Migrants in caravan shrug over U.S. vote

MEXICO CITY — The migrants in a caravan used by President Donald Trump as a campaign issue were almost universally unaware of the results of the U.S. midterm elections.

The Central Americans were more concerned with the dangers of northern Mexico as they struggled to reach the U.S. border, still hundreds of miles away, than with who controls the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Kenia Johana Hernandez, a 26-year Honduran farmworker, left her country with her 2-yearold daughter because she couldn’t afford child care or schooling. Asked if her decision to emigrate had anything to do with the U.S. elections, the answer was a simple, “No.”

For her, the caravan was merely a safety measure. “If I had come alone with just my daughter, maybe I wouldn’t have even made it this far because it is so dangerous,” she said.

Gilberta Raula, 38, from Samala, Guatemala, joined the caravan at the Mexican border because it seemed her best chance to get her 15-year-old daughter out of the country. She left six other children behind, but wants to give her daughter an opportunity to study and work.

She had only the vaguest idea of the issues surrounding Tuesday’s U.S. midterms.

What she did know, she said, was that “the U.S. president has acted badly.”

“The way we hear it, he doesn’t like anybody,” she said of Trump. Told that Trump’s Republican party had lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives she said, “Ah, good.” She, like others, expressed hope that somehow it might help their chances of finding refuge.

Franklin Martinez, a 46-year-old farmworker from La Esperanza, Honduras, said Wednesday he’d probably stay in Mexico City for a while before setting off again northward, to see if things changed following the U.S. elections.

“Because now it’s an anti-immigrant wave,” Martinez said. “They’re not well-received at the border.”

Experts agree that the formation of this latest caravan and the others that have set off for the U.S. border before it have far more to do with politics in Central America and current conditions in Mexico, where drug gangs frequently kidnap migrants to demand ransom from their families in the U.S.

“The first concern is collective security, there is safety in numbers,” said Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope. “There is a political logic to this, but it’s not exactly aimed at influencing the U.S. elections.”

“It brings pressure on the authorities of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador more than anything else,” he said. “This sends a message that there is a human rights crisis in the Northern Triangle of Central America.”

That view was shared by former Honduran lawmaker Bartolo Fuentes, who helped form the caravan of just a few hundred migrants that set out from Honduras on Oct. 13, before growing to as many as 7,000 at its peak. Fuentes told a news conference at the Mexico City stadium where the migrants, who currently number about 4,000, are staying that the caravan embarrasses the Honduran government “because now the world is seeing the tragedy we live with.”

Raul Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the Republican losses in the House suggest that Trump tried to use the migrants “politically, to depict the caravan as an invasion, and it didn’t work.”

Benitez said the caravan has put as much pressure on Mexico as the United States. After the migrants entered, Mexico came under pressure to accelerate the refugee and asylum process for Central Americans.

“The caravan shows that Mexico could give more humanitarian treatment to these people,” said Benitez, “that Mexico should treat these people the way Mexico wants the U.S. to treat migrants.”