be a vulgar criminal of the worst caliber, robbing and kidnapping,” Saab said.

Guaido’s spokesperson declined to comment on the allegations, but during a live transmission on his Instagram account, Guaido described them as “false” and challenged President Maduro to submit to justice himself.

“This message goes to you, Maduro, tomorrow let’s meet at any prosecutor’s office in the US or, if you prefer, another jurisdiction, The Hague. We can then go directly to the jurisdiction that also points (to) you directly,” Guaido said.

In June, the International Criminal Court ruled that prosecutors should resume investigating alleged crimes against humanity in Venezuela by security forces under President Maduro.

“The question is, why now? Why did the dictatorship not do it before?” he said of the arrest warrant. “So no, Maduro, I did not allow you to kidnap me, I will not allow you to take away my voice, and I will continue to denounce you in all places where possible, as a criminal.”

Venezuela is due to hold a presidential vote in 2024, though critics have cast doubt on whether elections can be free and fair in the country’s repressive political climate.

Guaido called on his followers to vote in the upcoming opposition primary election on October 22, saying, “today the vote is kidnapped in Venezuela, but we have an opportunity to mobilize again to confront Nicolas Maduro.”

The US, which had long been a supporter of Guaido, has somewhat softened its stance toward Caracas as the region struggles with rising energy costs and hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.

On Thursday, senior officials in the Biden administration said the US will restart deporting Venezuelans directly to Venezuela in an attempt to curb the record influx of crossings at the US-Mexico border, marking a major shift in policy.

Venezuelans who cross the US-Mexico border unlawfully and lack a legal basis to remain in the US will be eligible for removal, the senior administration officials said, adding that Venezuela had agreed to accept back its nationals.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the new policy “a key piece” of the administration’s approach to migration. Advocacy groups however have slammed the shift as dangerous for deportees; the policy will “likely lead to unsafe returns,” Refugees International warned in a statement.

In his interview with CNN on Friday, Guaido said he didn’t believe that the deportation deal was connected to his arrest. However, he did say that it underlined Maduro’s interest in gaining international recognition as Venezuela’s head of state.

“They are not going to stop the migration situation just by stopping migration or connect flights. We need to put a stop to the regime and recover rights in Venezuela,” Guaidó said.

“The only thing Maduro is looking for is recognition, and even with these deportation flights, he’s going to spin them as de facto recognition for his regime. That’s what he gets from this,” he continued.

“We never expected that Venezuelan migrants would reach the US directly, on foot, from Venezuela. Those are thousands of miles of desperation through the jungle. But we need to change the situation in Venezuela, bringing the country back to democracy, if we want to solve the migration crisis.”

Tijuana, Mexico
CNN
 — 

Estefanía Rebellón knows the trauma that stems from being forced to flee your home for safety. She understands the fear and uncertainty felt by the more than 70 million migrant and forcibly displaced children around the world.

She was a migrant child, too.

“My family’s case is the case of many refugees and migrants at the border. It was never a choice for our family to leave our home. We were forced out of it,” Rebellón, 32, said.

She was 10 when her family fled Cali, Colombia, because of death threats to her father, who had been forced into hiding. They settled in Miami, and with the support of teachers at school, Rebellón thrived. Now, through her nonprofit, Yes We Can World Foundation, she provides education for children living in limbo in shelters at the US-Mexico border.

Rebellón moved from Miami to Los Angeles when she was 21 to pursue an acting career. In 2018, she was so moved after volunteering in migrant camps in Tijuana that she put her career on hold.

“There were no schools set up to help these kids. They were walking around the camps barefoot,” she said. “I couldn’t forget about what I had just seen. And I was like, ‘I literally have to go back.’”

Rebellón and her partner, Kyle Schmidt, used about $1,000 of their savings to buy tents and supplies and set up a makeshift school at the border. They enlisted volunteer teachers to provide learning opportunities in the camps.

“We set up a school overnight and … told just a couple of kids,” Rebellón said. “It spread throughout the camp, and we had like over 50 kids surrounding us.”

In the months that followed, when those families living in the camps were moved to shelters, Rebellón and Schmidt wanted to continue offering educational services.

“I thought, “Why don’t we turn a bus into a mobile classroom, and we could take it to all the different shelters?” Rebellón said. “We literally just Googled and YouTubed how to convert a bus into a mobile classroom.”

Over the next year, Rebellón and Schmidt bought and gutted a bus, partnered with shelters, and drove the transformed bus over the border. Their goal: to provide bilingual educational programs to keep children in school.

“All the families that we work with and all the children that we work with on a daily basis are legally seeking asylum,” Rebellón said. “They’re going through all the processes that are being required of them.”

