MEXICO CITY — As many as six out of every 10 Central American women and girls are raped as they pass through Mexico hoping to cross illegally into the United States, Amnesty International said Wednesday.
The rapists include criminal gang members as well as local authorities in collusion with them, said Rupert Knox, an Amnesty International researcher on Mexico.
Knox called on Mexico to take action to end a “really chilling panorama” faced by migrants passing across its borders.
The London-based human-rights group issued a 48-page report titled “Invisible Victims” that says tens of thousands of migrants, nearly all of them from Central America, fall prey to gangs that rob, kidnap or rape them as they cross Mexico.
Much of the abuse occurs in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, where criminals who are in cahoots with rail conductors and local, state or federal police halt freight trains, which often are carrying hundreds of illegal migrants, it said. Problems are also severe in Tabasco and Veracruz states.
Many migrants who pass through those states, Knox said, “suffer abductions, sexual abuse, mistreatment, extortion, murder and other abuses that they endure in this voyage of terror.”
Last year, Mexican immigration authorities detained 64,061 migrants, about a fifth of them women or girls, the report says.
Migrants fear that if they report assaults, abductions or rapes, they’ll be deported to their home countries, it said.
Even when severe abuses are reported to the government, they remain a low priority for many state and federal authorities, the report says.
