“Dark Passage” is a project, about the long and difficult journey through Mexico that thousands of migrants – mostly illegal Central-American and Mexicans - face everyday along the way to the United States of America. The unique geographical location of Mexico, has made a long passage of this country, which migrants around the world use to reach the ideal of enhancing their life condition in the United States. This vast territory is turning into a “dark passage”, because in the last decade a number of factors have increased the difficulties along the way, making them vulnerable to crime.
“Dark Passage†is a project, about the long and difficult journey through Mexico that thousands of migrants – mostly illegal Central-American and Mexicans - face everyday along the way to the United States of America. The unique geographical location of Mexico, has made a long passage of this country, which migrants around the world use to reach the ideal of enhancing their life condition in the United States. This vast territory is turning into a “dark passageâ€, because in the last decade a number of factors have increased the difficulties along the way, making them vulnerable to crime.
In the last 30 years, Central-American mobility towards the North has increased in large amounts, due to the civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua and the condition of poverty in many of their communities. In the same wavelength, Mexican migration also increased after the NAFTA agreement was signed in the 90’s, which had a strong impact in the lives of Mexican peasants. Therefore, in the late nineties, American authorities started reinforcing the country´s limits with Mexico, and began to develop stronger and more rigurous migratory regulations, which includes today´s massive deportation processes.
At present, Mexico is also going through strucutral changes. The current Mexican government decided to dismantle the drugcartels in the country, which has resulted in a war between the cartels themselves for the control of territory and the State. In the middle of this war, illegal and Mexican migrants become silent victims of the crimes done by such organizations: kidnapping, submission to prostitution, human trafficking, slavery, are the crimes that systematically harm migrants who go through Mexico in search of the “American dreamâ€. Only in 2010, according to the National Comission for Human Rights located in Mexico, more than 11.000 migrants have been kidnapped. The main aim of this practice is to blackmail families in the United States in order to get a ransom (from $1000 to $5000 dollars per migrant).
In 2010, 72 people were found murdered in a storehouse in the middle of the dessert of San Fernando, in the Northern-border state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. After the investigations, it was stated that the victims were migrants from different points of Latinamerica, mostly Central-America. This event brought foward to the nation, the dangerous nature of the condition of foreign migrants, which has been understood by the media and the authorities as illegal people. But they are not. They just happen to be in an irregular migratory situation. Such a discourse of “illegality†shows a tendency of criminalization of migration. Under such immaginery, migrants who enter in Mexican territory become delinquents, increasing their vulnerability for a number of crimes and violations to human rights throughout the journey.
Dark passage is a long-term project, which main objective is to visibilize the vulnerability of the migrant condition between two forces: one that criminalizes them, and another one that victimizes them. It is a work that hopes to bring awareness about the risks, invisibility, and impunity of a historical human condition, such as the mobility from one place to another in the search for a better quality of life –which happens to be called today transnational migration. The circumstances lived now a days in the Mexican territory, cancel the traveler´s humanity, leaving him or her helpless, with luck as their only safe card