Guatemala Hosts Regional Venue on Transfer of Cuban Migrants

Guatemala hosts today a regional meeting to evaluate the results of the first movement through the área of Cuban migrants transfered from Costa Rica to the United States and to define the continuity of this strategy.

The meeting is the second held in this city, after the one organized in December, 2015 that caused the structuring of a test plan oriented to solve the situation created by the accumulation of some eight thousand migrants of the Caribbean nation on Costa Rican soil.

Organizers of the meeting shared with Prensa Latina that this meeting will be attended by directors of Migration of the countries involved in the project of the Migration International Organization (MIO).

They will evaluate the operation carried out on January 12 and 13, by which 180 Cuban migrants that could pay their trip were put on a plane in Costa Rica to El Salvador, from where they left in buses and crossed the south of Guatemala to Mexico.

The dialogue of this Wednesday could end, also, in the definition of dates for eventual movements like this to contribute to empty the 38 lodges fitted out since November 15 by the government of Luis Guillermo Solís near the border with Nicaragua, now occupied by those who received transit visas before December 18.

Political consultants point that, parallel to the procedure of Central Americans to solve the problem, several groups in the United States insist on politizing migration from the island beyond the economic reasons behind it, encouraging those rushing to reach the "American dream" without heeding the risks.

The Cuban Adjustment Act, approved by the United States Government in 1966 is the one that propels many Cubans to try reach that country, where they are received and one year after can apply for their residency, insists the Cuban government.

In Central America, other voices coincide in the claims to the White House to revoke that juridical body, which they consider discriminatory as it benefits Cubans while people from this área are arrested and deported constantly in the U.S.

They also highlight the difference between migrants from one part and the other, certain that most of the Cubans stationed in Costa Rica traveled legally, without humanitarian or political pressure and by plane to Ecuador, from where they took another plane, boat or by land until the center of the continent.

According to the spokesperson of Guatemala’s General Direction of Migration, Fernando Lucero, the meeting will session in the Ministry of Foreign Relations facility and behind closed doors, as it occurred in the December meeting, in which emerged the initiative of starting in an organized way to transfer the migrants from the Caribbean nation.