Violence and corruption in Central America, particularly in the Northern Triangle countries, is causing a wave of outward migration. The Trump administration’s restrictive measures and pressure on regional governments did achieve modest reductions in the numbers of migrants arriving at the border. But they did nothing to address the root causes of the problem. Meanwhile, efforts at reform across the region face opposition from entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo. Explore WPR’s extensive coverage of the Central America crisis.
For years, Central America has contended with the violence and corruption stemming from organized crime and the drug trade. More recently, the countries of the region also found themselves in U.S. President Donald Trump’s line of fire, due to the many desperate Central Americans who make their way across Mexico to seek asylum at the United States’ southern border.
The steady stream of outward migration is driven by ongoing turmoil, particularly in Nicaragua and the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The three Northern Triangle countries rank among the most violent in the world, a legacy of the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, which destabilized security structures and flooded the region with guns. In that context, gangs—often brought back home by deportees from the U.S.—have proliferated, and along with them the drug trade and corruption, fueling increasing lawlessness. Popular unrest has done little to produce political solutions, leading many of the most vulnerable to flee, often banding together in caravans to more safely navigate the treacherous route north.
Trump instrumentalized the highly publicized migrant caravans for domestic political purposes, while also using threatened cuts in U.S. development aid to pressure governments in the region to do more to hamper the outflow and to take in migrants returned from the U.S. border. But his administration did little to help regional governments address the root causes of the crisis—graft and violence.
The presidential election in early 2019 of a 37-year-old populist in El Salvador and an anti-corruption crusader in Panama raised hopes that new efforts to address those root causes were on the horizon. But entrenched interests have done their best to maintain the status quo, much as they have in the face of reformist efforts in other countries in the region, like Guatemala and Honduras. And El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has more recently raised fears of a return to authoritarianism due to his politicization of the military.
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