Mexico tightens travel rules for Peruvians in a show of visa diplomacy to slow migration to the US

BOULEVARD, Calif. (AP) — Julia Paredes believed her move to the United States could be now or never. Mexico was just days away from requiring visas for Peruvian visitors. If she didn’t act quickly, she would have to make a much more dangerous and surreptitious journey overland to settle with her sister in Dallas.

Mexico began requiring visas for Peruvians on Monday in response to a large influx of migrants from the South American country, following identical measures for Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Brazilians. In fact, it eliminated the option of flying to a Mexican city near the U.S. border, as Paredes, 45, did just before it was too late.

“I had to treat it like an emergency,” said Paredes, who worked serving lunch to miners in Arequipa, Peru, and borrowed money to fly to Tijuana, Mexico, across from San Diego. Last month, smugglers guided her through a remote opening in the border wall to a dirty field in California, where she and about 100 migrants from around the world shivered over campfires after a morning drizzle and waited for overworked State Patrol agents. of the Border took them to a station. For processing.

Senior U.S. officials, speaking to reporters before a meeting of senior diplomats from about 20 Western Hemisphere countries this week in Guatemala, applauded Mexico’s crackdown on air travel from Peru and called the visa requirement an important tool for jointly tackle illegal migration.

For critics, ending air travel only encourages more dangerous choices. Illegal migration by Venezuelans plummeted after Mexico imposed visa requirements in January 2022, but the lull was short-lived. Last year, Venezuelans made up nearly two-thirds of the record 520,000 migrants who crossed the Darién Gap, the notorious jungle that spans parts of Panama and Colombia.

More than 25,000 Chinese crossed the Darien last year. They typically fly to Ecuador, a country known for few travel restrictions, and illegally cross the U.S. border at San Diego to seek asylum. With an immigration court backlog of more than 3 million cases, it takes years to resolve such claims, during which time people can obtain work permits and establish roots.

“People will come anyway,” said Miguel Yaranga, 22, who flew from Lima, the capital of Peru, to Tijuana and was released by Border Patrol on Sunday at a bus stop in San Diego. He was ordered to appear in New York immigration court in February 2025, which left him perplexed because he told agents he would make a deal with his sister on the other side of the country in Bakersfield, California.

Jeremy MacGillivray, deputy head of the U.N. International Organization for Migration’s Mexican mission, predicts that Peruvian migration will slow “at least initially” and rebound as people begin walking through the Darien Gap and into Central America and the Mexico.

Mexico said last month it would require visas for Peruvians for the first time since 2012, in response to a “substantial increase” in illegal migration. Large-scale Peruvian migration to Mexico began in 2022; Peruvians were detained in the country an average of 2,160 times per month, from January to March this year, above the monthly average of 544 times throughout 2023.

Peruvians also began appearing at the U.S. border in 2022. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended Peruvians on average about 5,300 times a month last year, before dropping to a monthly average of 3,400 from January to March in the middle of a broad repression of immigration by Mexico.

Peru immediately reciprocated Mexico’s visa demand, but changed course after a backlash from the country’s tourism industry. Peru noted in its reversal that it is part of a regional economic bloc that includes Mexico, Chile and Colombia.

Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said Peru’s membership of Mexico in the Pacific Alliance has allowed its citizens to travel visa-free for longer than other countries.

It’s unclear whether Colombia, also a major source of migration, will be next, but Isacson said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is having a “love fest” with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, while his Relations with the Peruvian government are more tense.

Colombians are consistently close to the top nationalities of migrants arriving at Tijuana airport. Many find hotels before a guide takes them into the boulder-strewn mountains east of the city, where they pass through openings in the border wall and then walk toward dirt plots that the Border Patrol has identified as waiting stations.

Bryan Ramírez, 25, from Colombia, arrived on American soil with his girlfriend last month, just two days after leaving Bogotá for Cancún, Mexico, and taking another flight to Tijuana. He waited alongside others through the night for Border Patrol agents to pick him up as cold rain and strong winds blew over crackling high-voltage power lines.

The group waiting near Boulevard, a small, vaguely defined rural town, included several Peruvians who said they had come looking for economic opportunities and to escape violence and political crises.

Peruvians can still avoid the Darién jungle by flying to El Salvador, which introduced visa-free travel for them in December in return for a similar move by the Peruvian government. But they would still have to travel overland through Mexico, where many are robbed or kidnapped.

Ecuadorians, who have needed a visa to enter Mexico since September 2021, can also fly to El Salvador, but not all do. Oscar Palacios, 42, said he passed through Darien because he couldn’t afford to travel by plane.

Palacios, who left his wife and one-year-old son in Ecuador with plans to support them financially from the U.S., said it took him two weeks to travel from his home near the violent city of Esmeralda to Mexico’s border with Guatemala. . It then took him two months to cross Mexico because immigration authorities turned him around three times and bused him back to the southern part of the country. He said he was robbed several times.

Palacios finally arrived in Tijuana and, after three nights in a hotel, crossed into the US. A Border Patrol agent spotted him with migrants from Turkey and Brazil and took them to the dirty lot to wait for a van or bus to take them to a processing station. Recalling the trip, Palacios said he would rather cross the Darien Gap 100 times than Mexico at least once.

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Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed.