Rafael González speaks nervously, struck by frustration and discomfort.
An immigrant from Puerto San José, on Guatemala’s southern coast, González would like to tell his country’s president, Alejandro Giammattei, about the delays many Guatemalans have in obtaining passports from their home country. It’s a problem, he says, that can no longer be postponed.
“I’d like to have the opportunity to speak directly with the president and tell him in front of him everything that’s going on,” Gonzalez said as he waited in a long line that meandered toward the Guatemalan consulate on Riverside Drive in Los Angeles. , near the junction of Roads 2 and 5.
He had gone there on a sunny July day to investigate the mysterious fate of his passport. Activists and others point out that passports provide immigrants with not only an essential document, but also a universally accepted form of identity to process immigration procedures. , filling out tax returns, buying homes and cars, applying for loans, and making purchases on credit, among other benefits.
Passports also make it less difficult for immigrants to send remittances, a vital source of money for their loved ones in their home country and a source of income for foreign governments like Guatemala’s.
“I came here to ask for it in April and we don’t know if it will be ready,” Gonzalez said. “Here they are not doing their daily work with Guatemalans. The same. They don’t even call you if the document is ready.
That same afternoon, Sonia Chilel had a receipt proving that her passport had been processed on January 26. But when he returned to the defeated consupasado last April, he said he had not been taken care of, he said. The Local Malacatán, near the Guatemalan-Mexican border, had returned to check again.
“It’s very important that this challenge is solved, because there are other people who are missing a day of painting to pick up the papers and then tell us that we have to go back the day,” the East Los Angeles resident said.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017 1. 4 million people of Guatemalan origin lived in the United States, of which 60% were U. S. citizens or naturalized citizens and 33% were born on Guatemalan soil. The descendants of Guatemalans live in the city of Los Angeles, the largest network of its kind in the country.
Delays in passport delivery began with the pandemic, but the challenge worsened when the Guatemalan Migration Institute suffered a shortage of books to print passports. The Guatemalan network in Los Angeles has been outraged by a scenario that has left many immigrants without a simple proof of identity. for those who do not have a constant migratory prestige – the “doubly undocumented” – this is an economically and legally delicate position.
“The government doesn’t understand. They haven’t been in our shoes,” said Lety Baran, president of the Primaveral Association, a nonprofit that supports migrants and their families in the Washington, D. C. , area. and Guatemala.
Marvin Otzoy, 51, believes Guatemalan government officials who make decisions from the comfort of their offices forget about the odyssey their compatriots go through to obtain passports, especially those like him who don’t live near a consulate. Originally from the province of Chimaltenanpass in central Guatemala, Otzoy has lived since 2000 in Reno in northern Nevada, a domain he says is home to some 3,000 Guatemalan families. They have to drive 4 hours to San Francisco or nine hours to Los Angeles, where the two closest consulates are. located.
“Recently, there’s a cellular consulate here, after a three-year absence,” said Otzoy, president of the Guatemalan Brotherhood of Northern Nevada, who is eight years old. He said it would be a great relief to have a consulate in Nevada, perhaps by moving one to San Bernardino that serves fewer consumers than its Los Angeles counterpart.
“The passport is nothing fancy, it’s something basic, it’s a right,” Otzoy added.
The printing of Guatemalan passports has been controlled through other agents in recent years. From 2012 to 2015, it was controlled through a personal company founded in Miami. Then Guatemala’s immigration government resumed the procedure: collecting data from applicants, printing passports, and distributing them. In 2018, the government established printing centers at nine of the consulates, which now print passports distributed across all 23 consulates.
Over the past decade, crises have slowed or disrupted the issuance of Guatemalan passports. The longest occurred in November 2012, when an expired contract with another passport processing company resulted in the withholding of 5,000 passports sent to the Los Angeles consulate. The existing crisis dates back to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, which ultimately led to Guatemala’s 23 consulates in the United States only issuing documents in case of emergency. Since June 2021, the maximum number of applicants has had to wait at least several months for passports to land in their hands.
As of July 15, passport backlog was approximately 118,000 passports awaiting delivery in the United States. The largest processing delays occur at consulates in Lake Worth, Florida (35,316); Los Angeles (25,131); Houston (21,370); and Chicago (13,041).
“This is a crisis that you have nationally and internationally,” said Andrea Villagrán, a Guatemalan congresswoman who sits on the Guatemalan Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee.
Earlier this year there were 40,000 Guatemalan passports awaiting delivery. Secondly, the Guatemalan Migration Institute ran out of passport books. In recent weeks, given the delay, the firm has sent two batches of notebooks, for a total of 70,000.
“In the government of President Alejandro Giammattei we are very worried,” said Stuard Rodriguez, who took over as director of the Migration Institute last year after the former director, Guillermo Diaz, was fired for “corruption alerts,” according to the Giammattei government.
“It’s a delay that confuses us all because of the challenge of the pandemic,” Rodriguez said in an interview. consulates to have enough notebooks to meet the demand.
Activist Walter Batres said recent shipments of computers have not yet resolved the basic disorders of the main call that cause long delays.
“What happens is that it is being solved alone, the challenge persists and the deficit grows,” said Batres, president of the Migrant Network, an organization that represents the Guatemalan diaspora in 31 states in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Spain.
Immigrants and activists say passport withholding not only hurts immigrants in the United States, but stifles a major source of assistance for their relatives in Guatemala. the $11 billion sent in 2020.
Critics say senior Foreign Ministry officials will have to interfere in the crisis and quickly.
“It’s a shame, it’s a sign of inefficiency and little empathy for migrants,” said Jordán Rodas, a former Guatemalan ombudsman.
Cristhians Castillo, an analyst and researcher at the Institute of National Problems at the University of San Carlos, said that after enduring a year of this crisis, the guilty government has discovered an effective process.
“This is a problem that is exacerbated by the limited capacities of the officials who have been appointed to head the institutions, in this case the [Guatemalan Migration Institute],” Castillo said.
The Guatemalan network in Los Angeles now hopes, and insists, that Giammattei will assume the duty to solve the problem.
“The call would be for the president to pay more attention to the ministries, to realize that they voted for him to walk,” said Rosa Posada, an adviser to the Union of Guatemalan Emigrants in Los Angeles.
“We ask you to resolve the issue of issuing passports,” he added.
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A native of El Salvador, Soudi Jiménez graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from UES. Before joining the Los Angeles Times en Español he worked at Megavisión (Canal 21) in Los Angeles, The Salvadoran capital, Radio World International and Hoy Los Angeles.
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