By Nancy Press Ph.D., Child Aid CEO
There is a rueful expression in Central America: When the United States gets a cold, we get pneumonia. This aphorism encapsulates both the geographical nearness of the nations and the unequal relationship between them.
Today, the sentiment seems cruelly prescient. Faced with overcrowded detention centers for Central American migrants, the U.S. is deporting our “pneumonia” down to Guatemala via flights filled with migrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19.
The policy to continue deportation flights during a global pandemic, and to a vulnerable nation that might otherwise have dodged the worst this virus can unleash, is cruel and should end immediately.
Deportation flights and a spreading virus
In Guatemala, the nation where Child Aid, the literacy organization I helm, has worked for more than two decades, 20 percent of the nation’s coronavirus cases can be traced back directly to migrants who were deported from the United States, according to the Guatemalan Public Health Ministry.
Learn how Child Aid is addressing the COVID-19 crisis in Guatemala.
In April, at least 99 migrants deported by air to Guatemala by the U.S. government tested positive for the virus, and the Guatemalan government balked, barring all flights from the U.S. aside from humanitarian flights. But after a two-week reprieve, a flight arrived from the United States on April 30th with 92 deportees, all of whom allegedly tested negative for the virus before boarding the airplane. Since, deportation flights from the United States have resumed.
“I do believe that the U.S. is exporting the virus,” California Representative, and an immigrant from Guatemala, Norma Torres told CBS news.
Our ears and consciences should prick up at Representative Torres’ words of warning.
The migrants who left their homes, pushed by poverty and violence, unable any longer to hang on to the lowest rung on the ladder of one of the most socially unequal nations on earth, came to the U.S., eager and willing to work at jobs Americans weren’t ready to do: agricultural pickers, busboys, day laborers, nurse attendants. Many lived in crowded conditions and sent home as much money as they could, contributing more than 10 percent to the GDP of their native country. Others wound up in detention centers that became breeding grounds for the highly communicable coronavirus.
The question is, how long can the Guatemalan government stave off these dangerous deportations? President Trump holds much power in the form of millions of foreign aid dollars that he whimsically dangles over the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) in an effort to control immigration at our Southernmost border. Ultimately, whether Guatemala is forced to accept plane loads of virus-plagued people may come down to a sickening choice between foregoing essential foreign aid or accepting infectious people.
Read how Child Aid is fighting systematic poverty through literacy and education
Already, there is some question as to whether a scheduled shipment of ventilators from the U.S. to Honduras and El Salvador excluded Guatemala due to the Guatemalan government’s stance banning deportation flights. And, of course air flights are not the only way to send back migrants to such a nearby country. Deportations by land from Mexico continue unabated. According to the Guatemalan government, almost 2,929 migrants have been deported through Mexico back to Guatemala in the months of March and April.
Sending contagious people back to a nation as vulnerable and ill-equipped to bear the health and economic disaster of a COVID-19 outbreak as Guatemala, is unconscionable.
A Growing COVID-19 Crisis in Rural Communities
How vulnerable is Guatemala? Consider Totonicapán, one of the areas where Child Aid works. It is uncommonly beautiful. Lush mountainsides jut 8,000 feet above sea level and skirt deep blue lakes. Nearly all of the people living in Totonicapán trace their ancestry to the Mayan inhabitants of pre-colonial Central America.
In addition to being very poor, many of its people have little to no access to healthcare and suffer from chronic malnutrition. One of the biggest causes of death in Totonicapán is lung disease, likely due to the use of indoor cooking and heating over wood stoves. So, you see, a virus that preys on human lungs will find it easy to decimate whole villages of people who already struggle mightily.
But this is also one of the most isolated regions of Guatemala. It seemed that this could, at least, insulate it from a global pandemic. Yet the first documented case of a returned migrant infected with Covid-19 was a man from the small town of Momostenango in the center of this region.
Strict precautions have been put in place by a proactive Guatemalan government, desperate to curb the growth of a virus they know could overwhelm the country. Masks and gloves are widely used; curfews are enforced; schools and shops are shuttered and travel between villages is restricted. But all these precautions cause their own terrible problems in a nation where so many live on the knife-edge of survival. Many families stare starvation in the face as jobs are lost and the small shops that keep many families alive are shuttered. Fear and desperation are felt in villages where every illness is now a cause for the deepest alarm.
The very last thing the people of Guatemala need today is an American president bent on using the terror of this disease as a capricious weapon of political influence against a small and so over-matched neighbor.
Watching the needless unfolding of the pandemic in Guatemala shakes me to my core, and it should rattle you, too.
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