The Guatemalan and United States governments have officially announced the formation of the first center in the region to reduce irregular migration through what the Biden Administration referred to as “legal pathways under the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.”
According to the Biden Administration, these locations, known as “Safe Mobility Offices,” will provide legal pathways to migrate into the United States, Canada, and Spain. As a senior administration official told NBC News in late April, “Individuals will speak to specialists to be screened and if eligible . . . they’ll be referred for refugee resettlement or other lawful pathways, such as parole programs, family reunification, or existing labor pathways.”
The announcement comes after two high level meetings between officials from Guatemala and the United States, including a telephone call between Vice President Kamala Harris and Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei. Previously, the Giammattei administration had denied that negotiations to open such centers in Guatemala were occurring.
The website for the office will begin to accept appointments on June 12 as part of a six-month pilot phase of the project. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) will both be involved in the work as well.
A spokesperson for the UNHCR tells The Progressive that there is not much information currently available about how the offices will work, or where they will be located. However, a spokesperson for President Giammattei stated on Thursday that the locations will be along the country’s border.
Though the uncertainties around the program have led to a lot of uncertainty as the United States advances with the implementation of the project.
“I have my doubts if [the offices] will have that capacity or not [with asylum cases],” Ursula Roldán, an immigration researcher and the director of the Institute for Research on Global and Territorial Dynamics at the Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala City, says. “It is worrying because once again the [international] refugee statute is being violated.”
“It is worrying because once again the [international] refugee statute is being violated.”
Guatemala has taken a heavy hand towards migrants since at least 2021, when the country’s military and National Civilian Police expelled a caravan of Honduran migrants that had crossed its border. According to the Guatemalan Immigration Institute, nearly six thousand migrants have been deported from the country between January 1 and May 28, 2023.
These offices come as part of the programs that the Biden Administration has sought to implement in the region to address irregular migration since 2021. But these efforts have also attempted to address migration into the United States from Guatemala, which continues to be one of the main sources of migrants in the region.
Vice President Harris has sought the increase in investment in Central America to stem migration, leading to a surge of 4.2 billion dollars by private companies into Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. But these initiatives often fall short due to the failure to address the primary causes of migration, including a lack of labor rights, racism, and corruption.
And there are grave concerns over the continued deteriorating situation in Guatemala ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for June 25.
“Giammattei’s policy of systematically undermining the rule of law, in order to guarantee the corruption and impunity of his regime, is at the base of the rise in irregular migration in recent years,” Edgar Gutiérrez, the former Minister of Foreign Relations between 2002 and 2004, says. “Corruption destroys Guatemalans’ hopes of accessing quality essential public services, it scares away sustainable investment, and increases crime and insecurity.”
As the Biden Administration continues to tinker with immigration policy in Central America, there has been little attention given to the continued persecution of those involved in anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala. While the Biden Administration has made statements regarding the rollback of democratic institutions, according to analysts in Guatemala, it has been silent on the ongoing corruption crisis in the region.
“The Safe Mobility Offices respond to the objectives of the United States,” Renzo Rosal, a Guatemalan independent political analyst, explains.
Rosal adds that U.S. foreign policy has emphasized addressing migration and drug trafficking over other issues in the region.
“The Safe Mobility Offices respond [only] to the objectives of the United States.”
“Those are the objectives of the United States,” he says. “[That is what they] really care about: [not whether] there is a democracy here, if there is no democracy, whether authoritarianism is strengthened or not.”
Guatemala is witnessing a deterioration within its judicial system as well. In recent years, judges have shifted to targeting those who have sought to investigate, prosecute, or report on acts of corruption within the Central American country. This judicial persecution has led to the exile of dozens of people involved in anti-corruption efforts, including various judges, prosecutors, and journalists.
Recently, the criminal trial against renowned Guatemalan journalist José Rúben Zamora and former prosecutor Samari Gómez, who formerly worked with the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (commonly known by the Spanish acronym FECI) and is accused in the case alongside Zamora, began early in May 2023. The judge overseeing the case announced after just eight hearings that the final sentencing will occur on June 14, just eleven days before upcoming elections.
In another alarming case, Stuardo Campos, another former prosecutor from the FECI who was involved in investigating cases of corruption during the administration of Jimmy Morales, was arrested on May 26. He is facing charges of abuse of authority, which stem from accusations by the Foundation Against Terrorism, a far-right organization that formed to defend former military members being charged with war crimes and has increasingly targeted anti-corruption prosecutors and others within the judicial system.
Campos called the charges “spurious.”
Added to this, this year’s presidential elections have been plagued by irregularities, including the arbitrary exclusion of candidates. Candidate Carlos Pineda, a far-right candidate who had promoted himself as an outsider, for example, was barred from running along with every candidate from the Citizen Prosperity Party following a lawsuit claiming irregularities at their convention.
All of these rollbacks of democratic institutions and the co-optation of the judicial system has the potential of further affecting the security of migrants as they await their appointments. The return of a regime of impunity means that criminal groups could begin targeting vulnerable migrant populations, as has occurred along the border between the United States and Mexico.
“What we are seeing is that these [migratory] flows remain contained at the borders with a lot of risks,” Roldán says. “For the population that remains there [on the border] they have to work in subhuman conditions in which they live in vulnerability facing [human] trafficking networks.”
She adds that the threats for migrants within Guatemala are even worse, as “the institutional framework is already collapsing.”