Tapachula, Chiapas, México September 1, 2007
Tapchula, the southern most city in Chiapas, is a city known for the Central American migrants passing through on the train as they head to the United States and as an area of destination for Guatemala migrant workers. Hundreds of Guatemalan women and girls come to Tapchula to work as domestic workers. In addition, approximately, 60,000 Guatemalans migrate annually to work in the harvest in the southern plantations. All of these workers suffer labor abuses, the extent of which is largely unknown. The one and only human rights organization in Tapachula, the Center for Human Rights, Fray Matias (almost all of the human rights organization in Chiapas are named after Jesuit priests) is just beginning to expand its work with the abused Guatemalan migrants. After some outreach campaigns on labor rights resulted in workers decrying exploitation, they are further exploring bringing labor cases on behalf of the workers. At the present they just support, but do not directly represent, workers through the Ministry of Work labor complaint process. Distressingly, the state only employs one lawyer to bring labor complaints to court for a multi-county area. With only one lawyer to bring claims free of charge for thousands of workers one can only imagine the amount of injustice that goes unaddressed. For the few labor cases that Fray Matias has supported, many were halted due to portable justice issues that is the cases were dropped because the workers returned to Guatemala.