Express citizenship: the new border market
The offers even arrive on WhatsApp. From Mexico, gangs offer complete packages of documents to migrants who are in the United States and fear deportation. For about $4,390, they promise birth certificates, CURP and even a driver’s license.
“Are you in the United States and would you like to have Mexican citizenship? We have the solution!”
This is how they operate. The first package includes the “owner’s” certificate, the father’s certificate, CURP, “insurance” and license. If there are two minutes, they even give a discount: $4,209. And they send it to you wherever you are.
When the system pushes towards illegality
“It is the new business and it has already been a scandal and nothing happens,” says Luis Alfonso Abarca González of the Digna Ochoa Committee.
The activist points out the vicious circle: institutions such as the INM and Comar systematically deny refuge to Cubans. Without legal options, many end up seeking out these criminal networks.
The business is fueled by deportations from the US. Cubans without legal stay are expelled… and there appears the offer of Mexican records.
The network is international. Since December, the sale of records to migrants who went to Mexican consulates in Asia and the United States was detected.
In Tapachula they dismantled an internet cafe in front of Comar offices. There, hundreds of African, Caribbean and South American migrants sought to regularize themselves every day. It was there where five Cubans bought the records that they later presented at the Houston consulate.
Two men posed as lawyers sent from Mexico City to “speed up” procedures. They charged between 2,500 and 5,000 pesos for false promises. Today they are fugitives.
Corruption comes with an official seal
On January 12, the Civil Registry denounced three officials in Tzimol, Chiapas. They had registered an Iraqi citizen as being born in that municipality on the border with Guatemala.
An audit detected anomalies in the systems for issuing and correcting minutes. The three employees – Jorge Ervin “N”, Juan “N” and José “N” – were linked to organizations that move migrants from the south to the north of the country.
“These people were assigned to the municipality of Tzimol, in the systematization area,” reported prosecutor Jorge Luis Llaven.
The investigation file remains open. In case more cases appear. As usual.
