Between Jan 2024 and Feb 2025, our teams working across the route treated nearly 3,000 survivors of sexual violence and provided 20,000 individual psychological consultations.
Migrants in the Latin American corridor are exposed to multiple forms of violence, ranging from torture to sexual violence, robbery, kidnapping and extortion, which have serious consequences on their physical and mental health, sometimes irreversible. MSF teams witness these impacts on our patients. Between January 2024 and February 2025, we treated nearly 3,000 survivors of sexual violence and we provided more than 20,000 individual consultations for mental health across our projects of the migration route.
MSF runs 11 migration projects across Latin America, including 2 launched in March. Between Jan 2024 and Feb 2025 our teams provided more than 84,000 primary healthcare consultations.
Many people were already carrying a heavy burden: they had fled their own countries due to conflict, violence or exclusion, and then suffered new attacks at points along the Latin American migration corridor such as, but not exclusively, the dangerous Darién jungle. Although all people are in a vulnerable situation, the impacts are deeper among groups such as women and children. In recent years we have seen more and more families headed by women traveling alone or with minors.
The restrictive migration policy introduced by the US Administration, including the termination of the main avenues to seek asylum and the suspension of other programs, have caused stress, disorder and panic in the migrant population and left hundreds of thousands in a legal and humanitarian limbo in Mexico and other parts of the Central American route. We also fear that the absence of legal, dignified and safe mechanisms put very vulnerable people at risk of taking even more dangerous routes and leave them at the mercy of human trafficking networks.
We are concerned about the tightening of immigration policies in the US and how this could have a dangerous domino effect on other countries in the Latin American migration corridor, from Mexico to the south of the continent, resulting in more pronounced policies of containment and forced returns of migrants, restrictions on the right to asylum, residence and other basic rights.