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Summary
On January 15, another migrant or refugee caravan left Honduras for the US-Mexico border. We speak with Honduran migrant rights activist, Bartolo Fuentes and independent journalist Sandra Cuffe about how the caravans form, why so many people are fleeing, how the caravans was stopped from advancing beyond Guatemala, and how U.S. President Biden’s first few days in office have or have not impacted migration issues in Honduras. (Episode picture: Sandra Cuffe)
Show notes at: hondurasnow.org. Follow us on Instagram @hondurasnow
Special thanks to Jose Luis Granados Ceja and Sandra Cuffe for their assistance and support with this episode
Transcript
Karen Spring:
On January 15, just days before the inauguration of US President Joe Biden, another migrant caravan departed from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Most of the participants would never even make it to Mexico before being forcefully turned away by state security forces at every step of the way. Battered by dictatorship, poverty, the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus, and not one but two hurricanes. Neither a wall nor police will stop people from fleeing the country ruled by Juan Orlando Hernández.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. This podcast shares human rights stories from Honduras and connects them with global issues and North American policy. I’m your host Karen Spring, a longtime human rights activist that has lived in Honduras for over a decade. Thanks so much for listening.
US President Joe Biden began his presidency by implementing a series of measures aimed at reversing years of racist Trump-era immigration policy designed to appeal to white supremacists. The Biden administration has said that it intends to end migrant protection protocols, better known as “Remain in Mexico,” that saw thousands of asylum seekers forced to live in horrific camps on the Mexican side of the border, while they waited for their hearings that would determine if they would be granted asylum in the United States.
Biden has also promised to attend to the so-called root causes of migration. But these promises towards the people of Central America by Biden have been made and broken before. The challenge boils down to this: Migrant justice activists and the Biden administration have a very different understanding as to what the root causes of migration are. Based on what Biden proposed, both in 2014 and during his presidential campaign, Biden seems to simply want to entrench the power further of the Honduran oligarchs, and also cement the neoliberal development model in Honduras. And this has been the true cause of the Honduran exodus. We discussed more about Biden’s policies, in more detail, in Episode 11.
But let’s hear from Bartolo Fuentes, who’s a journalist, a migrant human rights defender, and an opposition politician. Bartolo tells us that the only way migration from his country will be stopped, will be if the United States government ends its support for the Juan Orlando Hernández dictatorship.
Bartolo Fuentes (interpreted):
There’s a permanent flow of migrants, and it will only end when we all leave to go north. And that can’t happen. So while conditions are not improved here in the country, the flow of migrants will not stop.
And in the United States, Donald Trump was endorsing this government that significantly worsened the living conditions for people. And that generated a lot of migration. It would be better if the border wall didn’t exist. But it would be even better if no one felt obligated to leave Honduras. And by changing the conditions here, that’s how you will stop migration.
One of the causes that makes people leave is because they don’t have any hope. In Honduras, people aren’t hopeful because the government is doing harm. Or they just rob. They stole all the funds from the social security system, money from the health ministry, from agriculture, education, lots of institutions.
For the government, the pandemic has been another opportunity to continue to steal, to purchase mobile hospitals that never got here. The government purchased mobile hospitals for the health emergency, but they still aren’t up and running. They cost $48 million in a country where there is a lot of need. But where there is permanent theft from the state. The US knows this well, and they tolerate it because this president supports the US’s international policies.
And then you look at the Honduran government’s involvement in organized crime. Everyone knows that President Juan Orlando Hernandez got to his position with money from drug cartels. And then later, he wanted to turn himself and his political party into the only cartel operating in Honduras by declaring war on other cartels. This week, on January 27, the president’s brother was supposed to be sentenced in a New York court. The president himself has been mentioned like 60 times in documents presented by US prosecutors. They even refer to him as CC4 [Co-conspirator 4]. So when are these prosecutors going to indict him? Or will the US Southern Command just continue to politically support Juan Orlando Hernández?
