The migrants won’t stay and fight for their country.
Via HMM:
Henry Diaz Reyes and about 1,500 other Central American migrants had just pushed past Guatemalan authorities and onto a border bridge to Mexico.
Mexican federal police were waiting for them in riot gear. The official border entry was closed, police said.
The migrants shouted obscenities and hurled rocks at the police, who responded by launching tear gas.
As the Oct. 28 scuffle escalated, projectiles started whizzing through the air. One struck Diaz, who fell to the ground, bleeding from his head. Rescuers rushed him to a hospital, where the 26-year-old was declared dead.
“He had so many plans,” said his half-sister, Glenda Reyes, who lives in Florida. Plans to work in the U.S. and have his son learn English. Plans to reunite with family members who had made the journey north and were finally living comfortable lives. “They took them,” Reyes said.
Large-scale confrontations on Mexico’s southern border were unheard of until last month. In the past, Mexican immigration agents regularly deported Central Americans in the country illegally, but usually after intercepting individuals or small groups well inside Mexico at checkpoints along highways or railroad tracks.
That changed in the run-up to the U.S. midterm election, when President Donald Trump began referring to migrant caravans as invasions and threatened to withhold aid from Mexico and Central American nations that failed to stop them.
In response, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto ordered hundreds of federal police to the southern border — putting them on a collision course with the groups of migrants mainly from Honduras that were heading north through Guatemala.
It is unclear what training or instructions the police on the border bridge had received.
Dozens of migrants and 10 police officers were injured the day Diaz was killed.
An autopsy performed by Guatemalan authorities found that Diaz died from a traumatic brain injury.
Mexican authorities have said police fired only tear gas. Found at the scene, however, were casings that two law enforcement experts said appeared to be from powerful projectiles that are designed to penetrate doors or other barriers and release chemical irritants — but not to be fired at people.[…]
A Mexican official who spoke on the condition of anonymity denied that federal police had fired such projectiles and said police do not use any products made by Combined Systems Inc. Asked where the projectiles may have come from, the official said: “We do not have that information.”
Human rights groups and journalists have documented past use of the same projectiles by police, including against crowds that demonstrated when Pena Nieto was sworn into office in 2012.
The day after Diaz was killed, the rest of the migrants he was traveling with waded across the Suchiate River illegally and continued their journey north mostly unimpeded by Mexican authorities.