Keeping the US border safe...in Honduras?

On November 18, five individuals were detained by Honduran authorities when they tried to enter Honduras with questionable Greek passports.  Given the timing, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris, the story was widely reported in US media.

The passports contained inconsistencies that raised the concern of Honduran immigration officials who ordered their detention.  While it was widely reported from the first that they were Syrians, it was only on the 19th of November that Honduran officials were able to confirm their identities: four college students and a professor, all hoping to seek asylum in the United States.

The group arrived on an Avianca flight from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Tegucigalpa, on the evening of November 17. Some of the biometric data in the passports did not match the individuals, raising the concern of Honduran immigration officials, who then detained them. Greek officials reported that passports for people with those names had been stolen in Athens. Representatives of the Greek embassy of Honduras confirmed that none of the five spoke a word of Greek.

After these five were detained, Honduran immigration officials reported that one other individual, who tried to enter Honduras with a false Greek passport the previous Friday, had been denied entry and deported. Three days after the group of five were detained, three more people, reportedly a Syrian woman and two Pakistani men, were arrested after entering Honduras without proper documents, arriving over land from Nicaragua.

All this made it seem for a short while as if Honduras was a weak point in potential terrorism in the US, invoking fears that ISIS was sending people to infiltrate the US via the border with Mexico.

Never mind that getting to the US-Mexican border from Honduras is a daunting prospect, with Mexico responding strongly to US persuasion to stop refugees coming from Central America from reaching the US border. Even without the recent crack down, the route from Honduras to the US over land was hardly ever easy.

Within a week of the detentions in Honduras, it became clear to most international media that these five men were not the first wave of some subtle terrorist strategy.

Most English media dropped the story entirely. In an exception to this rule, the BBC reported on November 24 that the Syrians arrested at the Tegucigalpa airport had applied for asylum, "because their lives were at risk in their home country".

On December 1, Reuters reported that the men had been freed, and charges dropped, after they paid a fine equal to $450 each for falsifying documents, and that they were expected to be granted permanent refugee status on February 22, quoting a Honduran official saying

they had been warmly received by Honduras' Arab community, and were planning to stay in the Central American country.

How the group reached Honduras is a fascinating illustration of the routes taken by those fleeing Syria.

Authorities said that the group that reached Honduras traveled from Syria to Lebanon, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, and Costa Rica before trying to enter Honduras.  Honduras' El Heraldo reported that the five fake Greek passports were acquired in Brazil, specifically because Greeks do no need a visa to enter Honduras, but Syrians do.

At least six people traveling on Greek passports, including the five detained in Honduras, entered Costa Rica on a flight from Argentina on November 11.  The sixth person, a woman, was detained  in San Jose, Costa Rica for questioning. 

Costa Rica and Honduras worked with Interpol to identify these individuals.

A check with Interpol found none of them had a criminal background.

On December 1, a Honduran court ordered their release after a plea bargain was reached.  The five Syrians signed a document in which they admitted to the crime of forging government documents (their fake passports) and were fined.  They were freed from prison, and the government of Honduras agreed to rule within the next 90 days on their application for refugee status. 

The Syrian and Lebanese Christian community in Honduras that is supporting their application are descendants of immigrants who themselves came to Honduras as refugees from the Ottoman empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

None of these developments have been enough to stop the exploitation of the story, minus the actual outcome and the exoneration of the Syrians held in Honduras from any terrorist ties, by right wing media and politicians in the US.

Arguing against accepting any Syrian refugees in the US, just this week one state senator wrote

Throw in the five Syrian nationals on their way to the U.S. that were apprehended two weeks ago in Honduras with fraudulent passports and we have a clear picture of imminent danger.

"Imminent danger". 

From students and a professor fleeing violence, welcomed as refugees by one of the poorest nations in our hemisphere.

What's "Rural" in Honduran Immigration?

In rural Honduras, the northward pull is strong

That's how the Washington Post headlined an article that, unfortunately, is unlikely to give people in the US anything other than another set of stereotypes about Honduras to add to drug violence and gang violence.

Let's start with "rural". I started the article thinking, maybe finally someone got out into Yoro to talk to people there, like the ones I worked with in the early 1990s-- before electricity arrived.

Or maybe they visited Santa Barbara, where on my first visit to the site my compadre was excavating in the early 1980s, we needed a flashlight to walk through the lightless night-time streets of the city-- the capital of the Department of Santa Barbara state.

That's rural. And there are still plenty of backwaters in Honduras where sanitation, electricity, and potable water are not routine, where cities are a long way away.

So imagine my surprise when I realized that the "rural town" here is Comayagua-- the colonial capital city, the capital of the department of Comayagua, and one of the most populous cities in the country.

I would have characterized Comayagua, located on the main highway that links San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, as urban. It's a city of approximately 60,000 residents.

The valley in which the city sits is a center of commercial agriculture, which the Millennium Challenge Corporation described in 2009 as

of the utmost importance to Honduras, agricultural and cattle breeding activities carried out in the valley stimulate the national economy; the valley is leader in the production of oriental vegetables and pickles in Honduras and Central America.

Think Dubuque, Iowa.

Rural, if by rural you mean agricultural. Not if you mean remote and antique.

But that is what the photo essay accompanying the Washington Post story seems designed to suggest. 

