The afternoon was cold and starkly silent, broken only occasionally by passing cars honking in solidarity. A blue and white five-starred Honduran flag wavered in the breeze, one of many symbols marking the deaths this week of 39 immigrants who were trapped in a fire at a detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
“It was the State,” read one poster in Spanish.
“No human being is illegal,” proclaimed another text held aloft by a Mexican immigrant.
The small but passionate group of demonstrators took up position Friday afternoon in front of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles to protest what they decried as the inhumane immigration policies of the governments of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and President Biden. The Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants gathered on Park View Street vented emotions over the tragedy.
Women from Guatemala stand in solidarity in memory of the 39 people who were killed in the detention center fire.
(James Carbone/Los Angeles Times en Español)
Indignation. Sadness. Rage. Dread. Pain.
“It’s a shame,” lamented Francisco Moreno, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Council of Mexican Federations, over the conflagration in which 18 Guatemalans, seven Salvadorans, seven Venezuelans, six Hondurans and one Colombian lost their lives. More than two dozen other immigrants were injured in the blaze, the cause of which is under investigation. On Thursday, a Mexican court issued arrest orders for six people in relation to the fire, a move that has done nothing to assuage activists or the families of the dead.
Born in Michoacán, in west-central Mexico, Moreno is a veteran of protests against the anti-immigrant policies of former President Trump. Now he condemns the López Obrador administration for what he sees as its taking directives from the Biden administration in the same way that Mexico’s previous president, Enrique Peña Nieto, yielded to former President Obama, in Moreno’s…