Officials calm migrants protest in Mexico military base

For weeks, Tapachula city near Mexico's southern border has been roiled by nearly daily protests by migrants frustrated over the long wait for documents from Mexican authorities that would allow them to continue traveling north.

On Friday, one of those protests appeared to pay off.

Migrants from Central America, as well as Venezuela, Cuba and other nations walked to the base where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was speaking, many carrying large wooden crosses.

Nearly 150 migrants shouting outside the military base were told they would receive humanitarian visas before the day's end.

It came a day after immigration authorities said they had given similar documents to some 800 migrants in the city ahead of the president's visit.

The migrants expressed concern, some saying that they had received such papers before, but when they traveled north, officials in other parts of the country detained them and sent them south again.

Some migrants, like Manuel Alcalá of Venezuela, had their lips sewn in an action which has become synonymous with the protests.

"We have been here for a long time," he said. "They offer us something but never follow through,"

A short time later, a high-ranking immigration official appeared to do just that.

Héctor Martínez Castuera, a director general for an agency within the National Immigration Institute, came out of the base to calm the protesters.

He said officials would make a list of everyone with name, age, nationality and he promised to keep families together.

For the past couple of years, Mexico has used a containment strategy that involved trying to keep migrants confined to the southern part of the country, far from the U.S. border.