Juárez fire victims’ families fear extortion after compensation

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RIO ZARQUITO, GUATEMALA — Well over a year has passed since Florinda Xol received the news of the death of her son, Byron Manuel López Xol.

López Xol was one of 40 migrants who died in a tragic fire that engulfed a migrant detention center in Juárez in March 2023. The fire captured international headlines and sent waves of trauma through migrant families throughout Latin America.

Xol still remembers that day, that sense of knowing something was wrong even before the calls and messages began to flood her cellphone.

“I didn't want to accept it; I said that it was a joke,” she said. “My son was no longer here. I said, no, my God, I want to find my son in the hospital, even injured, but I couldn't accept it.”

She stood by the simple bamboo walls of the structure that covers her kitchen as she scrolled through the photos of her son on her cellphone, reminiscing on the memories captured in time. Inside the modest, weathered wooden house in eastern Guatemala, nearly 170 miles from Guatemala City, a framed photo of her son sits on a cluttered cabinet in her room.

She said that her 25-year-old son had left Guatemala in the hopes of finding work in the United States to help protect the family’s almost 1.25 acres of land from the encroachment of African oil palm plantations. Family members fear they will be evicted from the land.

For nearly 30 years, the single mother has sown crops and raised chickens, turkeys, and cattle on the land. But in the last 20 years she has seen the surrounding farms transformed by the expansion of oil palm, which has brought plagues of flies.

“He told me he wanted to go,” she said. “He said ‘What am I going to do? How can I help? How can we get you out of here?’ My children have done everything to see how to get me out of here.”

Wrongful death payments Over a year later, while the criminal trial against those responsible for the deaths has yet to advance, the financial compensations for their wrongful deaths have started to appear in family bank accounts.

Those payments — which amount to roughly $205,640 per family, a potentially life-altering sum for many in poverty-stricken Guatemala — also carry fears of extortion, which is a common problem in some Central American countries and one all too familiar to migrants and their families.

It’s a fear that Xol says she’s heard from all of the 19 relatives of Guatemala victims of the Juárez fire whom she’s spoken with.

“(The other families) all said the same thing,” Xol said. “People are envious in this world. There are some people who become envious because they see what another has.”

She added, “but human life is priceless.”

Xol confirmed that she received some compensation, though she could not remember when the payment was made. She expressed frustration that the amount of the payments had been made public by the media, saying she feared it would heighten the potential for extortion.

The payments represent the Mexican government’s effort to make good after the disastrous fire became a symbol of the brutality unleashed by the migration crisis playing out in the Americas. The men killed in the fire were left to die in locked cells.

The Mexican National Migration Institute announced in August 2023 that it would pay a historic $8.2 million to the victims of the Juárez fire for their wrongful deaths.

According to a source in Mexico’s immigration agency, payments began in October 2023. As of November 2024, 35 families have received their payments, the immigration agency said.

Survivors, too, have begun receiving payments from the Mexican state, though the amounts they’ve received have not been made public. Of the 27 injured in the tragedy, 22 have received their payments, according to the Mexican immigration agency.

The El Paso Times also spoke by phone with a survivor of the fire from Guatemala, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions against his family. He said he received his payment last month but declined to confirm the amount.

“The money that the Mexican government gave (me) sincerely will be used to cover expenses,” he said.

“I had to pay the coyote,” he explained. “And yes to me, to my family, to my daughter, to my wife, and that, well, then practically the money that I owed at that time was all covered.”

Yet he explains that he still must pay for the prosthetics for the limb he lost in the fire, which he says could cost upwards of $45,000.

In Mexico, the indemnifications to the families of the victims and survivors of the fire are an unprecedented effort to make good on a wrong related to the immigration tragedy.

“The state has never looked back to victims to give them truth or reparation,” said Yesenia Valdez Flores, the defense coordinator and lawyer with the Mexican Non-Governmental Organization Fundación para la Justicia y el Estado Democrático de Derecho (FJEDD) which is accompanying 18 families of victims and survivors in the case in Mexico.

