The southern border celebrates the end of the Trump nightmare

4.716 kilometers south of Washington, in a hotel in Tapachula, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, a dozen migrants in a pension of six dollars a night follow the words of Joseph Biden in the Capitol.

In the central courtyard, next to a water tank of murky water, filthy walls, hanging clothes and rooms without ventilation, a group of Haitians, Hondurans and Salvadorans gather around a telephone screen where the inauguration of the new president.

"He left, he left, he left ... How nice that the white devil is gone," says one of them when Joseph Biden places his hand on the Bible and swears in office until 2025. As if he had just won a football game Jean Claude Maurissaint, born in Haiti 35 years ago, raises his arms and celebrates the change in the presidency in the country to which he dreams one day to reach.

"Trump has been bad with immigrants and I think the new one will be better for all of us who are waiting for a change," he says in precarious Spanish with his cell phone in hand.

Sticking to him, his friend from Port-au-Prince, Enold Desroches, follows the French translation on Youtube.

The cold of Washington seems to be from another galaxy in contrast to the almost 30 degrees that the last city of Mexico transpires.

The Honduran who is next to him, Santos Demetrio, 57, does not understand anything when the man with the tie and white hair speaks, but he does not look up from the cell phone screen.

His eyebrows jump when he hears Spanish: “A nation under God, with freedom and justice for all,” the singer Jennifer López has just claimed in her language so that all Latinos, from here and there, understand her.

"I don't think there will be many changes, but at least they will leave the families who are there alone ... Maybe now they will be able to help us more", dreams Demetrio.

Luis Mejía, another Honduran from Yoro, is part of the Torre de Babel that is Tapachula where, along 8th Street, Caribbean barber shops mix with African restaurants and hotels occupied by Cubans and Central Americans, two blocks from the main square.

“Biden is going to be better with migrants and open the border again, mainly for Latinos,” Mejía says with another phone in hand.

The idea that the border will be open to them is one of the illusions that runs from mouth to mouth and from shelter to shelter among the hundreds of migrants stranded in the south.

"Trump was a racist man who hated us," he adds.

Today is a special day at the Madrid hotel.

The usual tedium, the idle hours waiting to regularize the papers, for a relative to send some money or find a job, was broken this Tuesday at 11 in the morning with a news that happens thousands of kilometers from here and that they follow on YouTube and Facebook.

Over the weekend, Joseph Biden announced that immigrants to the United States will be able to obtain citizenship after eight years, but that after five years, after a background check and payment of taxes, they will be able to have legal residence.

The news was published by

on Monday and Tuesday.

In the filthy courtyard of the Madrid hotel, Michael Elysee, another 30-year-old Haitian, already knows and comments on the news.

"It will not be for everyone and it will not be the solution, but at least it is better news for us," he says.

Biden's initiative, which will have to be ratified in the Senate, tries to avoid caravans and that is why only those applicants who have been in the country since at least January 1 can apply.

Legalization, therefore, does not apply to any of those who sleep overcrowded today.

The feeling, however, is that for the first time in a long time from the White House there will no longer be insults or criminals who have their hands full of calluses from work and blisters on their feet since they walk.

With more than 40 million inhabitants, the northern triangle of Central America that makes up Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua has several decades of social injustices, dictatorships, militarism, corruption and natural disasters that keep more than half of the population living in the misery.

In caravan or moved by polleros, migrants aspire to imitate the almost seven million Central Americans who live with or without legal documentation in the United States and who contribute some 22,000 million dollars to the economy of their countries in remittances each year.

This time from the north comes happier news and although few believe that the situation will change, at least the dialectic is no longer aggressive and bullying.

That, which seems like a minor detail, is one of the few happy messages that reach a border hotel.