RAFAEL LARA GRAJALES, Mexico — The Sunday afternoon calm was broken by shouts from the small mission-style house, watched over by a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Bloodied hands punched through the windows. The glass shattered. Dozens of people were clambering over the back wall and jumping onto the street below.
The men and women ran up to shocked townsfolk and pleaded in their Central American accents: We were kidnapped. The local police are involved. Please help.
For a moment, the people of this small Mexican migrant town hesitated. Then, in an act that defied years of resignation in the face of immigrant abuse, they got on cellphones and bullhorns to mobilize the entire town. And in doing so, they launched a challenge to Mexico’s long tradition of complaining about treatment of Mexican migrants in the United States, while treating Central American migrants at home even worse.
Tens of thousands of Central American migrants pass through Mexico every year on their way to the U.S., but the journey is perilous. Only a handful reach the U.S. border without being robbed, beaten or raped, either by thieves or by Mexican officials.
Rafael Lara Grajales is a waystation on the route, a place to change trains and beg for food or spare change during the hour-long layover. Townspeople rarely turn the migrants down, handing over a few pesos or a leftover taco.
The town’s underlying sympathy for the migrants exploded into full-blown activism when bruised and broken people began spilling out of the house at No. 4 East St. on Oct. 12.
Many of the more than 60 people inside later said they had been picked up by police, who turned them over to kidnappers. They were then crammed into the house, robbed of their money and belongings and forced to strip off their clothes.
Their families received ransom calls demanding payments of up to $5,000 for their release, they said.
By the afternoon of Oct. 12, the migrants turned on the two captors present, who they said stabbed a man and then fled.
After spilling over the walls, the migrants begged for help. A few residents of Rafael Lara Grajales ran to the main square, where they interrupted a Columbus Day celebration.
Dozens of townspeople joined them, pulling old clothes from their closets for the nearly naked migrants. Others handed out food and bandaged bloody hands.
Police soon arrived. They arrested the two kidnapping suspects, who had been cornered in an empty lot.
Police then moved to put the migrants onto a van, witnesses said. But the crowd was outraged.
They feared police were involved in the kidnapping and were taking the migrants away to kill them, according to Elizabeth Bautista, who watched from a distance with her son.
The crowd began shouting at the migrants not to board the bus: “Don’t get on! You aren’t safe!” The migrants panicked and began crawling out the windows. Police grabbed them and shoved them back in.
One man with a bullhorn called more townspeople to come to their aid. The crowd quickly swelled to hundreds.
A few people hurled rocks at the van, and the multitude began pushing against riot police surrounding City Hall, witnesses said.
The migrants scattered through the streets and hid in houses.
Finally, federal police rolled in and began going door to door to look for the migrants.
In the end, they rounded up 21 migrants and took them into custody for deportation. Of those, 15 have been deported. The others are being held and will serve as witnesses to the events of Oct. 12.