“In none of the other cases that we represent has there been a single mention of comprehensive reparation, not even financial compensation,” she said. “The truth is that there is impunity and the most serious thing is that cases continue to be repeated in which migrants are either murdered or lose their lives.”

Seeking justice and precedent The fire broke out in the Juárez migrant detention center on March 27, 2023, at 10 p.m. The migrants had been protesting the dire conditions in the detention center, which was administered by private security contractors.

The fire left 40 migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela dead and another 27 migrants injured. Survivors later said security guards had refused to open doors that kept migrants locked inside the facility as the flames raged.

“They did not want to open the door,” the survivor of the fire said of that night. “They say that they did not have the keys, but they were in charge of human beings and they had to ensure our physical integrity.”

Investigations into the fire were launched within hours of the tragedy. The following day, agents from the Mexican National Immigration Institute, two private security guards, and a Venezuelan migrant who was accused of setting the fire were arrested.

At least seven criminal prosecutions are currently underway in the Mexican courts over the tragedy in Juárez. However, the investigations and cases have advanced slowly.

The commissioner of the National Migration Institute, Francisco Garduño Yáñez, was implicated in the deaths in April 2023.

The charges against the high-ranking immigration official followed a decision by a commission within the Mexican Senate, which decided that Garduño Yáñez should be removed from his position. The embattled commissioner, who was appointed during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has denied responsibility for the deaths and sought to separate himself from the case.

President Claudia Sheinbaum announced upon assuming office that she would remove Garduño Yáñez as the head of Mexico's immigration agency. He is set to be replaced as commissioner by Sergio Salomón Céspedes, the current governor of the Mexican State of Puebla.

Garduño Yáñez announced on Dec. 13 that he will be leaving office. As he addressed the press he mentioned that the majority of families had received their compensation.

He will be required to continue making regular check-ins at the court in Mexico City.

For the attorneys involved in the case, there is little he can do to avoid charges.

“He will continue to face charges in this case, if he does not manage to remove the charges,” Marcos Zavala, a lawyer with the FJEDD, who is involved with the case, said. “This public official will have to face the process until its final consequences.”

For the families, they hope that the Mexican courts provide justice for the deaths of their loved ones.

“They’ve told us that this case will not remain unpunished,” Xol said. “And yes, I want the guilty to pay for the damages they caused.”

A lasting pain The tragedy in Juárez has lasting effects on the survivors and the families of the victims.

The survivor who spoke with the El Paso Times explained that besides the physical impacts of the fire, including the loss of a hand and lasting lung damage, he was left with severe psychological traumas.

“Enclosed spaces make me nervous, they make me afraid,” he explained. “This is why I believe that the compensatory amount they gave them was not an amount corresponding to what we went through.”

Xol was hesitant to talk about the money she received, and talking about her son’s death brought back pain of his loss.

The reparation she received allowed her to pay back the 125,000 Quetzales, or roughly $16,000, the family had borrowed to pay the coyote. However, the factors that drove her son to seek to reach the United States persist; the money has not stopped the threats against her and her family that drove her son from the country in the first place.

Xol and her three remaining children live isolated, surrounded by the oil palm plantation.

She admits that her family cannot improve their living conditions given the ongoing land conflict with the nearby African oil palm company. She now lives with the constant fear of being evicted from her land and the fear and pain of violence against her or her children.

“I can't improve my house,” she said. “Look at my little house; there it is; it almost falls on us, but I can't fix it because, at any moment, they could evict us from here, and what do we do?”

She adds, “What makes me sad is that we are not safe here.”

Xol has sought to protect her property and animals by setting up barbed wire fencing around her land. She says that the threats from the palm company initially stopped following the death of Byron, but they began again months later.

She wishes that the Mexican government had offered a grant or work for her children along with the payment.

“I want some solution or for them to see how they can continue to support my children, so they can study or do some work there (in Mexico),” she said.

Jeff Abbott covers the border for The El Paso Times and can be reached at: jdabbott@gannett.com; @palabrasdeabajo on twitter or @palabrasdeabajo.bsky.social on Bluesky

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