Caribbean people offer more than 20 thousand pesos to get married, which, according to the same agreement, will last one year
Marriages of convenience between Mexicans and Haitians are on the rise; Caribbean people pay more than 20 thousand pesos to obtain a document that regularizes their stay in our country and thus reach the northern border with the hope of crossing into the United States. According to data obtained by El Sol de México in the Civil Registry offices of Chiapas, Baja California, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Puebla, and Guanajuato, from September 1 to October there have been 42 marriages between Mexican and Haitian women, the highest figure since 2000.
One case is that of Luisa, who traveled from Mexico City to Tapachula last month to marry Leroi, a native of Haiti, in exchange for 25 thousand pesos and the expenses of the transfer. As she tells this newspaper, she was contacted through a “friend” who works in an alleged organization for the protection of human rights, first to work as a manager of immigration procedures and then to marry Leroi.
Luisa said she was aware of the situation and even said she was not even attracted to her new husband. “Maybe it’s not right, but if I can help him and he can help me, I don’t see the bad,” said Luisa, who preferred to leave her job in a call center to move to Chiapas to marry Leroi.
In the opinion of Javier Urbano, a specialist in immigration, due to the delays in the processing of refugee status by the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, which has been overwhelmed in recent months by the increase in the arrival of undocumented immigrants from Haiti and Central America, migrants see in marriage a solution to the impediment of moving through the country, so they look for Mexican people willing to marry in exchange for financial support that can reach 30 thousand Mexican pesos.
These are, Urbano explained, contracts that do not oblige the spouse to comply with any type of sexual relationship, much less a “happily ever after” because with the marriage there is also an agreement for the divorce to take place formally after 12 months of marriage.
Negotiations for this type of marriage contract are regularly conducted, according to Urbano, by groups of human traffickers who, unable to take them to the northern border, compensate them with an arranged marriage.
The increase in marriages of convenience coincides with the announcement by the Joe Biden government, on September 18, of applying the policy of mass deportation of migrants from Haiti who managed to enter the United States from Mexico. In Tapachula, Chiapas, for example, since September 1, 13 Mexican women have married Haitians.
In Baja California, a border state with the United States, there are nine, seven in Mexicali and two in Tijuana, while in Ciudad Juárez there are eight and another eight in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Other cities in the center of the country through which migrants traditionally travel to the United States, such as Guanajuato and Puebla, register, for the first time in 10 years, marriages between Haitians and Mexican women; three and one respectively.
In accordance with the Migration Law in force in its article 9, the Civil Registry officials cannot deny migrants, regardless of their immigration status, the authorization of civil status acts, nor the issuance of certificates related to birth, recognition of children, marriage, divorce, and death.
