MEXICO CITY — Mexican immigration officials in Tapachula near the Guatemalan border in the state of Chiapas on Oct. 22, 2013, took into custody Ender Manuel Martínez, an LGBT rights advocate from El Salvador, when he tried to apply for asylum because of death threats he said he received in his Central American homeland because of his activism and sexual orientation.

He alleges authorities at the Tapachula detention facility housed him with those who were mentally ill. Martínez says they did not allow him to bathe, forced him to sleep on a damp floor and demanded “sexual favors” from him in exchange for better food.

Officials last December transferred Martínez to another detention facility outside of Mexico City where he said guards subjected him to sexual harassment and anti-gay discrimination. Julio Campos Cubías, general coordinator of Migrantes LGBT, a group that advocates on behalf of LGBT migrants, told the Washington Blade on Monday that Martínez also did not receive proper medical care for a ruptured gallbladder while in custody.

Martínez remained in custody until May when Migrantes LGBT and other advocacy groups convinced authorities to allow him to pursue his asylum claim outside the detention facility.

“My intention is to stay here and to be part of Mexico,” Martínez, 32, told the Mexican website Animal Politico after his release. “I would like to be seen as a citizen that fights to take his country forward.”

Campos told the Blade during an interview at the International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Intersex (ILGA) World Conference in Mexico City that Martínez’s case is “very emblematic for us.”

Mexican law bans anti-gay discrimination, but the country’s immigration statutes do not include LGBT-specific protections.

Mexico City law bans discrimination based on national origin and sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. Migrants and asylum seekers are among the marginalized groups with whom the Mexico City Council to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination, which enforces the Mexican capital’s sweeping anti-discrimination law, works.

“If the migrants know that they have been discriminated against because of their preference or sexual orientation they can come here and bring a complaint to the council,” Jacqueline L’Hoist Tapia, president of the Mexico City Council to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination, told the Blade on Monday during an interview at her office in Mexico City’s Popotla neighborhood.

Campos said the Mexican government, LGBT and human rights advocates and other groups are simply ill-equipped to work with LGBT migrants in spite of the aforementioned efforts.

“The institutions do not have the capacity to support us,” he said. “There are no specific spaces for this community.”

Campos is one of five volunteers who work at Migrantes LGBT, which was founded in January.

The organization that operates out of the Casa Espacio de los Refugiados (Space for Refugees) in Mexico City’s Ramón López Velarde Park provides LGBT migrants with clothing, food, shoes and other basic needs. Migrantes LGBT also conducts protests, organizes cultural activities and other events to highlight the needs of those who are escaping persecution in their home countries based on their sexual orientation and/or gender identity and expression.

“We are our own witnesses,” said Campos.

Majority of Mexico migrants come from Central America

Mexico’s National Institute of Migration notes 88,501 migrants were held in detention facilities across the country between January 2011 and December 2012, with nearly 50 percent of them in the state of Chiapas. Nearly 92 percent of these detainees were from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Nearly 97 percent of 79,426 migrants that Mexican authorities deported in 2012 were from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Ongoing violence in the three countries has prompted tens of thousands of undocumented children to cross into the U.S. in recent months.

Campos told the Blade the majority of the migrants with whom his organization works leave their home countries because of anti-LGBT discrimination and persecution. He said they quickly realize there are “not many opportunities” when they arrive in southern Mexico.

“They do not want to come to Mexico,” said Campos. “Mexico is a bridge to enter the U.S.”

Trans sex workers along border forced to sell drugs

LGBT migrants remain particularly vulnerable to discrimination and abuse while in detention.

Campos said it is common for federal immigration officials to ask detainees to perform “sexual favors” in order to leave the detention facilities to which they are brought. He told the Blade that transgender women are particularly susceptible to this type of abuse.

“They are the most obvious and they are the sexual fantasies of many sexually active men,” said Campos.

Campos told the Blade that lesbian and trans women frequently smuggle drugs into the U.S. for drug cartels that work in and around Tijuana. He said many of these migrants do not have the money to pay smugglers — known as “coyotes” in Mexican Spanish — who bring them across the border into California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

“They tell you, ‘I have to cross the border,’” said Campos. “If you are going to help me, I will carry 10 kilos of marijuana or 10 kilos of cocaine or 10 kilos of something.”

Ricardo Baruch, a member of the Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights who lives in Cuernavaca, noted to the the Blade on Wednesday that a number of the trans sex workers who work in cities along the U.S. border are from Central America because they can make more money there than in southern Mexico. He said the drug cartels sometimes force them to sell drugs.

“They are forced because they work on the street,” said Baruch