Illegal immigration is one of the most lucrative businesses in Guatemala. Indifference, lack of skills and open complicity on the part of authorities has turned the Central American country, 12 years after the peace accords, into a country that cannot offer its inhabitants the necessary opportunities to live with a minimum of dignity.

This circumstance causes entire towns, especially in rural areas, to look for work opportunities in the United States. And, faced with the near impossibility of obtaining a visa, they decide, literally, to risk their lives in the hands of coyotes (traffickers) who, for a fee that ranges between $4,000 and $5,000, offer to take the young men to the United States through Mexico to reach the American dream, where they have contacts that will offer them the job they are hoping for.

They feel the ancient hunger, and the light at the end of the tunnel cannot be seen. They sell or pawn their few properties to begin an adventure that often ends with deportation, if not with death by exposure or heatstroke in the desert, where the coyotes abandon them to their fortune, not before robbing them of any item of value they have with them. In the case of women, they are subjected to all types of trauma, from rape to being sold into prostitution on the border between the United States and Mexico.

Humiliated deportees

When they are repatriated to Guatemala, humiliated and with enormous debts that they cannot pay, they may repeat the odyssey as many times as it takes to make it. This is a human drama that is not often portrayed in international media or at the government level.

There are no statistics. The clandestine nature of human trafficking keeps them in the shadows. It is estimated that between 80 and 100 Guatemalans attempt to achieve the American dream daily. Their hell begins before stepping into Mexican territory, even before boarding the death train, the hell begins. The testimonies of abuses committed even by police are disturbing.

But many make it. According to calculations by the U.S. Embassy, around 1.2 million Guatemalans live and work in the United States, most of them are undocumented. They live in inhumane conditions, in frightening rented rooms or piled up in rented houses doing the jobs that no one wants to do, in shifts longer than 10 hours a day. But this subsistence economy allows them to send money to their families, to the extent that money transfers have become the main source of revenue for the country.

According to statistics from the Bank of Guatemala, last year money transfers reached over $4.1 billion. However, with the present economic crisis in the United States, hand in hand with the hardening of the immigration policy in Washington, black clouds are on the horizon.

In 2007, over 23,000 people were deported. Already in 2008, between January 1 and March 24, the number of deportees reached 4,528, a number that is growing every day with flights coming in from different U.S. cities.

Despite this, the Guatemalan government has shown itself incapable of establishing a policy to protect these workers. Public Defender Sergio Morales emphasized this to Jorge Bustamante, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for protection of migrants’ human rights, during an official five-day visit to Guatemala.

“Guatemala does not have an emigration policy,” Morales said to the press after meeting with the international representative. “Although the National Council on Migrants from Guatemala was created, there is no legal framework containing mechanisms to protect either Guatemalans or those who find themselves here on their way to the United States or returning to their countries of origin after their deportation.”

Morales criticized the official silence regarding the risks of undertaking the voyage at certain times of the year, the extreme conditions that take many lives in the desert when they attempt to cross it between March and August, the hottest months.

He also spoke out against the Guatemalan consulates in different American cities that do not offer any support to migrants and of their abandonment when they arrive in Guatemala. “The lack of information is so extreme that there are dramatic cases, such as the increase in AIDS, with 120,000 infected, putting us in fourth place in Latin America.”

The Public Defender hopes that the report Bustamante will present in Geneva will be sufficiently explicit to awaken international consciousness. “We need to make public the serious reality that this sector of the population is experiencing,” said Morales. And he added, “It is necessary to sensitize our authorities to the urgency of putting in practice a comprehensive migrant protection policy.”