Jeff Abbott
A woman holds a sign stating that "Guatemala is not a concentration camp" during a protest against the agreement with the Trump administration on July 27.
Donald Trump seems to negotiate in the style of a mob boss. Extortion is the name of his game—just like the gangs of Central America that many migrants from the region are fleeing. The U.S. President’s strong-arm tactics are on full display in his efforts to force Guatemala to make U.S. asylum seekers wait in Guatemala as their application process advances.
On July 23, Trump took to Twitter to threaten Guatemala after the Guatemalan Constitutional Court ruled against the signing of any “safe third country” agreement. He warned that he might ban Guatemalan products or impose tariffs on remittances sent back to the country, which would severely impact families that rely on money from their loved ones in the United States.
Three days later, the Guatemalan administration of President Jimmy Morales and the country’s business community gave in to the extortion. With Trump looking on, Enrique Degenhart, the Guatemalan minister of the interior, signed the agreement, which will require Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran asylum seekers to wait in Guatemala until their claims are processed.
The agreement is part of the Trump Administration’s attempts to curb migration into the United States. But many analysts, constitutional lawyers, and former officials believe it is illegal.
“When Minister Degenhart signed the agreement, he was disobeying the decision of the Constitutional Court,” Renzo Rosal, an independent political analyst based in Guatemala City, tells The Progressive.
Degenhart and Sandra Jovel, the Guatemalan minister of foreign relations, stated in a July 29 press conference that there was no pressure for the administration to sign the agreement. They claimed the agreement will merely close “grey zones” in Guatemala’s immigration law and help combat the use of coyotes, which charge asylum seekers often huge sums for safe transport.
But the Morales administration negotiated the agreement largely in secret, without informing the country’s Congress, and repeatedly lied to the public about it. In a press statement on July 14, it assured that “at no moment has [the administration] contemplated signing an agreement to convert Guatemala into a safe third country.” It has even tried to insist that the signed agreement is not a “ safe third country” accord but rather a “Cooperation Agreement Regarding the Examination of Protection Requests.”
Trump, in early July comments to reporters, used the term “safe third agreement” to describe what Guatemala would later sign.
The two winners in Guatemala’s June 16 presidential vote, Sandra Torres and Alejandro Giammattei, have both proposed either re-negotiating or annulling the agreement. The two will face off in a run-off election on August 11, with the winner assuming the presidency in January 2020.
The Morales administration’s decision to sign the agreement directly violates a court order from the country’s highest court. As a result, Morales’s unilateral decision throws the country deeper into the constitutional crisis that began when Morales expelled the United Nations-backed anti-corruption body, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala.
Jeff Abbott
Urban collectives protest against the agreement with the US government outside Guatemala's Presidential Palace on July 27.
Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled on July 14 against any “safe third country” agreement for asylum seekers. The decision came after four former foreign ministers, a high-ranking diplomat, and the country’s human rights ombudsman, filed petitions to block the agreement. Among those opposed was Edgar Gutíerrez, the former minister of foreign relations during the administration of Alfonso Portillo.
“These types of agreements must be public, not secret, and they must be approved by Congress,” Gutíerrez tells The Progressive. “This agreement will have impacts on every level,” Gutíerrez added. “We have a humanitarian crisis.”
As of July 29, three new injunctions against the agreement have been filed. At their joint press conference, Degenhart and Jovel denounced these legal challenges, warning that a failure to implement the agreement “could affect millions of Guatemalans.”
For many, the agreement cements Morales’s place in Guatemalan history.
“This is what Morales is ending his time in office with, [leaving the country] in worse conditions,” Rosal tells The Progressive. “He will go down in history as a total disaster.”
The agreement with the Trump Administration references the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, which established the concept of a “safe third country” for refugees fleeing violence and repression. Under international law, a country must meet certain conditions to be considered a safe country for refugees, none of which apply to Guatemala, according to experts.
“This country is not even safe for the people who live here.”
Activists have returned to the streets of the capital to protest the Morales administration’s signing the agreement. On July 27, nearly 200 urban activists gathered outside the presidential palace to protest the decision.
“Guatemala has a situation of the highest levels of malnutrition in Latin America,” Alma Jimeno, a seventy-year-old from Guatemala City who came to protest the agreement, tells The Progressive. “How can we attend to migrants when we cannot attend to our own citizens?”
Guatemala continues to suffer from rampant corruption and racism against indigenous peoples.
According to data from the World Bank, 59 percent of the nation’s population is living in poverty, including 23 percent in extreme poverty. Guatemala has some of the highest levels of child malnutrition in Latin America, education and health care systems in collapse, extreme levels of violence, and national territory controlled by gangs and drug traffickers. These are among the factors driving tens of thousands of Guatemalans to migrate to the United States.
“This country is not even safe for the people who live here,” Luisa Samayoa, a forty-three-year-old resident of Guatemala City, tells The Progressive. “Thousands of Guatemalans are searching for opportunities in other countries. If we are not capable of supporting the people here, then we are not able to receive people from other places.”
Organizations and collectives have called for more protests this Saturday, and every weekend until the agreement is nullified.