People are discouraged, so they leave the country. The US immigration policies don’t act alone. We would be really happy if Biden legalizes Hondurans in the US with TPS and the Dreamers. This is good. But more than just opening the borders to others, what we want is for conditions to be improved in our country. And that happens when the criminal government that we have, that is protected and backed by the US, is changed.
There was a coup here. The armed forces of Honduras didn’t take a single step without instructions, or the go-ahead, from the US Southern Command. Southern Command is like a regional government that the US has here to protect Honduras, to the point where they even publicly praise and recognize the president, give him medals and diplomas. That’s how it is.
Karen Spring:
I frequently get asked how these migrant caravans get formed. People seem to want to know who organizes them? And how do people know what date they leave? Is it a political conspiracy? Are these people being paid to walk to the border to mess around with the political situation in the United States?
Well, the answer to those questions is no. The caravans are formed by a combination of factors. One being that all it takes is a small group of people to say that they’re leaving the country. They send that message or announcement to a WhatsApp group chat. And that message gets forwarded and forwarded from there. And when the departure date rolls around, as set out by that WhatsApp message, people just arrive to the planned point, and they leave from there.
Many people say, “But tell them that they’re being lied to! Tell them that the American Dream doesn’t exist, and that they will face serious problems at the border. Do they know that? Do they know that it’s hard to get across?”
My answer is yes, Hondurans know. They know it’s dangerous. They know they might not make it and they know that there is tremendous risk. But they’re desperate and feel like leaving is the only way forward, that it’s better to take the risk of dying or being detained or being kidnapped than staying here in the conditions in Honduras.
The US Embassy in Tegucigalpa puts out messages and tweets, and has for many years since the caravans started, warning Hondurans about the dangers of traveling north. The messages warn that US law will be used against them if asylum seekers or Hondurans violate it. And that they’re being cheated. Commercials on major Honduran TV networks are frequently aired as well repeating the same messages. The video clips warn people not to flee north, and then use fear as a primary tactic to deter people.
Here’s a short clip in Spanish of former US Chargé d’Affaires, Heide Fulton, who was in charge of the US Embassy for many years, warning people not to travel and what will happen if they do.
Heide Fulton:
Este es un mensaje para los que están migrando hacia los Estados Unidos. Por favor, regresen a su país. Están siendo engañados con falsas promesas de parte de líderes con fines políticos y criminales. [This is a message for those who are migrating to the United States. Please return to your country. You are being deceived by false promises made by leaders with political and criminal purposes.]
Karen Spring:
It’s hard to understand desperation, and just how bad things have to be for Hondurans to make these decisions. But they’re bad. The situation here is not easy. And people have no hope that it’ll get better.
Bartolo Fuentes (interpreted):
All these conspiracy theories about the caravans don’t have any basis. None. There are something like eight or nine different contradictory versions.
They even accused me of being a caravan organizer. And at one point, ironically, they accused me based on these theories. I told them that, if they’re going to slander me, that they needed to get their story straight. Because at one point, I was accused of paying people to go on the caravan. Others said that I was charging each migrant 1,000 or 1,500 dollars. So I asked them, what is it, then? Am I paying them, or charging them? But I had to defend myself from these inventions and accusations.
Here, unfortunately, military intelligence has the capability to write an exaggerated story about how these caravans are formed. The last theory I heard was yesterday. Now they’re trying to say that evangelical pastors are organizing the caravans. Good God. But it’s true that, in the caravans, there are people carrying Bibles and praying. I don’t want to say that a pastor who has some leadership amongst his people are going to direct a group toward a caravan, or that he’s an organizer.
Do you want to know how the caravans are organized? It’s simple. Listen, here in northern Honduras, there is a large, fast-flowing river, the Ulúa River. It’s huge. But this river doesn’t originate from one source. No one can say that the Ulúa River originates at one single point. It starts from a ton of places, and starts first as a brook that forms into a stream, which joins with the Chiquito River, which then pours into the Ulúa River.