The first image shows a man roping a bull-- a common part of life even near San Pedro Sula, the industrial powerhouse of the country, due to a long heritage of cattle ranching. The annual Feria Juniana in San Pedro Sula centrally features cowboys riding, and a cattle show-- like any country fair anywhere in the US.

But that image set a certain tone for the representation of Comayagua, which was reinforced by images of mango vendors on the side of a road, and reached an absurd climax with a series of three images of two young men, hard at work "at the Villa San Antonio community outside Comayagua".

Pause for geography lesson: Wikipedia, to which I resort out of necessity, informs us that the Villa de San Antonio is located 20 minutes outside the city of Comayagua, has 17,000 inhabitants, and its "principal economic activities include farming, factory work, and construction". 

Back to the images: the first shows a view along the paved highway. Cars drive by-- three are visible-- but our focus is on two young men in a cart. The caption describes them as riding to work "in a typical carriage pulled by oxen".

Now, "typical" usually implies "normal": what most people might use. Ox carts, though, are actually more used for specific kinds of work than as the typical form of transportation, even in the really remote rural areas I have worked in. As early as 1955 a US news article characterized Honduras as having moved directly from ox carts to airplanes, making this an especially durable image of primitiveness applied to the country.

The second photo in the sequence shows the same two young men and describes them as working "to extract dirt from the bank of a river, which they will later sell".

So far as I know, there is no market in Honduras for dirt (as such). It is possible that these two young men were digging clay, a principal material for building adobe houses that still form an important part of the housing stock in Comayagua.

Villa San Antonio's mayor made news last year asking for funding to pave the town's streets, noting that it also needed potable water. It is exactly the kind of place where adobe houses still are the most practical option for people.

So yes, Villa San Antonio is rural, if by rural you mean: poor.

But not rural as in remote, removed from urbanization. In fact, the mayor went on to talk about the need to plan for infrastructure impacts when the military air base at Palmerola is finally rebuilt as a civilian airport. Because Palmerola (Soto Cano Airbase) is in the Villa de San Antonio.

And Villa San Antonio and the other places featured in Comayagua are not particularly central to the story of Honduran migration, anyway.

News coverage today in La Prensa today says that 52,000 deportees were returned in 2012, about 32,000 from the US.

According to authorities quoted, they came primarily came from the departments of Cortés (where San Pedro Sula is located), Francisco Morazán (where Tegucigalpa is located), Yoro and Choluteca-- the last two actually rural.  No mention of Comayagua as a leading source of Honduran would-be emigrants to the US.

Of course, this isn't really a story about Honduras. Instead, it offers another stereotype: the story of Central Americans trying to reach the US, forced by Mexican drug lords to pack drugs into the US.

The narrative on immigration is just as incoherent as its representation of Comayagua. Admitting that the total of intercepted would-be undocumented immigrants at the Mexico border is at its lowest point in 40 years-- since the 1970s-- the article seizes on the fact that a higher proportion of those still trying to enter the US are from Central America.

For Hondurans, we are told, the immigration reform bill "has nothing to offer".

That's convenient: immigration reform offers nothing for Central Americans, who are coming in a "surge of unlawful newcomers", "an exodus".

Of course, it is both a small surge and an unsuccessful exodus: of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Hondurans trying to make it to the US in a year, we are told, more than 50,000 are deported from the US-- and what cannot be estimated is how many turned back before crossing the border.

There are real issues that could have been covered here. The portrayal of Honduran immigrants as semi-willing drug mules ignores a horrific and well documented recent history of hopeful immigrants being kidnapped by Mexican criminals and held for ransom, raped, even killed.

The Post could have followed the lead of Columbia University's Katy Orlinsky, whose reporting details the risks Honduran immigrants experience riding the Mexican rails. She documents the bias Central Americans face Mexico, where (as in the US) they are viewed as likely gang members.

Most of all, she presents these people in full humanity, wanting to "show Americans what they go through to make it to the other side" She wrote:

I worked to capture their feelings of hope and uncertainty, fear and anticipation... of the young people I met in the rail yards were brave and generous. They took care of one another. People shared food; they took turns keeping watch. They felt safe with one another.

The Post could have done something similar; the last ten photos in their essay actually tell that story, if they had been explained.

They start with images of Hondurans crossing the border with Guatemala at Corinto, on the northern coast, supposedly starting for the US. Next comes an image of a bus full of Hondurans deported from the US, at the old airport of San Pedro Sula. The two ends of the journey.

The images that follow mix two centers to support returning migrants, one at the border crossing at  Corinto, the other at the San Pedro airport.

Honduran press describes the center at Corinto in 2012 as intended to serve Hondurans deported from Mexico. Funded initially by the Red Cross, the Centro de Atención a Personas Migrantes responds to the medical needs of these Hondurans-- needs caused by the conditions that Orlinsky wrote about. The mission is one of serving people who have suffered.

The second center featured, Centro de Atención al Migrante Retornado (CAMR), is one of two located at the major Honduran airports. It is supported by the Catholic Missionary Brothers of San Carlos Borromeo, along with the Honduran government and an international NGO, the International Organization for Migration. Its mission, too, is to serve:

To assist those vulnerable Hondurans who return to the country, through actions directed to attend to their immediate needs and to promote their social adaptation and integration.

Vulnerable Hondurans.

This is the real story of Hondurans attempting to make it to the US: danger, risk, and need. Not as sexy as drug running, of course.