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GUATEMALA CITY—It’s a gray and cloudy day when two U. S. flights and a third flight from Mexico arrived in Guatemala City on June 10 loaded with deported migrants. Among them, Álvaro Chávez, a 22-year-old Mayan indigenous man. in the momostenango highlands of Guatemala, they were deported from San Antonio a few days after crossing the border into the United States.
Chavez arrived with other migrants at a new deportation reception center next to a Guatemalan Air Force base in front of La Aurora International Airport. The center, opened in July 2021, was built with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Then Arriving here on airlines chartered through U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the U. S. , each deportee receives a lunch bag, a phone call, and a clear plastic bag containing their non-public belongings. Unaccompanied minors are getting a little more attention, and the Guatemalan government is taking them to a separate wing to meet with social workers. All deportees register with the Guatemalan Migration Institute, a government agency, before leaving.
As we sat in the seating area of the reception center, Chavez said he was driven to migrate due to the deteriorating economic scenario in the country, where a portion of the population lives in poverty. He had dreamed of making cash in the United States in the hope of putting on a shoemaker and one day returning to Guatemala to open his own workshop. “It’s hard for anyone to make economic progress,” Chavez said. “There’s no way to do it here. “
GUATEMALA CITY—It’s a gray and cloudy day when two U. S. flights and a third flight from Mexico arrived in Guatemala City on June 10 loaded with deported migrants. Among them, Álvaro Chávez, a 22-year-old Mayan indigenous man. in the momostenango highlands of Guatemala, they were deported from San Antonio a few days after crossing the border into the United States.
Chavez arrived with other migrants at a new deportation reception center next to a Guatemalan Air Force base in front of La Aurora International Airport. The center, opened in July 2021, was built with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Then Arriving here on airlines chartered through U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the U. S. , each deportee receives a lunch bag, a phone call, and a clear plastic bag containing their non-public belongings. Unaccompanied minors are getting a little more attention, and the Guatemalan government is taking them to a separate wing to meet with social workers. All deportees register with the Guatemalan Migration Institute, a government agency, before leaving.
As we sat in the seating area of the reception center, Chavez said he was driven to migrate due to the deteriorating economic scenario in the country, where a portion of the population lives in poverty. He had dreamed of making cash in the United States in the hope of putting on a shoemaker and one day returning to Guatemala to open his own workshop. “It’s hard for anyone to make economic progress,” Chavez said. “There’s no way to do it here. “
Over the past two years, Guatemala has noticed a sharp increase in the number of other people looking to leave and return. In August, 40,522 Guatemalans were deported from the United States and Mexico this year via charter flights and another 26,557 were deported by land from Mexico. Too often, migrants return and find their living situation worse than when they left due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, there are few state-run projects to help them. reintegrate into society after their arrival.
Hours after his arrival, Chavez was taken out of the reception center and taken to Guatemala City’s main bus station, where he would be sent back to their network in an old refurbished school bus. he was afraid to explain his scenario to his circle of relatives. They had paid a human trafficker, known locally as the “coyote,” for the trip. The circle of relatives still owed the coyote money, although Chavez was unwilling to say how much. As the U. S. While the U. S. and Mexico implement more measures to prevent immigrants, coyotes charge higher fees for their services. includes several attempts to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Migrants take advantage of those follow-up attempts after being deported.
A major challenge for Chavez and other deportees is that there are no state policies in Guatemala for returning migrants. The scope of care they get necessarily ceases once they leave the Reception Center in Guatemala City. Upon their return, they will most likely face the same challenges as before: emerging living prices, limited opportunities, and the majority of the population working in the informal sector. This lack of facilities affects deportees who have lived abroad for years, as many of them face stigma upon their return, which can make it difficult for them to reintegrate into their communities.
“The government is doing nothing to prevent migrants who have been returned from seeking to migrate again,” said Andrea Villagrán, a representative of Guatemala’s congressional foreign policy commission. “There’s no tracking at all even though there’s data on all the other people about who they are, where they live and all their data. “
On paper, the secretariat of Guatemala’s National Council for the Care of Migrants aims to respond to the wishes of migrants. But migrants, rights advocates and government regulators have accused the firm of corruption. (He denied the allegations. ) Migrants also accused the company of failing to fulfill their day-to-day jobs and offering poor services. Guatemala’s Congress has called for reforms to the company, adding an increase in its budget, but they have not yet materialized, and in 2021 the company used less than a 3rd. of your budget.
Other policies beyond in the last 10 years have largely failed to address the problems that drive other people to migrate due to inadequate funding, lack of political will and weak continuity with the next governments. This unwillingness has worsened over the past two years. Basically, it is members of civil society, rather than politicians, who paint to announce legislation that can solve those problems. “The current government doesn’t really have any interest in the migrant population,” said Juan Jose Hurtado, director of the human rights organization Pop No’j.
The few systems that exist lately don’t have much impact. Guatemala’s Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare and the Ministry of Social Development run some placement programs that refer a small minority of deportees with secure skills, such as speaking English, to jobs in personal businesses. But those projects are limited to Guatemala City and discriminate against citizens of indigenous rural spaces where other people basically speak indigenous languages.
Intellectual non-governmental organizations, such as Pop No’j and El Refugio de los Ángeles Niñez, offer more Array especially to deportees in more rural areas. back to school. ” Civil society organizations are the ones that have developed capacities for better care for the deported population,” Hurtado said.
Both organizations get from USAID, UNICEF and other foreign agencies and devoted groups. But those projects are limited because of the lack of really broad funding. Civil society organizations are there to fulfill, in a very limited way, the responsibilities that correspond to the state,” Hurtado said. “We are small organizations. We don’t have all the mandatory resources.
The absence of the State is a component of a wider distribution of social benefits in the country. “Today, the social coverage formula has been completely lost,” said Renzo Rosal, an independent political analyst in Guatemala. “Migration is a phenomenon that will have to be [addressed] in the context of social coverage measures in general.
The lack of state systems and policies for deportees is also a component of a larger challenge in Guatemala: the fact that the economy is based on remittances, which prevents the government from addressing the reasons for migration.
“There is an organization of [economic and political] sectors that don’t mind containing migration,” Rosal said. “On the contrary, they are interested in encouraging abnormal migration because if these migrants manage to arrive, they will generate remittances. “
Remittances account for about 18. 4% consistent with the percentage of the country’s GDP. In 2021, Guatemalans living abroad sent more than $15 billion to their families, and that figure is expected to rise in 2022, according to projections by Guatemala’s central bank. Last year, remittances were the sector of maximum vital expansion in the economy, expanding more than 35% over the past year. This cash is basically used to pay off coyote debts, build houses, education and gym, and buy goods for customers.
“If migrants are prevented from entering, there will be no remittances or remittances will decrease,” Rosal said. “And consequently, those productive sectors would have problems. “
Thanks to all those factors, deportation is not the end of a migrant’s dreams of reaching the United States. The lack of political will to satisfy the wishes of the deportees means that many Guatemalans will have to leave.
Chavez is one of the lucky few to have discovered paintings after being deported. When we met on August 1, he said he had since discovered a task in construction, although he didn’t pay much. He did it on his own, without follow-up or from the Guatemalan state. When asked if he was contemplating looking to migrate again, he replied, “The fact [is], I’m still not sure. “
Jeff Abbott is a freelance journalist in Guatemala. Twitter: @palabrasdeabajo
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