Mexico City, August 18.— Mexico and Turkey share similar migration scenarios : they are the receiving centers for large flows seeking, in one case, to reach the United States, and in the other, the European Union. However, Central Americans who arrive in Mexico do so largely out of fear of forced recruitment by armed groups and the impact of crime and violence.
Although both aspects are also the motivations reported by those fleeing Syria or Afghanistan to Turkey, in the case of Central America the proportion is higher, indicates the ForMove study, presented at El Colegio de México by researcher Ludger Pries, from the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, as part of the seminar International Perspectives on Refuge and Asylum .
The academic explained that according to surveys conducted for this project, 51.1 percent of migrants who arrived in Mexico and departed from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador considered that one of the reasons for leaving their community of origin was that they considered fear of violence or armed conflict to be very important ; 58.8 percent said it was because of fear of crime, and 81 percent because of living conditions.
