Mexico confirms CCTV footage showing guards leaving migrants to die in blazing building

The government has launched an investigation into the disaster in Ciudad Juarez

Migrants and activists at a makeshift memorial to the migrants who died in a fire in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, March 28, 2023. AFP

At least 38 migrants were burnt alive in Mexico after being trapped in a blazing building as guards at a nearby detention centre did nothing to help, CCTV footage released on Tuesday showed.

Mexico’s government has confirmed the authenticity of the video, which matches accounts from survivors of the fire in Ciudad Juarez, near the US border.

In the video, two guards are seen leaving a door shut with at least one man trapped in the fire on the other side. Women and children had reportedly already been released from the blazing building.

Victims of the fire were reportedly from Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador and Guatemala, many of them working illegally washing cars and doing other menial work.

“I was desperate because I saw a dead body, a body, a body, and I didn’t see him anywhere,” Infante Padron said of her husband, Eduard Caraballo Lopez, who in the end survived with only light injuries, perhaps because he was scheduled for release and was near a door.

Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, which ran the facility, said it was co-operating in the investigation. Guatemala has already said that many of the victims were its citizens, but full identification of the dead and injured remains incomplete.

US authorities have offered to treat some of the 28 victims in critical or serious condition, most apparently from smoke inhalation.

For many, the tragedy was the foreseeable result of a long series of decisions made by leaders in places such as Venezuela and Central America, by immigration policymakers in Mexico and the United States, right down to residents in Ciudad Juarez complaining about the number of migrants asking for handouts on street corners.

“You could see it coming,” more than 30 migrant shelters and other advocacy organisations said in statement on Tuesday. “Mexico’s immigration policy kills.”

Those same advocacy organisations published an open letter on March 9 that complained of the criminalisation of migrants and asylum seekers in Ciudad Juarez. It accused authorities of abusing migrants and using excessive force in rounding them up, including complaints that municipal police questioned people in the street about their immigration status without cause.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered sympathy on Tuesday, but held out little hope of change.

He said the fire was started by migrants in protest after learning they would be deported or moved.

“They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune,” Mr Lopez Obrador said.

Immigration activist Irineo Mujica said the migrants feared being sent back, not necessarily to their home countries, but to southern Mexico, where they would have to cross the country all over again.

“When people reach the north, it’s like a ping-pong game — they send them back down south,” Mr Mujica said.

“We had said that with the number of people they were sending, the sheer number of people was creating a ticking time bomb," Mr Mujica said. "Today that time bomb exploded.”

The migrants were stuck in Ciudad Jaurez because US immigration policy does not allow them to cross the border to file asylum claims. But they were rounded up because Ciudad Juarez residents were tired of migrants blocking border crossings or asking for money.

The high level of frustration in Ciudad Juarez was evident earlier this month when hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants tried to force their way across one of the international bridges to El Paso, acting on false rumours that the United States would allow them to enter the country. US authorities blocked their attempts.