Migrants eager to reach Mexico City

MEXICO CITY — Thousands of exhausted migrants from the Central American caravan trudged along highways Monday toward Mexico City, where officials prepared a sports stadium to accommodate them as they try to reach the U.S. border still hundreds of miles away.

The first wave of more than 500 migrants spent Sunday night on concrete benches at the Jesus Martinez stadium, where they were served hot meals as authorities prepared to receive as many as 5,000 migrants from the lead caravan and several smaller ones hundreds of miles behind it. Nashieli Ramirez, ombudsman for the city’s human rights commission, said the migrants would be able to stay at the stadium as long as necessary.

“We have the space in terms of humanitarian help,” Ramirez said.

In a thundering voice vote late Sunday at a gymnasium in Cordoba, in the Gulf state of Veracruz, hundreds of the estimated 4,000 migrants in the lead caravan voted to strike out for the capital, eager to leave a part of the country that has long been treacherous for migrants trying to get to the United States. Cordoba is 178 miles from Mexico City by the shortest route, which would be the group’s longest single-day journey yet since they began more than three weeks ago.

But the group encountered obstacles Monday. Truck after truck denied the migrants rides as they trudged miles along the highway, experiencing a taste of the colder weather of central Mexico. At a toll booth near Fortin, Veracruz, Rafael Leyva, an unemployed cobbler, stood with a few hundred others for more than 45 minutes without finding a ride.

“People help more in Chiapas and Oaxaca,” Leyva reflected, referring to the southern Mexican states the group had already traversed and where pickup trucks frequently stopped to offer rides.

Migrants were seen grouping in front of tractor-trailers, forcing the big rigs to stop so that fellow migrants could climb aboard.

This impromptu ridesharing is precarious, with dozens scrambling onto vehicles at a time, and leaves some behind. And police will force the migrants off vehicles if the drivers complain.

Most of the weary caravan participants camped Sunday in Cordoba, a colonial city in the Veracruz sugar belt. But they were eager to divert toward Mexico City from Veracruz, a state where hundreds of migrants have disappeared in recent years, falling prey to kidnappers looking for ransom payments. They are still more than 600 miles from the U.S. border.