Biden's puzzle in Central America

EULOGIA MERLE

For four decades, each new Administration that comes to the White House has brought plans and initiatives to solve the problem of irregular immigration of Central Americans to the United States;

For four decades, each new Administration has been grinding against the complexity of the problem, both in terms of internal consensus to achieve an immigration reform law, and in terms of policies designed to prevent Central Americans from leaving. your countries and head towards the rich neighbor to the north.

President Biden promised in his campaign that he would invest 4,000 million dollars to face the recurring migratory crises and, once he took office, he appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the one in charge of handling the problem, following the guidelines of former President Barack Obama, who during his tenures entrusted then Vice President Biden with the same task. This guideline shows the high level of importance that the immigration issue has on the Administration's agenda, but at the same time it frees the president from his probable, if not expected, failure.

As part of his initiative, Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico, where he met with the respective presidents, Alejandro Giamattei and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and also traveled to the city of El Paso, Texas, where he met with immigration authorities, representatives of organizations non-governmental and irregular immigrants. Harris's message had two components: on the one hand, he explicitly warned Central Americans not to “come” irregularly to the United States because they will be deported; on the other hand, he promised to attack the "root causes" of the problem in the countries of the isthmus themselves, through economic investment and support for democratic institutions that encourage the population to remain in their countries thanks to employment and security.

Harris's warning is a political gesture without any impact on the thousands of Central Americans willing to risk their lives on the journey north. Not even in the toughest moments of the Trump Administration was the exodus contained. For those desperate and determined to flee the extreme conditions of poverty, corruption and violence that plague Central American societies, the speeches of Republicans or Democrats make little difference regarding the threat of deportation. It is enough to remember that in the countries of the isthmus, former President Obama is known as “the deporter-in-chief”, and that this perception has been confirmed by data from the Pew Research Center, according to which Trump did not reach the number of deportations carried out by Obama . The exodus, then, will continue.

The second component of Harris's message, attacking the "root causes" of the problem, does not bode well for a better fate. The political and economic elites of the three countries (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) that expel the most people to the United States have such a level of corruption that it is unthinkable that a million-dollar investment improves the living conditions of those societies; and the dismantling of democratic institutions parallels that of corruption.

In Guatemala, President Giamattei, who was accused and imprisoned for the extrajudicial murder of seven inmates when he was director of the prison system in 2006, has surrounded himself with shadowy military and business groups investigated by the now defunct Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) formed by the United Nations; at least three prosecutors who scrutinized corruption cases of these groups have been forced into exile. The situation in Honduras is more dramatic: the United States has as its interlocutor a government whose president, Juan Orlando Hernández, has been identified by a Federal Court in New York as being linked to drug trafficking (his brother, Tony, was sentenced to life imprisonment for that same court and for the same charges).

The case of El Salvador deserves special mention for its peculiarity. President Nayib Bukele - with the support and even enthusiasm of the majority of voters - has disrupted the Salvadoran democratic system, which was the negotiated culmination of a ten-year civil war that cost 100,000 deaths. Thirty years of democracy were ruined with a stroke of the pen. Bukele ended the separation of powers, harasses opponents and the press, and now he intends to call a referendum to change the Constitution and be able to re-elect at will, just as Chávez did in Venezuela and Ortega in Nicaragua, but without the leftist ideological vociferation of these. Bukele had the luxury (called “rudeness” in the US press) of not receiving the special envoy for Central America from the Biden Administration, Ricardo Zúñiga. For now,Washington has suspended military and police aid to El Salvador.

It would be illusory to think, then, that the Biden Administration will be able to attack the “root causes” of the problem of illegal immigration of Central Americans, when the three governments - elected or re-elected to the heat of Trump's drums - are bent on democratic backsliding. and to avoid any accountability at all costs. Vice President Harris has said that, to overcome the stumbling block of government corruption, the economic investment will be given directly to the population through non-governmental organizations.

This initiative has two vulnerabilities. The tendency of authoritarian or dictatorial governments to legislate against NGOs in order to declare them “enemies” of the nation and close them down is widespread in our time (Russia, Hungary, Belarus, Venezuela, to mention a few cases). In Central America itself, the Daniel Ortega regime has attacked foundations and organizations that promote human rights, freedom of the press and culture, and has not only closed them down, but has also imprisoned their managers or forced them to leave. into exile (the journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro is the most representative example). It should not be surprising, then, that Bukele and his fellow men, who form the so-called Northern Triangle, soon lined up their batteries against these organisms as part of their authoritarian onslaught.

The other vulnerable point has to do with the supervision of the delivery and execution of the eventual millionaire funds to Central American NGOs. For this work, the State Department appeals to the hiring of American contractor companies, which has been criticized by experts in the field, since in this type of model more than half of the money stays on the road and ends up returning to United States, due to the high salary and operating costs associated with contractor companies.

Viewed bluntly, the problem of irregular immigration of Central Americans to the United States has no solution in the short or medium term.

Vice President Harris' margins of maneuver are very small, more than those of Biden when he took office from then-President Obama, since the democratic deterioration was not as acute as it is now.

Horacio Castellanos Moya

is a writer.

His most recent book is

Roque Dalton: Clandestine Correspondence and Other Essays

(Random House Literature).