This is the same for the caravans: People leave from different parts of the country, but from the same department. They don’t all come from the same place. They come from different municipalities, from within a municipality, groups of five, six, or eight people. Or from one village, five, and another, eight, from another, 10. And they don’t even know each other. At that level, there is an organizer that says, let’s go, let’s go. That’s how I understand it, at least. So each person brings five or six, or whatever small number with them. And a lot of the small groups are friends, cousins, or whatever. And they get together in one place. And later, they form into a big river, a crowd. But it’s not just one person. They all get together, organized around a single date, a place, and a departure time.
The Honduran government knows how this works. They know that the information spreads through WhatsApp. WhatsApp groups can have hundreds of people on them. But even then, these groups aren’t the caravan. It’s just where people confirm that the caravan is happening. So the caravans don’t have a single organizer, but instead hundreds of organizers. The enormous needs that the people have, these are the momentum, or the motor, that drives the caravans. If it occurred to someone right at this moment to say that on February 14, I don’t know what day of the week that is, that a caravan is going to leave, and that announcement is disseminated, or someone has the courage to say publicly, people will show up, people will arrive to the departure point on that hour and on that date.
Karen Spring:
Around January 15, several thousand Hondurans began gathering in the large bus terminal in the major northern industrial city of San Pedro Sula. Groups began leaving on foot headed to the border as early as January 14 in the evening, but the largest group left San Pedro Sula on January 15.
To try and stop the caravan, or slow it down, police and military checkpoints were set up inside Honduran borders, and some even in the same department where the caravans gathered in the bus terminal. The state security force checkpoints stopped the migrants as they walked by, harassing them for documents, or stopping large vehicles like trucks that were giving migrants a short ride.
This is independent journalist Sandra Cuffe, who was on the ground with a caravan after it crossed into Guatemala from Honduras. Sandra is based in Guatemala City, and has covered many stories of the migrants participating in the caravans, and has reported for the LA Times, The Guardian, and many other major news outlets.
Sandra Cuffe:
So on January 15, the first large group of the migrant caravan entered Guatemala and walked all night and into the following morning, January 16, 27 miles into Guatemala from the El Florido border crossing to right around the village of Vado Hondo.
So Guatemala had deployed hundreds of police and military in this sort of eastern region of Guatemala to border areas, to checkpoints, to the control points. And there was also significant deployment to Vado Hondo. That’s where the government decided they were going to stop the caravan.
So on Saturday, January 16, by early-ish afternoon, I think, police lines and lines of military police and soldiers were blocking the advance of the caravan, that of course also blocked the commercial traffic and trucks heading through the region through the Agua Caliente border. So there was a sizable group, estimates range from between sort of 800 to more than 1,000 of people from the initial group of you know of three or four thousand Hondurans who pushed through the police and military lines on Saturday, January 16.
Karen Spring:
Thousands of soldiers and police were set up inside Honduran borders, but the vast majority were set up in Guatemala, preventing the advancement of the caravan into interior Guatemala and obviously preventing them from heading to the north, where the border of Mexico is located.
This is Bartolo Fuentes describing the border wall that has turned into a militarized human wall, that has been pushed farther south beyond the US-Mexico border, creating a barrier for migrants at every step of the way.
Bartolo Fuentes (interpreted):
The border wall is built, right? The places at the border that don’t have a wall have a natural barrier, like the desert, that is not easy to cross, and mountains, rivers.
The wall isn’t really the problem. It’s the anti-immigrant attitude that the same police, the government, and local government have in some states, where there is practically total persecution against migrants.
For example, in Arizona, they wanted to convict an academic migrant activist to 20 years in prison for putting water for migrants in the desert border regions. These types of attitudes are prevalent and strong.
But here there are other issues. The policies that are anti-migrant, those that make Mexico militarize its southern border, that have Guatemala beat migrants with batons, and has Honduras erect police barriers on the highways to prevent migrants from leaving.
So Biden is going to stop the construction of the wall between Mexico and the United States. But is he also going to stop the human border walls that the US has constructed as well? Like thousands of police and military that have been dispatched in Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras? This is an important question. Because the safe third country agreement is nothing more than the US charging others to repress migrants before they arrive at the Mexico-US border.
Karen Spring:
Just inside Guatemala, but still close to the border with Honduras, the days dragged out, while the Guatemalan military and police blocked the highway, preventing migrants from getting more into Guatemala’s interior.
The anticipation of Biden taking power in the United States had generated a new sense of hope amongst the participants in the caravan – potentially false hope, but hope, nevertheless – that people who are desperate and that travel north will not be treated as badly by state security forces, both at the border and along their journey.
When Biden took power on January 20, the road blockade was still at a deadlock. This is Sandra Cuffe describing what was happening between the migrants and refugees and the Guatemalan state security forces inside Guatemala at that moment.
Sandra Cuffe:
So when I got there on Monday morning, the rumor that everyone at least in that area of, you know, the group who was on the highway closest to military and police lines, the widespread belief there was that somebody from the Biden campaign had phoned down, unclear to who, the previous evening, and said that as soon as Biden was in office, he would essentially ensure that people would be welcomed along the route and at the US border.
That is, of course, completely false. Biden has taken office, the US is still coordinating with Mexico and Guatemala, still celebrating Guatemala’s, you know, quote unquote “exceptional efforts” to combat quote unquote “irregular migration,” as in celebrating the militarized response to the migrant caravan.
So while US immigration policy in the US has seen already, within Biden’s first acts upon taking office, he rolled back some of the more hardline travel bans and other restrictions on immigration and asylum. And also has pledged to propose legislation to provide a pathway to legal status for the millions of people who have been living undocumented in the United States. Those are all incredibly, incredibly important acts, obviously, that impact the lives of millions of people.
However, the reality and perspective in Central America is quite different. So those measures, including a stay on many deportations, including the plan to provide a pathway to status for people, none of that applies to anybody who would be arriving after November 1 of last year. So that’s right before the hurricanes swept through Central America, hitting Honduras the hardest. It’s sort of right around the time that people fleeing Central America, the numbers have been picking back up, after so long, have sort of slowed down, you know, when all of these border restrictions and lockdown measures were really slowing down migrations.
Karen Spring:
People hearing this story might think that the difficulty of the journey would make for a sober experience the entire way. But the truth is, those who are fleeing Honduras have agency. And despite the situation being so hard, and so difficult, Hondurans find a way to keep going, to keep each other motivated, and also keep each other happy.
Sandra Cuffe:
Sometimes I think that the the mood of caravans doesn’t always get conveyed in media coverage, because people are fleeing such devastating conditions and circumstances, political persecution, extreme violence. In this case, huge numbers in the caravan had lost their homes due to flooding, you know, lost their crops because of Hurricanes Eta and Iota. So rightfully, there’s a great focus on people’s stories and why they are fleeing Honduras, and the more systemic or root causes behind these massive exodus groups, sometimes I think that the actual mood while people are traveling can get lost along the way.
Because people fleeing the worst situations and circumstances still experience joy and collective celebration when they’re walking in these caravans. So people, in this case the night of January 15, after people had crossed the border, most people hadn’t slept in at least 24 hours, some people hadn’t eaten at all since they left San Pedro Sula. A lot of people had major issues with feet, people were sore, people were tired. A lot of people hadn’t had enough water. Children were really struggling.
However, Hondurans have an amazing sense of humor and find things to laugh about, even in the worst of times. So every time I have been walking with any migrant caravan group, starting in 2018, through 2019, again this January, there’s a lot more joking and celebration than I think people realize. And especially in the middle of the night, when it’s dark, if people have started walking at 4:00 a.m., there’s always people joking, trying to raise each other’s spirits. There’s also always, silence is punctuated, somebody will start with “Fuera JOH”, you know, out with Juan Orlando Hernández the President, and that’ll be soon echoed, and you’ll have everyone within hearing distance of whoever’s shouting it out will start shouting it out, too. So yeah, the mood was actually quite positive after crossing that first border.
Karen Spring:
Despite the positive steps taken by the Biden Administration for Central Americans living in the United States, there are still huge areas for improvement. In fact, nothing has changed here in Honduras. There is still no plan for the migrant caravans to stop, and migrant caravans continue to be demonized, made worse by the situation caused by the ongoing pandemic, with political figures now presenting migrants as a threat not only to public order and national security, but also public health. This is Bartolo Fuentes.
Bartolo Fuentes (interpreted):
We have to make true change. This is one thing. But the other thing is that migrant caravans are a form of protection. Caravans save many lives. They protect migrants for two reasons. One is that if people go together, they can mutually support one another.
And two, because they do not have to choose the dangerous routes. They walk openly for the whole world to see, and they ask authorities for help. While if people go as individuals or in small groups, they go quickly or hidden from public view. They pass through the unpatrolled areas of the Guatemalan and Mexican borders. They are assaulted, raped, killed, and recruited to organized crime. There are young men that are kidnapped and converted into assassins by force. They become cheap foot soldiers for organized crime. They send them to fight with other criminal groups, and are killed, and nothing happens. They throw their bodies at the side of the road. These types of things don’t happen as frequently when there are caravans.
So instead of repressing the caravans, they should be given a different treatment. I think people should be permitted to ask for asylum at the border, just like international law dictates. So repressing the caravan forces people to take dangerous routes, and condemns them to suffer or to death.
They should be given special treatment. They should be given at least documents in Mexico when they cross. If the US asked Mexico for assistance with this, that people that arrived to Mexico, give them a document or a visa. Mexico has done this from what I’ve seen in Oaxaca. Mexican authorities at one point were giving 30-day temporary visas to migrants. This allows people to cross the border safely, avoid the state of Tamaulipas, where they can be kidnapped or extorted or have horrible things happen to them. With a document, people will safely go to the border and request asylum. If they qualify, they will get one. And if not, they can be returned to their country. But don’t force them to taking dark, secret routes.
Karen Spring:
Hay que hacer los cambios de verdad. We have to make true change. Otherwise, migration will never stop. In this most recent caravan, officials estimate that 7,000 people left Honduras and entered Guatemala. The vast majority never made it to Mexico. Most were pushed back by military forces in Guatemala, loaded onto buses, and taken to San Pedro Sula, where they had started their journey.
The problem is, sending them back to Honduras doesn’t solve the problem. Many will brave the journey by themselves, and others will join the next caravan which, to date, has still not been announced. They will continue to try to leave a country that offers them no hope and no opportunities.
We must attend to the root causes. But what the new Biden Administration understands as the root causes, and what migrant justice activists understand the root causes to be, are widely different.
We await what the Biden Administration will announce for Central America. We hope Biden has learned from the failure of the 2014 Alliance for Prosperity, crafted when he served as Barack Obama’s envoy to Central America. This plan, the Alliance for Prosperity, set out to also deal with migration, did nothing except promote more neoliberalism and strengthen the power of the Honduran oligarchs.
And, as always, the Honduran organizations and social movements aren’t just going to sit around and wait for the United States to solve their problems here in the country. In the less than two weeks since the Biden Administration has taken power, more mobilizations and protests calling for President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s immediate resignation in Honduras have increased. The resistance continues.
That is the episode for today. Please check out the show notes at HondurasNow.org. Thank you so much to my monthly contributors and my loyal listeners. Until next time, hasta pronto.
Special thanks to Jose Luis Granados Ceja and Sandra Cuffe for their assistance in the production of this episode.