MONTERREY – After wasting her work in Honduras, Gabriela Alvarado has spent more than six weeks crossing the U. S. border, a small but developing movement of Central Americans heading north after the coronavirus devastated the already deficient region.
Alvarado and her husband, Joseph, said their only option was to leave their two children in the hands of relatives and leave to succeed in the United States after an unsuccessful search for paintings from their home.
“I went looking for him still nothing, everything is closed,” said a former employee of a 24-year-old factory in sonora state on Mexico’s northern border on Tuesday. “There are no jobs. “
Earlier this year, migration to the United States declined when Central American and Caribbean countries imposed strict movement restrictions in reaction to the developing coronavirus pandemic, and the United States implemented a new immediate deportation program for others trapped across the border without authorization.
Historical closures have plunged into such chaos the region’s well-marked migration routes that some “coyotes” – people smugglers – have changed course and begun to target Central Americans to their home countries.
Now, a few weeks before the US presidential election, the US presidential election has been in the middle of the year. The region’s complex migration mechanism is reactivating, smugglers, experts and migrants say, as the collapse of Central American economies plunges families further into poverty, creating what can be a political challenge for the United States. Next. US Administration.
The U. S. Border Patrol has not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time It carried out nearly 55,000 deportations or arrests of migrants at the southwest border in September, according to new knowledge from the US Customs and Border Protection Office. (CBP), an increase of 238% in April.
Approximately two-thirds were Mexican citizens, a DHS spokesman told Reuters, while Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador were the next 3 largest countries of origin.
October’s first knowledge shows that the upward trend continues, said an American familiar with the numbers.
Knowledge implies an uptick in traffic, the U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has an uptick in traffic. The U. S. reported that more than a third of deportees under the new U. S. program have been deported. But it’s not the first time They had been arrested more than once.
CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan said Wednesday that deteriorating economic situation in the Western Hemisphere due to COVID-19 continues to drive upward migration.
“Save OPENING”
In February, a people smuggler known as Chicote, who oversees a network of coyotes, arrived at the U. S. border, looking nervously at migrants who coughed or sneezed while crowded in crowded shelters that the network uses to move others as they escaped from the authorities. .
In March, when the coronavirus swept through the region, members of the Gulf cartel in northeastern Mexico told him to suspend operations. Chicote said he was running with drug traffickers to help migrants cross the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas into Texas.
Then, in July, a Gulf cartel agent for tactics to build the gang’s source of income asked Chicote to restart.
At first, still involved in the pandemic, Chicote declined, but now, after a seven-month break, he says he is back in business, with a twist, now insisting that traffickers and migrants wear masks and a lot of antibacterial gel.
“Everything opens up again,” he says.
“People don’t have cash and they have debts, and the easiest way to make cash is to move to the US. Usa,” Chicote said, explaining that the circle of relatives of his clients in the U. S. it’s worth a tag.
Chicote asked to be known through his genuine call for fear of reprisals.
“NICE PLACE TO STAY”
In Honduras, the central bank expects the economy to contract between 7% and 8% this year due to pandemic constraints, marking the worst monetary decline in the country’s history.
“People are migrating due to excessive poverty and violence,” said Ismael Zepeda, a researcher at the Tegucigalpa-based Social Forum of Angels External Debt of Honduras (FOSDEH) expert group.
“With contraction, poverty gets deeper. “
Travel controls in the region, declining resources available to many potential migrants, and persistent fears of the ongoing pandemic in Mexico and the United States have so far limited migration.
But in a sign that tensions are rising, thousands of adults, young people and the elderly have joined an organized and largely failed caravan that left Honduras two weeks ago, many took their bags and left a few days after learning on social media about the caravan. . planned exit.
“Every day the stage gets worse here,” said Enoch de Jesús Ramírez, 21, who said he joined the caravan after wasting his homework at a gas station and firing his friend from the factory where she worked.
After the organization first flooded Guatemalan border security, the Guatemalan government granted the military special powers to circulate and deport more than 3,000 migrants to Honduras, Ramirez added.
While these giant teams attract attention in Washington, most Americans who migrate without permission do so alone or through smuggling networks, largely out of sight.
In Guatemala, a low-level smuggler named Pablo, who asked not to use his full name, told Reuters that when traffic stopped in the spring, he came out of unemployment at a hairdresser’s and charged $1. 30 according to the cut.
But in recent weeks, he has resumed transporting others across the border to Mexico, said, from there, other members of the smuggler network will help migrants continue their adventure to the northwest, running with the Sinaloa Cartel to cross the Sonoran Desert.
“We use Scouts who are for the border patrol,” he said. For every 10 people, in general, six cross (the border). “
Others, such as Alvarado and her husband, embark on the damaging adventure of Sonora alone, without the affection of the smugglers, some then rent to a trafficker to help them on the last sensitive stretch of the adventure.
Victor Clark, director of the Tijuana Binational Center for Human Rights and a migration expert, said the pandemic had forced some smugglers to reduce the value of crossing the desert into the United States to $5,000 of $8,000.
“Central Americans are exhausted (economically) and their families in the United States are also absorbing pandemic prices,” he said.
Meanwhile, in the state of Veracruz, southeastern Mexico, dozens of caravan members who managed to escape Guatemalan infants and Mexican customs officials waited Tuesday afternoon near the train tracks to take an extra to Mexico.
“People are hungry in Honduras,” said Marcos, who did not give his last name. “So I left to see if I could be in another country” (Reporting through Laura Gottesdiener in Monterrey, Lizbeth Díaz in Mexico City, Tamara Corro in Veracruz, Sarah Kinosian in Caracas, Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa and Nelson Renteria in San Salvador; written through Laura Gottesdiener, edited through Rosalba O’Brien)
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