The March 7 issue of the New York Review of Books has an article - behind a paywall - The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA that talks about the connections between the violence in Central America and US policy. A short excerpt:
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The migrants departed from San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras and its economic center, not far from the Guatemalan border. Roughly 160 people had arranged to meet at the city’s bus terminal on October 12, the date of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. By the time they set out, their number had grown to a thousand. People choose to leave together to shield one another, to protect themselves from being robbed along the way of the little they have. The alternative is to rely on coyotes (human traffickers), who charge seven or eight thousand dollars, sometimes more, to take migrants to the US—sums that can take decades of work to save, and that many borrow from criminals to whom they are then indebted for life. To leave in such a large group, then, is a form of defense against crime.
San Pedro Sula may not be well known, but from 2011 to 2014 it was the most violent city in the world. (Caracas took the title in 2015.) The only thing to do there is escape. The crime syndicates, which have complete control over the region and the power of life and death over its people, have in recent years plunged Honduras into an unofficial state of war. In 2012 the country had the highest murder rate in the world: nationally 90 people per 100,000 inhabitants were killed, but in San Pedro Sula the rate was 169 per 100,000. So far the provisional data for 2018 show the national murder rate to be down to about 40 per 100,000. Despite the decline, the murder rate remains extremely high—the US rate, by comparison, is fewer than 5 per 100,000 inhabitants.1
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Together with El Salvador and Guatemala, Honduras forms the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America, one of the most dangerous non-war zones on the planet. What has made this region such a hell on earth is the fact that it is situated between the main producers of cocaine—Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia—and the main seller, Mexico. Honduras, furthermore, has two coasts, one on the Caribbean and one on the Pacific, making it a convenient point of arrival and departure for shipments of cocaine, and thus a very attractive base for traffickers. The migrant caravan is following the same land route as the cocaine that enters the US every day.
In recent months some have said of the migrants, “Instead of running away, they should try to change the situation in their country!” Only those unfamiliar with the Honduran situation could say such a thing. Anyone who opposes it, anyone who criticizes or tries to change it, risks death. Between 2010 and 2016, more than 120 environmental and human rights activists were killed in Honduras. Freedom of the press is also under siege, as Reporters Without Borders has documented. Honduras is one of the most dangerous Latin American countries for journalists, seventy of whom have been killed there since 2001, with more than 90 percent of those murders going unpunished. Anyone who writes has two choices: leave the country or stop writing. Exile yourself or censor yourself. Otherwise you may be sued for libel—libel suits are expensive to defend against, and even if journalists are eventually cleared, their credibility in the eyes of the public is often damaged. Or you may be jailed on false charges, or killed. And attacks on the freedom of the press come not only from criminal organizations, but also from politicians.
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