MIGRATION-GUATEMALA:
One-Way Ticket Home
Inés Benítez

GUATEMALA CITY,  (IPS) - "They catch you and treat you like trash," said 38-year-old Julio Medrano, shortly after being sent back to his home country along with 116 other Guatemalans deported on a charter flight from the southwestern U.S. state of Arizona.

More than 3,000 Guatemalans have seen their "American dream" cut short this year after being deported from the United States. In 2006, 18,305 undocumented Guatemalan immigrants were sent home -- nearly 60 percent more than in 2005, a clear indication of the stiffening of U.S. immigration policy.

U.S. immigration authorities "have helicopters, motorcycles and dogs that carry bones in their mouths so they won't bite," said Medrano, recalling his seizure by border patrol agents in the Nogales desert along the border with Mexico.

Sitting on white plastic chairs, men, women and children with weary faces listened in silence to the "welcome" offered by Guatemalan immigration authorities in a room in the local air force installations.

"It's hard to find work here in Guatemala," sighed Medrano, who a month ago left behind his home, his wife and four children in the southeastern department (province) of Jutiapa in search of a dream that turned into a nightmare.

"You have to sleep in the bush, in the desert, suffering thirst and hungeràyou travel in a trailer truck with 80 other people, with just one little ventilator," he said.

The majority of this group of deportees were seized on their way through Mexico or along the U.S. border. Others had made it into the United States and were working without legal documents when they were arrested in their workplaces or homes.

A total of 75,395 Guatemalans were deported by land from Mexico in 2006, and more than 4,000 so far this year. (Guatemala borders Mexico to the south).

"The number of sweeps and raids has increased" in the United States, the president of the National Coalition of Guatemalan Immigrants (CONGUATE), told IPS.

She pointed to a rise in the number of Guatemalans deported after their requests for political asylum were rejected. Most of the applications for asylum were filed in the 1990s, before Guatemala's 36-year civil war came to an end in 1996.

García said "enforcement of immigration laws has been stepped up," and "immigrants are more fearful of being deported; they lay low and are more vulnerable to abuses and exploitative labour conditions."

Some 1.4 million Guatemalans are living in the United States, mainly as undocumented immigrants. The remittances they send home to their families (which totalled 3.6 billion dollars last year) represent 10 percent of Guatemala's gross domestic product.

The Guatemalan community in the United States is calling for broad reform of U.S. immigration law, including the regularisation of the status of the majority of undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record, a reduction of the timeframe for obtaining residence permits for family members, and the approval of a quota for the entrance of legal immigrants.

"If I didn't need to, I wouldn't emigrate," said 22-year-old Vivian García, sipping orange juice, part of the snack that Guatemalan authorities serve the deportees when they are sent back to this impoverished Central American country.

García left her eight-month-old baby and three-year-old toddler with their grandmother in the eastern department of Santa Rosa, setting out with a group of other women on a trek that involved "three days hiking through the desert and 18 hours in a van," to join her husband in the United States.

"They treat immigrants really bad there," she said, remembering how she suffered in a jail in Arizona, where she was held for 15 days before being put on a plane back to Guatemala.

Sitting next to her was Mayra Opec, a 26-year-old schoolteacher from the southwestern department of Totonicapán, who said the border agents "hit the men and shouted at the women."

Of the 3,021 Guatemalans deported by air from the United States this year, 362 were women and 136 were children, according to official statistics.

Mauro Verzeletti, head of the Guatemalan bishops conference's migration pastoral programme, said "deportation is not the solution to the immigration issue," and added that "what is needed is heavy development spending" in countries that are major sources of migrants.

Verzeletti, who runs the Casa del Migrante in the Guatemalan capital, which provides humanitarian assistance and advice on human rights to migrants, called for a "social reinsertion policy" for deportees, given the toughening of migration policies that plays into the hands of "coyotes" or people traffickers, who tend to also have links to drug trafficking and other kinds of organised crime.

Guatemalan migrants pay between 35,000 and 40,000 quetzals (from 4,500 to 5,200 dollars) to the coyotes, said Pablo César García, the head of the Guatemalan Foreign Ministry's office on migrant affairs.

The sweeps and deportations carried out by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency target youth gang members as well as undocumented migrants who have failed to show up for their hearing before an immigration judge.

"We have 52 teams at the national level to track down these immigration fugitives," ICE spokesman Michael Keegan told IPS.

He also referred to a pilot project that will target "criminal aliens," identifying undocumented immigrants in U.S. prisons with the aim of deporting them to their home countries.

In addition, ICE is investigating trafficking and smuggling of undocumented migrants, and criminal organisations that force victims of trafficking to work off their debt in the United States in sweatshop conditions.

The consequences of the increase in deportations of Guatemalan immigrants include a drop in remittances -- the country's second biggest source of foreign exchange after exports -- the break up of families, and the personal difficulties faced by deportees who have to readjust to Guatemalan society, sometimes after living abroad for years.

"At the highest possible level, there is an urgent need to urge the U.S. government to adopt an immigration policy that addresses this reality, respects human rights and values the contribution that Guatemalans make to the U.S. economy," said Raquel Zelaya, director of the Association for Social Research and Studies.

In late 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a draconian immigration bill, which ordered the construction of more than 1,000 kilometres of double-layered fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border, and would have criminalised assistance to undocumented immigrants and made their illegal presence in the United States a felony.

The Senate, on the other hand, approved a guest workers programme and a route to citizenship for illegal immigrants -- an initiative that had the backing of President George W. Bush. Congress is now working to reconcile the two bills.

Last October, President Bush signed into law a bill calling for the fencing off of 1,112 kilometres of the U.S.-Mexican border -- one-third of the total length of the frontier.