The idea that Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are safe and suitable countries to receive refugees would be a bad joke if it weren’t exactly what the Trump Administration has concluded.
The US Government has pressured the three countries to sign cooperative asylum agreements, similar to “safe third country” agreements. Translated from Orwellian newspeak, it means that the U.S. will return asylum seekers that cross the southern border in search of protection back to the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America. Trump is, in effect, off-shoring refuge – for the asylees he does not want in his own country – to Central America.
This decision will have serious implications for these three countries, whose citizens submitted the most asylum applications in the United States during 2018. Salvadorans made up the most applicants, with 33,400, followed by Guatemala with 33,100 and Honduras with 24,400. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) the three countries, taken together, accounted for more than a third (35%) of the total asylum applications in the United States.
Worldwide, the Northern Triangle Countries rank among the 12 nations that submitted the most asylum applications in 2018. Only the citizens of six other countries made more asylum claims than Salvadorans and Hondurans. Those are Venezuelans, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Congolese and Eritreans.
The official line from the Trump Administration is that the United States wants Central Americans to request protection 'as close to their [home] countries as possible.' But who the hell is seeking asylum in the Northern Triangle? Applications for asylum last year did not even add up to 400 in all three countries combined. Everything indicates that this is a veiled threat to discourage those seeking protection. Do you want asylum in the United States? It’s unavailable, and if you dare to ask for it, we will send you to Central America, a region that, for many, is a hell.
In 2018, when Trump said that El Salvador and some African countries were “shit holes,” he asked why the U.S. had to receive citizens from those countries instead of from places like Norway. Almost two years later, he’s found a way to do just that. No one who has not arrived in the United States via airplane (or has been in the country since before a series of asylum bans issued this year) can currently request asylum. And the three countries who produce the most asylum claims have signed on.
Although there was little opposition on behalf of the Central American governments, the signing of these agreements was not an exercise of freedom. Outgoing Guatemalan president, Jimmy Morales at first protested, claiming, 'At no time are we considering signing on to an agreement to make Guatemala a safe third country.”
In response, Trump tweeted: “Guatemala, which has been forming caravans and sending large numbers of people, some with criminal records, to the United States, has decided to break the deal they had with us on signing a necessary Safe Third Agreement. We were ready to go. Now we are looking at the “BAN,” Tariffs, Remittance Fees, or all of the above. Guatemala has not been good. Big U.S. taxpayer dollars going to them was cut off by me 9 months ago.” Three days after the tweet, Guatemala signed. Five months later, in a White House meeting with Morales, Trump said that Guatemala “has been terrific” in terms of migration.
El Salvador signed their own “safe third country” agreement on September 20, just one week after launching their own border patrol, which the United States also devised and is helping to finance. The last brick of this Central American wall was laid by Honduras on, September 25.
'More than an agreement, this is an act of extortion,' said Oscar Chacon, director of Alianza Américas, a network that represents 50 migrant organizations in the United States. “None of the signatory countries have the leverage to negotiate with Trump. The three Central American countries have economies that largely depend on remittances sent by millions of migrants living in the United States.”
The decision made by these three presidents will be judged by history. Each of the three govern countries from which tens of thousands flee every year. And yet, the three have also agreed to receive citizens from other countries who want to flee to the United States.
The legitimacy of Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) as president of Honduras hangs on by a rope dangled by the United States. His unconstitutional re-election in 2018 was approved by the three state bodies that Hernández himself controlled. The process was so murky that even the lukewarm Organization of American States (OAS) requested that the process be repeated. And yet, the United States endorsed the results. This despite the protests against him and the fact that Tony Hernández, the president's brother, was convicted for drug trafficking in the Southern District of New York in October 2019.
In Guatemala, Jimmy Morales ends his embattled presidency in January 2020, two months after Guatemala started receiving Honduran asylum seekers who were forcibly returned from the United States. Morales breached his campaign promise to continue the fight against corruption. After he and his family were investigated, he turned against the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and ended the mandate of the one lifeline Guatemala may have had against entrenched corruption. The decision demonstrated that the United States valued their immigration agenda more than supporting CICIG, thus reinforcing their friendship with Morales. Emboldened, Morales ended up calling CICIG 'a criminal organization' in his speech to the United Nations. Experts note that Guatemala’s constitutional order is already in clear decline.
The case of the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele, is different. After six months of governing El Salvador, he maintains a very high approval rating, close to 90%, and is free from serious corruption or social scandals. Since before taking office he promised loyalty to the United States and has been strategically complacent. He signed the agreement, although he later admitted in a CBS interview that the country doesn’t have the required asylum capacity.
At his bilateral meeting on September 25, Bukele said Trump was 'very nice and cool.' For someone as obsessed with his image as Bukele – who even took a selfie at the UN, but didn't say a word about the plight of Salvadoran migrants – the trick seemed to work. Eleven days after signing the safe country agreement, the U.S. State Department reduced its travel alert to El Salvador. Bukele quickly pointed out that, 'no previous government had succeeded in getting the United States to reduce the alert.' A few weeks later, the Trump administration delayed the suspension of Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans by one year.
Since the coup d'etats in the 60s and 70s, and especially during the revolutions of the 1980s, there has long been talk of United States influence in Central America. 'The President of the United States is more president of my country than the president of my country,' wrote Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. Although limited, the United States remains key in the internal politics of the isthmus today. What are these safe country agreements but the continuation of imperialism by other means?
As international law states that no asylum seeker can be returned to their country of origin if they can prove a well-founded fear of persecution, Trump has devised a perverse end-run. Now, Salvadorans may not be deported to El Salvador, but to Guatemala and Honduras, and vice-versa. Central Americans flee from a variety of factors. MS13, the street gang that Trump has enlarged to criminalize migration, holds a large presence in the new “safe third countries.” Last year, the homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were 51, 40 and 23 respectively. The UN considers any rate higher than 10 per 100,000 an epidemic of violence.
But asylum seekers do not only flee from violence. Honduras is one of the three countries most affected by extreme weather events, according to the Global Climate Risk Index. Migration from El Salvador and Guatemala is also spurred from the effects of drought and floods.
The signatures of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras hide realities such as that of Central American children caged in US detention centers, where five Guatemalan (and one Salvadoran) children have already died; or that of increased enforcement on traditional migration routes force migrants to travel through more dangerous areas; or the growing despair of those who, stuck in Tijuana and elsewhere on the US-Mexico border, decide to venture across the rivers, as the Salvadorans Oscar and his young daughter Valeria tried last June. They both drowned.
These signatures also signal another problem. Aside from not having sufficient employment or housing opportunities or adequate public safety, none of the countries that agreed to receive asylum seekers from the United States has a robust asylum system. Guatemala only has four asylum officers total; a situation similar to El Salvador, which has nine, but has granted, on average, only six asylum claims per year since 2014.
Everything indicates that, under this perverse logic, if Caribbeans begin to seek asylum in larger numbers than they already do, the next safe country will be Haiti.
*Translated by Kevin Amaya