Rebellón’s organization hires professional teachers and tailors their curriculum to the specific needs of each student. The program has been accredited by the education secretary in Mexico and serves children ages 3 to 15 – a crucial period for education, Rebellón says.

Despite the challenges she faced as a migrant child, she says she was lucky to have teachers who advocated for her and guided her along the way.

Many migrant children do not have this support and often fall through the cracks and miss valuable school time. Many have been on the road for months, if not years, and have difficulty attending school because they are often in transit, without a permanent home. Safety, economic instability, poverty, lack of transportation, and perceived legal status are also factors.

“People don’t realize that this is such a long process for families,” Rebellón said. “It’s not just like you arrive at the border, you seek asylum, and your life is all rainbows. It takes decades and a lot of work and a lot of pain.”

Rebellón’s family navigated a decades-long legal process to obtain political asylum and later US citizenship. Her parents, both lawyers by trade, were forced to abandon their careers in Colombia and take on new jobs in the US to support their family of five. Her mother worked multiple jobs as a caregiver and her father worked nights at Walmart. He has worked there full time for nearly 20 years.

“Any time I get a chance, I share my immigration story with (the kids),” Rebellón said. “I always want the kids that come through our programs to realize that being a migrant is not something they need to be ashamed of.”

Today, Yes We Can Foundation educates 250-300 kids a day through its four school locations along the border and three mobile school buses. Since 2019, Rebellón says the group has served more than 3,100 migrant children from 10 countries.

Their program runs Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. School runs for the entire year, with no summer breaks. They also provide free uniforms, backpacks, and school supplies. Lessons focus on common core instruction in the subjects of language arts, math, and science as well as addressing practical and immediate needs like how to translate basic information including phone numbers and addresses.

“I want our efforts to be something permanent,” Rebellón said. “And that when it’s all said and done, we will be proud to look back and say that we were there when people needed us the most.”

Want to get involved? Check out the Yes We Can World Foundation website and see how to help.

To donate to Yes We Can World Foundation via GoFundMe, click here

Mexico City
CNN
 — 

Last month, as the Biden administration scrambled to manage the latest wave of migrants overwhelming the US southern border, top US immigration authorities crossed into Mexico for an emergency meeting.

Seated around a Ciudad Juárez conference room, the officials and their Mexican counterparts drafted a 15-point plan to help defuse the flashpoint – most of it a checklist of actions for the Mexican government. Notably, according to a readout from Mexico’s federal immigration agency, Mexico agreed to carry out more costly deportations of the migrants gathering on their side of the border – a move that some believed would dissuade disorderly crossings.

The measures, which also specified Mexican efforts to clamp down on the crush of migrants riding north on railcars, are the latest in a series of policy shifts in Mexico that have alleviated, if slightly, the massive political headache in Washington caused perennially by migration. Analysts in both countries see a pragmatic bargain: as Mexico increasingly carries the weight of US immigration strategy, the Biden administration has granted rare leeway to the country’s divisive but popular leader.

“Mexico has real leverage in the relationship with the US. And right now that leverage is around migration,” said Andrew Selee, the president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Sharing nearly 2,000 miles of land border and a history of important economic exchange, Mexico and the US have long held intertwined immigration policies that adapted as international migration patterns shifted. When George W. Bush made his first trip out of the US as president in 2001, it was to the ranch of Vicente Fox, the Mexican leader, to discuss a new era of cooperation on border issues, like trade, drugs, and the northward flow of Mexicans, who at that time comprised the bulk of undocumented border-crossers.

But as spiraling violence and desperate economic conditions fueled years of mass migration out of Central America and the Caribbean to the US, overpowering the country’s legal intake system, the stretch of Mexican territory in between became a critical “buffer state,” said Maureen Meyer of the Washington Office on Latin America.

“The Mexico southern border pretty much was the US southern border,” Meyer said.

Under pressure from several US administrations, Mexico has repeatedly sent resources to its border with Guatemala over the past 10 years to formalize migration routes and detained record numbers of migrants at newly installed checkpoints as they made their way north.

At the helm of Mexico’s latest immigration coordination with the US has been President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftist leader who in 2018 campaigned on resistance to doing the US’s “dirty work” on migration. His political calculus has changed swiftly since then.

Under the threat of crippling tariffs from then-President Donald Trump, López Obrador agreed in 2019 to allow asylum applicants to wait out their claims inside Mexico under the “Remain in Mexico” policy, roiling activists who said it forced migrants into dangerous living conditions.

