Truncheon-wielding Guatemalan troops have clashed with Central American asylum seekers trying to push their way north towards the US border as Donald Trump’s presidency entered its final days.
Thousands of mostly Honduran migrants began crossing the Guatemalan border on Friday night, having set off on foot from the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula in the early hours of Thursday.
On Sunday, as they trekked west across Guatemala towards its border with Mexico, part of the group was intercepted by members of Guatemala’s army and police near the village of Vado Hondo.
Video footage showed scuffles between migrants and the soldiers trying to block their path through the eastern department of Chiquimula. Troops used teargas, riot shields and sticks to repel the weary, back-pack carrying travellers as they tried to push past. Several were reportedly injured.
“You cannot and will not get through,” Guatemala’s immigration chief, Guillermo Díaz, told the migrants, according to the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre. “Please understand that carrying on isn’t possible.”
“We have no work. We can’t go back,” one member insisted. “Back home we’re dying of hunger.”
On Saturday Guatemalan authorities said they had deported nearly 1,000 members of the caravan, including nearly 200 children.
The caravan is the first of 2021 and comes just days before Joe Biden – widely seen as being more sympathetic to migrants than Trump – takes over as US president on Wednesday. The march also follows two devastating hurricanes in Central America last November, which destroyed communities, upended lives and convinced many families to migrate north.
Central American “caravanas” first made major international headlines in October 2018 when a group set off from San Pedro Sula – a notoriously violent industrial hub in north Honduras – and ran straight into a Twitter war with the US’s anti-migration president.
“MANY CRIMINALS,” were heading to the southern border, Trump fumed on Twitter, even though such groups are largely made up of desperate families fleeing poverty, violence and, increasingly, the effects of climate change.
It is unclear how Biden, who takes office on Wednesday, will respond to the latest caravan which, with an estimated 8 or 9,000 marchers, appears to be one of the largest since 2018.
In recent weeks activists have urged Biden to scrap Trump’s hard-line migrant policies, including a “devastating” program that exposed tens of thousands of asylum seekers – many of them children – to violence, abduction and rape by sending them back across the border into some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities. However, apparently wary of triggering a sudden race to the border, members of Biden’s transition team have played down expectations they will do so immediately.
In a recent interview with the Spanish language news agency Efe, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice, said: “Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1. It will not.”
On Saturday, the acting head of US Customs and Border Protection, urged the migrants and their “irresponsible coordinators” to return home because of the risks of coronavirus.
“Our countries have had a combined 25 million Covid-19 cases & 500,000 deaths – and infections are surging!” he tweeted. “Covid is a silent killer & the number of migrants falling ill will only increase.”
