Jeff Abbott
Honduran migrants cross over the Suchiate River in western Guatemala in January 2020, the same route that many migrants from Venezuela and other countries are now taking.
On October 12, nearly 400 migrants, the majority of whom were Venezuelan, according to the Guatemalan Migration Institute, were left at a bus station just south of Guatemala City overnight because the buses were charging them double to take them towards the border. The following day, another 290 Venezuelan migrants appeared at the same bus station.
“They arrive in groups of twenty to fifty people,” Brenda Peralta, of the Franciscan Network for Migrants, tells The Progressive. “There is nowhere for them to stay close to the bus station.”
According to Peralta, the Catholic group she works with has opened a church near the bus station to allow them to stay overnight.
Venezuelans migrants and asylum seekers are increasingly passing through Guatemala in hopes of reaching the United States. This year marked the highest number ever of Venezuelans passing through the country. The Guatemalan Government estimates that at least 10,000 Venezuelans have unsuccessfully sought to pass through the country so far during 2022. But as Peralta points out, it is likely that the majority returned later to attempt again to cross the border. Among the migrants she spoke with, one had crossed five times prior to reaching the center of the country.
The flow of Venezuelan migrants through Guatemala has been on the rise since February. Initially, the migrants passed through the country silently, largely traveling through the remote and dangerous border crossing at El Ceibo in El Petén into Mexico. However, in recent months, they have increasingly traveled through the central region of Guatemala to the western border with Mexico.
“The migratory route has changed,” Peralta says. “In the south it is more feasible, but they have been coming in small groups that have been imperceptible.”
In the last five years Venezuelans have fled the South American country en masse as an economic crisis, caused by an internal political conflict and sanctions imposed by the United States, worsens. It is estimated that at least a quarter of the country’s population has migrated from the country since 2018.
“Venezuela is unlivable and dangerous,” Adam Isacson, who works with the Washington Office on Latin America, tells The Progressive. “People don’t even get enough calories in the day or basic services like water. That’s why people left for elsewhere in South America.”
Previously, migrants had taken safer routes to reach the United States. The newer route, however, takes migrants through the remote and dangerous Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia. According to Peralta, many of the migrants are driven by the idea that the Biden Administration is poised to end the controversial Trump-era use of Title 42, which expels migrants back into Mexico. As a result, in September 2022, the number of Venezuelan migrants encountered by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents was greater than all other Central American and Mexican migrants.
Tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants have increasingly taken this dangerous route through the Darien Gap in the hopes of reaching the United States. Along the way, migrants passing through Central America face racism, extortion by police, and elevated prices for transportation. Migrants are also often harassed by immigration officials, who regularly expel them from the countries through which they are passing.
Migrants are forced to take the Darien Gap route because of the United States government’s policy of “prevention through deterrence,” which has been in place since the Clinton era and is meant to put barriers on entry for migrants. But for migrants, the threats along the way are better than the threats and lack of opportunity they would face if they remained in their home countries.
“What they didn't calculate was that going through the desert or getting on La Bestia [the train across Mexico] is less scary than day-to-day life in the slums of San Pedro Sula, [Honduras,]” Isacson says. “[Our government] can certainly make the journey bad enough that it kills people and sickens them and gets them robbed and raped, but we still can’t really make it uniformly scarier than the day-to-day life in a lot of these places that people are leaving.”
Part of the reason for the current increase in migration through such dangerous areas is that these migrants previously flew to Mexico, where they could then travel to the U.S. border by bus. But the Biden Administration pressured the Mexican government to impose visa requirements for all Venezuelans entering the country. This policy went into effect in January 2022.
“The United States leaned hard on the Mexico government to require visas for Venezuelans,” Isacson says.
“By February, the number of Venezuelans went down to 3000 at the U.S.-Mexico border,” he explains. “Every month since then there have been more and more Venezuelans showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border and more Venezuelans walking through. It just wasn’t done before.”
Faced with the influx of migrants arriving at the border, the Biden Administration has also launched a program to accept up to 24,000 Venezuelan migrants who arrive by air. Those who illegally cross the border will be expelled back into Mexico under Title 42. The first Venezuelan migrants were expelled on October 13, just one day after the announcement.
But as Isacson points out, the program—which is similar to the one that was used to accept thousands of Ukrainian refugees earlier in 2022—shows that in spite of political discourse, the United States has the capacity to accept refugees and asylum seekers if it wants to.
The Biden Administration, Isacson says, is “showing [its] hand here that we can ramp up if we really feel like it.”