The pandemic does not stop a new caravan of Central American migrants

Hundreds of Hondurans from the new caravan leaving San Pedro Sula.ORLANDO SIERRA / AFP

A new caravan of migrants has set out on its route from Honduras to the United States this Wednesday night.

On their way north, as has happened since the great caravans began in 2018, other Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants are expected to join, and anyone who is not willing to travel through the Mexican migrant hell alone, off the beaten track, in the shadows.

They wear masks, but Covid-19 seems to be the last of the concerns of those fleeing concrete death threats.

A migrant mass that advances towards the north and reminds the world that violence and hunger continue to haunt them, with or without a pandemic.

The situation has changed a lot since the last attempt to migrate together in mid-January.

The arrival of that caravan to the southern Mexican border and the images of the National Guard harshly repressing those who tried to cross the river that divides Mexico from Guatemala, sent a powerful message that the Government of López Obrador would not be lenient in its policy migratory.

And, above all, that the pressure from the United States and the outbursts of Donald Trump for the entire Mexican territory to become his great southern wall, had taken effect.

Almost eight months later, the heavy-handed policy remains the same, but the focus and resources have been used these months to alleviate the effects of the pandemic.

The numbers of migrants detained and deported these months show that the Mexican political agenda was not at the borders.

Between January and July, according to the latest data available from the Ministry of the Interior (Interior), 43,306 migrants were euphemistically detained, although the official reports euphemistically “presented”, mostly Hondurans and Guatemalans and almost all in Chiapas, the Mexican state that it borders Guatemala.

This represents almost 70% fewer detainees than in the same period last year.

Also, the numbers of deportations that had tripled in recent years, have fallen: in total in those seven months 31,722 migrants were deported.

And refuge was granted - a resource that many began to request in Mexico given the blockade to continue north and request it in the United States - to 6,261 people, most of them Venezuelans, but also Hondurans (2,083) and from El Salvador (1,010) .

The arrival of a new migrant caravan has once again put its finger on the line of a tragedy that does not stop.

The indices of violence, poverty and absence of the State in Central American countries, especially Honduras and El Salvador, are now adding to a global economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

The suffocation to which its fleeing inhabitants were subjected is aggravated and the safest way to escape seems to be the one they devised - with the most success since 2018 - with the caravans.

López Obrador's strategy since he accepted the requests of the United States to stop the migration was to deploy more soldiers on the two borders.

Last year, the US president threatened Mexico with imposing tariffs on its exports if it did not take serious action on the matter.

And the Mexican president responded with 15,000 soldiers, members of the National Guard corps, on the northern border and some 6,500 on the southern border, according to Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval.

Some agents who also had the ability to detain migrants at the border with the United States, something very unusual until now, and images such as that of a mother with her child detained by the National Guard while they crossed the Rio Grande, turned around to the world.

In addition, Mexico signed an agreement with its northern neighbor called

(Stay in Mexico) by which in its most controversial part it promised to assume that the thousands of migrants who await their asylum procedures in the United States courts would remain in Mexico .

Even when in this country they have not started any migration process and it does not meet the conditions of the so-called safe third country, according to the human rights organizations that criticized the measure.

The caravans seemed to have disintegrated, but not the flow.

In 2019, the year in which the repression against them was most forceful, almost 200,000 were arrested and some 150,000 deported.

With the deployment of the National Guard and immigration agents working as a funnel from the south, the migrants left the busy roads, dodged the military checkpoints in the mountains, got back on La Bestia, bitten the police and agents migratory routes became more expensive, many coyotes (people in charge of crossing migrants) made the August.

Outside the caravans, they have definitely been more exposed to the well-known migrant hell: kidnappings, rapes, executions, human trafficking, assaults at the point of a machete, cannon fodder for organized crime.

Everything indicates that this new caravan will not have it easy. The strategy of pulverizing it will begin as soon as they set foot in Mexican territory. And even more so with a US presidential election in less than a month. The

Trump, who overwhelmingly are hundreds of young people and families desperate to have a life, not even an American dream, moving again. And the challenge for the Mexican government is becoming more complicated these days, because in addition to facing a health and social crisis due to the pandemic, it will have to bear the consequences of having accepted the designs of its northern neighbor.