As soon as the celebration of Todos Santos ended, on November 1 and 2, the massive migration of day laborers Mexicans to the interior of the country, mainly from southern states, the most impoverished. In 2020, more than 15,300 men, women, girls, boys and adolescents left the Guerrero Mountain alone to work in fields in the north, center and west. In this year, until last October, 10,572 people have traveled.
“Son displacements, to very distant places, of children, pregnant mothers, working mothers and a large population that leaves without any institutional support and without official registration, ”said Abel Barrera, founder of the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center. The registry of last year and of this one has been raised by personnel of that organization.
At the beginning of the confinement, in April 2020, the agricultural sector it was declared by the federal government as an essential activity. “The newspaper families they were forced to leave their communities, “because” their economic situation is very precarious, “said Barrera at a press conference from the Casa del Jornalero Agrícola, in Tlapa, Guerrero.
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the primary sector, which includes agriculture, grew 0.7% in the third quarter of 2021 compared to the same period of 2020. These activities contributed more than 605,156 million pesos. However, the salaries of these people do not usually exceed 200 pesos a day, according to the National Network of Day Laborers and Agricultural Workers.
The number of agricultural workers has increased, stressed the anthropologist and activist. In 2020, Tlachinollan registered more than 7,669 “old women, young people, mothers and girls”. 7,754 men and boys traveled with them.
Of the 15,323 people who migrated from the Guerrero mountain region, 6,553 were children and adolescents. In other words, it is 42% of the migrant population. In the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school cycles, Inegi reported a high level of school dropout, more than 310 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 dropped out of school because they had to work, according to the Survey to Measure the Impact of COVID-19 on Education (Ecovid-Ed).
From January to September 2021, Tlachinollan has registered that of the 10,572 migrant day laborers, 2,286 are children and adolescents. The representation of this population fell to 21 percent.
Abandonment of authorities
“After November 2, whole families leave and are already preparing to move to the agricultural fields” of Michoacan, Zacatecas, Sinaloa and Baja CaliforniaMainly, explained Abel Barrera, a human rights defender. Some travel in private vans, but many more in buses that are hired by families or sent by agricultural companies.
On November 3, seven trucks with working population from Ayotzinapa and Malinaltepec, informed Miguel Martínez Peralta, from the Council of Agricultural Laborers of the Mountain. A day later, on the 4th, “another 6 trucks left the communities of Jilotepec and Tototepec.” On the 6th and 7th another 23 trucks from Ayotzinapa left.
its migratory situation, even in their own country, puts them in a place of vulnerability, stressed Barrera. And they face it without institutional support from any of the three levels of government. There is “no tracking” of their trip and neither of the conditions in which they work at their destinations.
“In this new season we are not finding an echo in the state authorities to attend to the working day indigenous population of the mountain. It requires an inter-institutional intervention ”and intergovernmental, he said.
“People are leaving and there is no health care, lodging, water service” for their transit to be decent. “And in the fields they are exploited, deceived, looked down upon. And there are situations of another type, he faces mistreatment, discrimination by authorities, bosses and butlers ”.
People leave “with the hope of being able to improve the life conditions. But we know they are in a situation of abandonment, lack of attention, girls and boys do not go to school, mothers work in conditions that are not conducive to their health, they travel in dilapidated buses ”.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx