Migration, a lacerating wound in the open veins of Latin America

Migration continues to be a excruciating wound in many countries of Latin America, where this year 14 million people have seen their dreams crash against a wall of discrimination, marginalization and, in some cases, even the death of those who in the midst of despair launched themselves on the adventure of looking for a more promising future.

Although the migratory flow in America, one of the largest in the world, dates back six decades and has so far involved the mobilization of some 40 million people, it has been more recently when the phenomenon has become a massive reality and media, coming to occupy a place in the political, economic and social agenda of the region.

“In recent years, migration in America has begun to cease to be invisible to become a scenario similar to that experienced by African or Syrian migrants in Europe,” Germán Casas, president of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) for America, explains to Efe. Latin.

However, the differences with these areas of the planet are abysmal, because in Africa and the Middle East, migrants leave low-income countries and reach other high-income countries in Europe. On the contrary, in Latin America the journey consists of moving from one poverty scenario to another more or less similar, because only a few make it to the United States or Canada.

Casas, who is closely familiar with the problems faced by communities in Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia, assures that “Latin America has become an immense corridor full of migrants whose common denominator is that they are fleeing violence.”

Here migrants escape threats from the guerrillas or paramilitaries in Colombia, common crime in Venezuela, gangs in Central America or drug trafficking in Mexico, but they also leave their country behind to escape a common enemy: misery. .

According to International Organization for Migration (IOM), there are currently 281 million international migrants in the world, which is equivalent to 3.6% of the population. Of those, 59 million (21% of the total) are in North America and 14.8 million (5%) in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In search of the American dream

The mobility restrictions derived from the pandemic in 2020 and much of 2021 altered these migratory flows, mainly in relation to the issuance of visas and the working conditions of Latin American workers

This year, with vaccination underway and the consequent economic reactivation, the flow of migrants to the United States soared again, especially after the Labor Department’s announcement last August that 10 million employees were needed.

The declaration once again set in motion the migrant caravans along the northern triangle of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) in the direction of Mexico to take the leap from there and make the “American dream” come true.

The figures show this: between January and October 2021, Mexico detained 228,115 migrants and deported another 82,627, figures that had not been recorded for fifteen years. In addition, 123,000 people applied for refugee status in the first eleven months of 2021, well above the 40,000 requests that were routinely filed each year.

The recent resumption of the “Stay in Mexico” program, which forces foreigners to wait while a US court evaluates the asylum application, has generated serious concern because this initiative, promoted in its day by President Donald Trump, has stranded more than 70,000 people for months in the dangerous border strip.

The feeling of frustration spread among the 95,000 Nicaraguans who left their country to escape the political crisis and misery, and the 49,000 Hondurans deported from Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere in Central America.

The dream was also cut short for the 9,000 people from Honduras heading to the United States who entered Guatemala irregularly last January, where they were repressed by the police and detained.

The drama of Haitian and Venezuelan migration

“A similar pain is experienced by Haitians who, anguished by the few economic opportunities that their nation offers, have chosen to move to Brazil or Chile, where, however, they have not felt welcome,” Donna Cabrera, specialist in migration from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, in Colombia.

With their eyes set on the United States, thousands of South American migrants travel through the region until they reach the Darién Gap, an inhospitable border enclave between Colombia and Panama where a large number of Venezuelans, Cubans, Africans, Ecuadorians and Colombians are concentrated en route. towards the United States.

And despite the danger of an area where wild animals abound and the flooding of rivers, the boats enter the sea at midnight, crowded with people who have plenty of dreams and lack life jackets, exposed to the whims and the cruelty of human traffickers who take what little money they have with them and subject them to all kinds of abuse and humiliation. The numbers account for this drama: Colombian authorities estimate that in the first ten months of this year, some 90,000 people tried to cross this jungle, and at least fifty of them died.

Along with Haiti, Venezuela is the country that proportionally registers the highest number of migrants. The 2021 Living Conditions Survey of the Andrés Bello Catholic University estimates that the population “fell to 28.7 million”, because “just over four million” left the country between 2015 and 2020. The apparent economic improvement caused by De facto dollarization has not stopped this flow, although the Government assures that in 2021 many migrants have returned, after having lost their jobs in the countries where they resided, due to the pandemic.

In the absence of official statistics, the Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela (R4V), dependent on the United Nations, has registered 6,038,937 Venezuelan migrants worldwide, of which 4,992,664 are in Latin America and the Caribbean. , while the Organization of American States (OAS) warns that Venezuelan migration may reach seven million people at the beginning of 2022, thus exceeding the exodus from Syria, considered the largest in the world, with 6.7 million refugees.

Despite the efforts of the Dominican Republic, Curaçao, Colombia, Peru, Chile and the United States to regularize or grant temporary status to these people, “a pending issue for the countries of America and the regional cooperation organizations is to be able to guarantee the rights of Venezuelans, “says specialist Donna Cabrera.

An uncomfortable truth

Migrants are abandoned people, victims of stigmatization, traumatized because they have suffered rape, persecution, threats, extortion, robbery or kidnapping, and who sometimes lose their lives during their trip, as happened on the 9th of more than fifty of Central American migrants traveling crammed into a truck that overturned on a highway in southeastern Mexico.

“It is sad to know that many of these people in their countries had a house, a job, a family, but now they are reaching another place and are identified and classified as usurpers,” says Germán Casas.

It is difficult for society to understand that the migratory crisis has been constant in America, and that if now it is Central Americans, Venezuelans and Haitians, long ago it was Mexicans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and Peruvians who tried to cross the border that separated poverty from prosperity.

“It is impossible to stop thinking that one could be in the situation of a migrant, go from a quiet life to having to flee and leave everything to become a wanderer, without a homeland, without a family, with nothing,” reflects the president of Doctors without borders.