MEXICO CITY, Aug 30, 2017 (BSS/AFP) – Mexican authorities said Tuesday they rescued 133 Central American migrants, including 34 children, from a house where they were apparently locked up and abandoned while being trafficked to the United States.
The undocumented migrants, who came from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, were locked up in “overcrowded conditions” in a house in a remote area in the southeastern state of Tabasco, the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Authorities found them after receiving an anonymous tip, it said.
Two people were arrested on kidnapping charges. The migrants were handed over to immigration authorities.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants cross Mexico each year seeking to reach the United States. Central Americans who make the trip are often fleeing brutal gang violence in their home countries. The trend reached crisis levels in 2014, when some 69,000 unaccompanied children flooded the US-Mexican border.
They often travel in perilous conditions, prey to human traffickers known as “coyotes” and drug gangs that charge them “taxes” to cross their turf.
Last month,10 migrants suffocated to death in the back of a truck that was found in a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, just across the border.