Mexican President to Meet Victims' Kin

Newsday/By John Moreno Gonzales
STAFF WRITER

October 4, 2001

Mexican President Vicente Fox is scheduled to meet today in New York with the families of the "disappeared," countrymen and women who were working at or near the World Trade Center during the attack.

In meeting with the families, and separately with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Fox "will express his solidarity and condolences to the American people and to New York and the Mexican community here," said Barbara Blakely, a spokeswoman with the Consulate General of Mexico in Manhattan.

Fox will meet the families at St. Bernard's Church on West 14th Street at 4:30 p.m. He and the mayor will meet at the Pier 92 Command Center at 6:15 p.m., officials with the mayor's office said yesterday.

Blakely said Fox may also visit the Trade Center recovery site, but those plans had not been finalized.

The consulate's office in Manhattan has officially listed 16 Mexican nationals as missing from the World Trade Center and the surrounding area. Through ongoing meetings in the immigrant community, the nonprofit Asociación Tepeyac de New York has identified 23 Mexican nationals as missing, as well as 66 mostly undocumented immigrants from other nations.

Tepeyac has also tallied some 700 immigrants - many part of a growing Mexican population in New York - who are now unemployed because their places of work lie near Ground Zero.

Joel Magallán, a Jesuit brother and executive director of Tepeyac, thanked the Mexican government for providing psychological counselors to his group, but he had another request.

"I would like to ask if they can invite us" to meet with the Mexican president, he said. "And if President Fox can request permanent residency for those who have lost a loved one or their job when they were working around the World Trade Center."

Fox has used his longtime relationship with President George W. Bush to lobby for immigration amnesty for an estimated 3 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States.