Recent years have seen an abundance of migration and a mass exodus from Central America and the Caribbean to the United States. In 2022, this influx reached a record two and a half million migrants at the border with Mexico. Unlike in previous years, the majority of these migrants did not come from the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) and Haiti, but from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
Immigration pressure led Joe Biden’s administration to agree with Mexico earlier this year on a new immigration plan that would expand legal income entry into the United States. According to this plan, almost a quarter of a million citizens of these countries have received temporary humanitarian stay so far in 2023. Most of the permits were granted to Haitians, then Venezuelans, and finally Cubans and Nicaraguans.
The end of Title 42 and the entry into force of the Biden plan temporarily stemmed the flow of migrants. However, more than half a million people have been arrested by border patrols this summer. As expected, the measures taken by the USA and Mexico are not enough to bring about a significant decline. It is strange that this conclusion was not shared at the high-level meeting between the United States and Mexico at the National Palace in early October.
The migratory potential is not increasing in any of the countries in the region, including Mexico, although the forms of detention, containment or return are different. Some are deported from the United States or Mexico, others, fewer, manage to settle in Mexican or Central American territory, and an even smaller number give up the idea of emigrating in order to find more favorable conditions in their countries of origin.
In 2022, during a presidential trip to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize and Cuba, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that social programs such as Sowing Life and Young People Building the Future would be expanded in Mexico to these countries, to promote regional development and prevent emigration. A year and a half later, it is not known to what extent these programs have been applied in these countries, nor whether they have helped stop or slow the flow of migrants.
After five years of bilaterally addressing an essentially transnational crisis through repeated meetings with the United States, the Mexican government convened a migration summit in Palenque. Of the ten leaders invited, only five were present: the presidents of Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras and the prime minister of Haiti. The absence of the heads of state and government of Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and El Salvador highlighted the limits of the call.
The preponderance of the Bolivarian Alliance’s positions in the forum apparently did not lead to the inclusion of Daniel Ortega, but did lead to a rhetoric focused on the migration crisis as a situation caused by the trade embargo and economic sanctions imposed by the Bolivarian Union against Cuba and Venezuela. Of course, the restrictions that Washington unilaterally imposes on trade with these countries affect their internal conditions, but the decline in social indicators of these countries and, in particular, the increase in poverty and inequality are a consequence of wrong economic policies.
The narrative of sanctions as a cause of emigration overlaps with opposite experiences from a US development aid perspective, such as those of Haiti and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. Unlike the Bolivarian governments, the governments of these countries do not find it difficult to recognize that poverty, inequality and insecurity have increased in their countries. Rather, the axis of these governments’ discourse is on cooperation for development and not on confrontation with the hegemony of the United States.
López Obrador’s Mexico, which enjoys a priority relationship with Washington, appears to be the ideal place to help bring these contrasting approaches to migration closer together. However, as with their tour of the region in 2022, the government of Amlo and Morena appears to be momentarily integrating itself into the anti-imperialist discourse of the members of the Bolivarian bloc. After this cursory response, Mexican diplomacy returns to its deep and constant inter-American logic.
How should this mimicry be understood? On the one hand, it is an easy and inexpensive way to satisfy governments like the Cuban and Venezuelan ones, which always rely on external legitimacy and the ability to put pressure on the base of the regional left. On the other hand, this ideological diplomacy allows Mexico to maintain the migration issue as part of its ongoing negotiations for beneficial bilateral relations with the United States, without making deeper commitments to regional containment.
The Palenque summit at times seemed like a Tower of Babel, with heads of state and government speaking different languages while statements and minutes from foreign ministries attempted to reach more substantive agreements. Some of this linguistic confusion was inevitable, as the causes of emigration have different nuances in each country. Neither the structural deficits in Haiti nor the lack of freedoms in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua are outside of this causality. But in all cases, poverty is at the root of the phenomenon and uncertainty lurks at every stage of the journey to the United States.
Once again, ideology colludes against diplomacy, to the point that a migration forum bringing together all the rulers of Central America and the Caribbean becomes unimaginable. The lack of democratic legitimacy of some and the isolationism of others, together with the profound deterioration of regional integration forums, contribute to the emergence of these fictions of ideological consensus, which do very little to channel legal and safe emigration.
Subscribe here Subscribe to the EL PAÍS México newsletter and receive all the important information on current events in this country