Ciudad Hidalgo: Hundreds of Central American migrants were stranded in a sort of no man's land on the river border between Guatemala and Mexico after running up against lines of Mexican National Guard troops deployed to keep them from moving en masse into the country and on north toward the US.

Naked children played amid the sand and trash on Monday evening as clothing and shoes hung from the trees to dry along with the Suchiate River, normally a porous waterway plied all day by rafts ferrying people and goods across.