During the pandemic, when the US employed a public health measure known as Title 42 to turn around many asylum seekers at the border, López Obrador agreed to receive many of the migrants, reversing a long-standing position in the country and straining the resources of Mexico’s own border cities. In May, as the US ended the use of Title 42, López Obrador continued to allow the returns on “humanitarian grounds.”

“I think these more recent steps really do cross another line because it is not just stopping people from coming to the United States, which has been the more enforcer role,” Meyer said.

“It is actually allowing people deported from the United States to either stay in Mexico, or in this case now, actually maybe actively returning them back to their home countries for the United States,” she said.

Details on the deportation plan announced last month have been limited. In a news conference from Washington on Friday, Mexican Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena said that Mexican authorities were carrying out six flights each week to return migrants to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Bárcena added that officials were “exploring” the possibility of expanding the returns to Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia.

It was unclear where the deportation flights were taking place and when they had begun. It also couldn’t be learned if the migrants being returned had already been deported from the US or if they had pending asylum claims. Stakeholders in Mexico told CNN last week that there had not appeared to be any significant change in the pace of repatriation flights in the country’s north.

A spokeswoman for Mexico’s federal immigration agency declined to provide more details on the deportations.

But the announcement may already have had the effect of discouraging migrants from crossing to the US without the appointment required to seek an asylum claim. In the weekend that followed the meeting, the number of migrants encountered by border authorities entering the US near El Paso, Texas, fell by about 30%, CNN has reported.

Last Wednesday, López Obrador also announced that he was planning a summit with officials from several Latin American and Caribbean countries “whose populations are migrating” to be held in the coming days. Mexico also last month agreed to urge countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba — which have limited diplomatic relations with the US — to take back their citizens deported at the border.

“What we are looking for is to reach an agreement to confront the migration phenomenon by addressing the causes,” López Obrador said at a news conference. “We have to align ourselves.”

The recent cooperation between the two countries has come with a busy schedule of shuttle diplomacy. Last week, Bárcena held meetings in Washington with Senate leaders and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s homeland security advisor. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to Mexico this week along with other cabinet secretaries and meet with López Obrador.

For Mexican negotiators, the country’s increased responsibilities have often been conditioned on a US commitment to grow the ways that migrants can enter the country legally, like through temporary work visas and a recently expanded humanitarian parole program that the Biden administration says has allowed tens of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who meet certain conditions, including a local sponsor in the US, to fly into the country and secure work authorization.

Last month, ahead of the announcement around Mexican deportations, Mexico’s foreign minister told Bloomberg in an interview that the US and Mexico were nearing an agreement with the United Nations to pre-screen tens of thousands of migrants in Mexico for entry into the US under the parole programs. The US has opened similar processing centers in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

A United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees spokesperson told CNN that the organization is “regularly in contact with US and Mexican authorities including on how we can provide support to possible future initiatives.”

“Politically for the Mexican government, they can’t do enhanced enforcement without showing that they are also fighting for the well-being of migrants and for legal opportunities, because it is a country with a history of migration to the United States,” Selee said.

A free hand for Lopez Obrador?

Still, some analysts see a more cynical incentive behind the cooperation, arguing that the Biden administration has largely turned a blind eye to elements of López Obrador’s agenda that would have typically drawn rebuke.

“López Obrador very quickly understood that if he gave into Biden’s request for support he would have significant political capital to ensure that US pressure on a number of either bilateral issues or domestic Mexican policy issues would be constrained,” said Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to Washington who has been a critic of the current administration.

Detractors point to democratic backsliding in a number of López Obrador’s positions: an attempted reform of the country’s independent election authority, frequent criticism of the judiciary and the press, and the capitulation of state powers on policing and transportation to the military.

The election reform, which was passed earlier this year but later blocked by the Mexican Supreme Court, diminished the country’s independent election authority, cutting its workforce across the country and limiting its autonomy ahead of a presidential vote next year.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans marched on the capital against the policy in the largest opposition protest of López Obrador’s presidency. Critics decried it as a dangerous erosion of democratic institutions.

But in Washington, the Biden administration was unusually muted. In a statement following the February protests, Ned Price, a senior adviser to Blinken, described “a great debate on electoral reforms on the independence of electoral and judicial institutions that illustrates Mexico’s vibrant democracy.”

“We respect Mexico’s sovereignty. We believe that a well-resourced, independent electoral system and respect for judicial independence support healthy democracy,” Price said.

If Mexico had less leverage in its relationship with the US, “I think that you’d see greater public pressure from the State Department, from the White House, on the slippery slope of democratic erosion that we’re seeing in Mexico,” Sarukhán said.

“I think the United States should be invested in Mexico’s democratic strength because if not, what you’ll have in Washington sooner or later is someone asking the question, ‘Who lost Mexico and why?’” he added.