With the gangs breathing down his neck, Honduran Maynor sold everything he owned, took his wife and three children ages 11, 8 and 5. He closed the door of his life, threw away the key and he went north. It was not the first time.
“I had to leave my country several times and they deported me,” he explained. Now he was trying for the third time to get to the United States. And things got bad. Stranded in Mexico, Manor admitted: “We are bad, very bad.”
Immigration in Latin America ceased to be a linear phenomenon that took migrants from one point to another. Now go in various directions; a route that leads to one country and then another and then another in an unfortunate adventure in which whoever finds an inclusive host society, work and a better life wins.
“Is a multidirectional phenomenon which may involve recurring movements between different places. The return of migrants to their countries of origin and their readmission to third countries are a natural part of international mobility,” says a report by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), to which he had access Clarion.
“People who emigrate are in a constant search for opportunities, to establish certainty about how to eatdecent work opportunities, seek access to health, so when migrating, they seek a basic minimum of survival,” he explained to this newsper Marisol QuicenoMSF advocacy representative in Latin America.
When they do not find the answers to the needs they seek to satisfy, they leave againpoints out.
Why hpens?
He rising cost of living and high unemployment rates have made it difficult for them to integrate and rebuild their lives in host countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Quiceno argues that countries where migrants used to stop and stay before, now “effective, legal or economic integration does not occur” of these people.
“The primary responsibility is to understand, it is to understand the reasons for migration, the situations that a migrant faces in an unknown country. In some societies, migrants are rejected, they are not welcomed,” he laments.
Venezuelans in Argentina
With inflation above 100%, Argentina generated a new migratory wave of Venezuelans who had come escing from the Chavista debacle.
According to Bloomberg, the rampant rise in prices, the problems to rent and the deterioration of the quality of life led Venezuelans to new directions.
It should be remembered that the Venezuelans who arrived in Argentina in 2019 they had a dollar at 38 pesos. Today the blue is more than 700.
Some targeted Canada. But overall, All roads lead to the United States.
Haitians in Chile
Already in 2021, the Haitians who had arrived in Chile in the 2010s decided to leave. They argued rising unemployment, poverty, hostility, and tougher immigration laws.
In a note published then by The New York Times, Phalone, a Haitian with two children, recounted her case and the decision to leave for Texas. “Here (in Chile) they tell us: Go to your country, they are a scourge“, he justified.
Racist prejudices and language cliffs helped push Haitians to turn around and end up backed into a corner at the US-Mexico border.
Migrate once, twice, three times
Today, migrating once, twice, three times has become commonplace in Latin America, a region that also holds the top positions in the number of wandering humans looking for a place in the world.
According to the latest UNHCR Global Trends report, two out of five new asylum seekers around the world in 2022 came from Latin America. And, according to the UN, the main region of origin of migrants in North America is Latin America and the Caribbean (25.4 million), followed by Asia.
With the movement almost in circles the danger arrives. There is no migrant that advances without the weight of a heartbreaking story.
Mayner Rodriguez, a psychologist at the MSF mobile clinic in Danli and Trojes, in Honduras, has known countless stories that are not usually talked about: that of many people who go through the migration process on repeated occasions and face one and another time to very hard challengessuch as family separation and assaults on the road.
Rodriguez tells the story of siblings whose parents died trying and had to survive however they could, sometimes separating and taking different paths. An older brother who goes with the youngest, leaving the middle one to his fate.
“For them it was very sad to leave their middle brother, but they had no choice“, says.
For Quiceno, it is worrisome “the increase in unaccompanied children and adolescentsthose who travel alone, without parents or other relatives and who are not under the care of any responsible adult”.
The list of illnesses is enlarged with robberies, mistreatment in the street, days without eating, sleeping in parks, walking hundreds of kilometers and sexual abuse.
“Inside of jungle I heard and saw ugly things. I saw violent robberies, I saw deaths. You have to know that it is not easy to cross”, tells MSF Jose Rafael Cumare, 38, who migrated for the first time from Venezuela to live in Argentina for three years and then leave across the Darien.
And then there’s the shame
back to start it is not an easy decision. “People are faced with uncertainty. They doubt if the situation has really improved and if it makes sense to continue trying in the place where they are living,” Quiceno explains to Clarion.
And he adds: “Other people have told us that face some shame having to tell their families and neighbors that the dreams they were looking for were not found”.
Source: Clarin
