Alejandro Solalinde
A priest who opened his door to migrants riding freight trains north through Mexico
Alejandro Solalinde was ordained relatively late in life and worked for years in poor parishes in southern Mexico before turning his attention to the migrants he saw passing through on freight trains known collectively as La Bestia, riding on top of rail cars on a journey north toward the United States that exposed them to robbery, extortion, sexual assault and kidnapping by organised crime groups who treated migrants as a resource to exploit.
In February 2007 he opened a shelter, Hermanos en el Camino, in Ciudad Ixtepec, Oaxaca, offering migrants a safe place to sleep, eat and receive medical and psychological care, along with help reporting crimes and pursuing asylum claims. More than four hundred people stayed there on its opening night, and the flow never really stopped. Solalinde became an outspoken public critic of the cartels controlling migrant routes and of Mexican police complicity in abuses against migrants, testimony that made him a target.
He received death threats specific enough that Mexican authorities gave him a security detail, and in 2012 he temporarily left the country after intelligence suggested an assassination attempt was imminent. He returned to continue running the shelter and campaigning for migrant rights, and has received Mexico's National Human Rights Prize among other honours for work that has cost him his personal safety for over a decade.