Maya villages spurn deportees from US
QUETZALTENANGO, Guatemala: Guatemala’s indigenous Maya towns are spurning returned migrants, threatening some with burning their homes or lynching as fear spreads about more than 100 deportees from the United States who tested positive for the new coronavirus. In one city in the Guatemalan highlands, home to a large indigenous population, residents tried to burn down a migrant shelter. In some villages, locals are rebuffing the recently returned and threatening relatives of the deportees with expulsion from their homes.
To date, Guatemalan health officials have said that nearly one fifth of the 585 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the Central American country can be traced to people deported from the United States, most of them on two flights in a single day. That has fueled an angry backlash against migrants as they make their way home.
Carlos Cumes, an 19-year-old whose American dream ended a few weeks ago with his deportation, saw his luck sour again when he returned to the village of Santa Catarina Palopo, hoping to reunite with his family. The village, on the shore of the volcanic Lake Atitlan, is a center for the Kaqchikel Maya whose women wear traditional blue and purple dress.
Walking the final leg to his parents’ home, Cumes was confronted by an angry group of locals who had seen televised footage of him being transported toward the village in an ambulance earlier in the day. He was showered with insults and accused of bringing the disease with him, despite having undergone four days of medical observations in the capital and carrying a document from the health ministry pronouncing him symptom-free of coronavirus.
But none of that allayed the mob’s worst fears. “They threatened to set my family on fire,” said Cumes. “I was really afraid and I could only think about leaving the village so that I wouldn’t cause any more trouble.” “If I had stayed, they would have burnt my house down and who knows what else,” Cumes said in a telephone interview from Guatemala City, where he is observing a mandatory 15-day period of isolation.
Some of his own relatives, he said, also turned their back on him. Biting poverty has made Guatemala one of the main sources of migrants to the United States in recent years, along with neighboring El Salvador and Honduras. The confirmation by President Alejandro Giammattei that 103 Guatemalans deported from the United States on three flights since late March have tested positive for the virus has fostered popular anxiety and the volatile mood in the impoverished highlands, home to many migrants.
Until recently Guatemalans looked favorably on migrants, due in part to the vital remittances they provide to many families, fear of them has grown dramatically in just a short time. “Only a few months ago, most people were very happy (with migrants) because they came bringing remittance checks, but now they treat them like criminals,” Giammattei said in a national broadcast on April 19.
Mob justice is not uncommon in the mostly indigenous region and although Guatemala suspended most flights from the United States in midApril in response to the infections, deportations from Mexico continue apace, stoking residents’ fears. The US Immigration and Enforcement Agency (ICE) has said deportees were screened before the flights for elevated temperatures and symptoms associated with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Yet migrants returned by the United States to Colombia, Mexico, Haiti and Jamaica have also tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, raising broader concerns over the deportation program.
Following reports of infected deportees, the agency said it would acquire 2,000 coronavirus tests per month to screen migrants on outgoing flights, even though it likely would not have enough tests for all deportees. — Reuters