Organizer says immigrant caravan not being funded by political groups
Thousands of Central American migrants continue their journey toward the U.S. border Wednesday reaching the Mexican coastal town of Mapastepec.
President Donald Trump has suggested that the caravan is being used as a cover for terrorists from the Middle East. Vice President Mike Pence said there are reports that Venezuela’s leftist government is funding the group.
Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros has been accused by figures on the right, and Russia has been accused by figures on the left, with both sides suggesting the timing might have something to do with the November midterm election.
But Fuentes insists was none of those things.
“There are no institutions – religious, charity or political – that are financing this,” he said in a phone interview from Honduras, where he was deported after being detained by Guatemalan authorities. “The only ones using this caravan it
in a political way are the Americans and Donald Trump.”
His skeptics on that point include some powerful Honduran politicians, who have accused Fuentes – a member of the main leftist opposition party – of both funding the caravan and acting as a “coyote” who took money from the migrants to smuggle them north.
Mireya Aguero, the country’s minister of foreign affairs, suggested recently that Fuentes organized the caravan to make Honduras look bad.
“This irregular mobilization was promoted and organized by the same actors as in the past and has always generated destabilization and ungovernability in the country,” she said.
Fuentes acknowledged that he has been an open critic of the Honduran government.
But he pointed out that those marching in the caravan don’t belong only to the opposition party and aren’t interested in making political statements.
Ask caravan members why they left home, and the most common reasons are to escape poverty or violence, or to reunite with family members living in the United States.
But most say they learned about the caravan in the same place: social media.
One video – taken at the Honduras bus terminal where caravan members started out – was viewed nearly 300,000 times on Facebook.
When the caravan left Honduras, it had fewer than 2,000 people. But thousands more raced to join it as they saw coverage of the group traveling north.