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By Jose Torres
TAPACHULA, Mexico (Reuters) – Thousands of migrants from southern Mexico have accepted a government offer to leave a caravan bound for the U.S. in exchange for a Mexican visa, officials said Tuesday night.
The caravan is one of two large groups of migrants, many from Central America and the Caribbean, with families including children on foot on a long northern trip to the northern U.S. border from the southern city of Tapachula in recent weeks.
The caravan of migrants leaving Tapachula last week approved the government’s proposal to “start a process that will allow them to regularize the legal situation,” according to a joint statement from the Interior Ministry and the National Migration Institute.
On Tuesday, the group advanced to the town of Mapastepec in southern Chiapas, led by caravan organizer Luis Garcia Villagran of the Pueblo Sin Fronteras group.
Garcia told Reuters that most of the migrant caravans had accepted the offer and officials would eventually take them out of Chiapas by bus, spread across 10 states. The government statement, however, listed nine states.
In exchange for the agreement, organizers agreed not to collect any more caravans in the future, a Mexican migration official later said on condition of anonymity.
Caravan organizer Garcia denied that the deal had been made, and the statement made no mention of it.
Migrants have repeatedly expressed skepticism about receiving documentation that regularizes them in Mexico, and organizers have said another caravan is about to leave Tapachula, a major migrant gathering near the Guatemalan border.
Earlier, Garcia said the decision to offer transportation and visas to migrants was a positive one, after Tapachula became a “prison” for migrants who were waiting for procedures to allow them to pass through the country.
A Mexican migration official said a group of migrants from Haiti and Honduras were taken to the state of Guanajuato on Tuesday about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).
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