Hopelessness driving record numbers of Hondurans to migrate
OMOA, Honduras — At a converted seaside hotel, more than 200 Honduran migrants stepped off six buses, weary from travelling overnight across Guatemala after being deported by Mexico.
Their journeys ended somewhere in Mexico, short of the U.S. border, and now early Friday morning they were back in Honduras making arrangements to return to where they started.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection last month reported more than 41,000 encounters with Hondurans at the U.S. southern border. That was about 12,000 more than during March 2019.
The reasons Hondurans continue to flee their country have been well documented: pervasive violence, deep-seated corruption, lack of jobs and widespread destruction from two major hurricanes that struck the region last November.
Here at one of the Honduran government’s reception centres for returnees, their documents were reviewed, they received medical checks and with the help of the Red Cross, they were screened for whether they could safely return to their communities.
Gilles Carbonnier, vice-president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, visited the centre Friday during a weeklong visit to El Salvador and Honduras. Among its efforts, the Red Cross works to support people displaced by violence.
On Saturday, Carbonnier told of meeting a Honduran cobbler who had a shop in a market in Tegucigalpa. One of the region’s infamous street gangs was extorting him and when he could no longer pay, the gang severely beat him.
The man saw no choice but to close his shop and migrate to the U.S. He was deported more than a year ago, screened and eventually referred to the Red Cross. The humanitarian agency helped him relocate and gave him some money.
“He bought the material to restart his cobbler activities and right now he has two shops, six employees and was able to restart his life,” Carbonnier said.
Hondurans and others around the world feel the need to migrate because of “a lack of opportunity and a lack of hope,” Carbonnier said. “And a lack of opportunity with a lack of hope results in you saying: ‘There’s no space for me in this country and I’m going.’ ”
For Eugenio Sosa, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, the assorted factors pushing Hondurans out of the country have contributed to a general hopelessness.
“The people don’t go just because it’s really bad,” Sosa said. “The people go because it’s bad and because they are certain that it is going to continue to be bad.”
U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has been charged with addressing the root causes of the region’s migration, struck a similar note last week.
She said Wednesday that the U.S. wants to use its resources — the Biden administration has spoken of US$4 billion in aid — to provide the people of the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “with some hope that if they stay at home, help is on the way and they can have some hope that the opportunities and the needs that they have will be met in some way.”