Mexico tightens travel rules on Peruvians in a show of visa diplomacy to slow migration to US

BOULEVARD, Calif. (AP) — Julia Paredes believed her move to the United States might be now or never. Mexico was days from requiring visas for Peruvian visitors. If she didn’t act quickly, she would have to make a far more perilous, surreptitious journey over land to settle with her sister in Dallas.

Mexico began requiring visas for Peruvians on Monday in response to a major influx of migrants from the South American country, after identical moves for Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Brazilians. It effectively eliminated the option of flying to a Mexican city near the U.S. border, as Paredes, 45, did just before it was too late.

“I had to treat it as a emergency,” said Paredes, who worked serving lunch to miners in Arequipa, Peru, and borrowed money to fly to Mexico’s Tijuana, across from San Diego. Last month smugglers guided her through a remote opening in the border wall to a dirt lot in California, where she and about 100 migrants from around the world shivered over campfires after a morning drizzle and waited for overwhelmed Border Patrol agents to drive them to a station for processing.