Movement of the people: David Pratt on the migrant caravan heading for the US

Among their number are entire families, women with toddlers in pushchairs, people in wheelchairs. The majority carry their worldly possessions in threadbare bags. At times they have numbered more than 7,000, but occasionally that dwindles as exhaustion, searing tropical temperatures and lack of food have taken their toll.

It was earlier this month on October 12, in the crime-ridden Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, when a group of 160 people gathered at a bus terminal and prepared to set off on this dangerous journey, some motivated by online messaging.

“The violence and poverty is expelling us,” read the online slogan circulating on social media in Honduras showing a lone migrant sketched against a bright red backdrop.

It was the work of left activists who had helped lead migrants north in the past, but also an effort to undermine newly re-elected president Juan Orlando Hernandez and call attention to the plight of migrants.

Little did they know then that their campaign that began as a domestic dispute in Honduras would mushroom into an international political football drawing global attention. Here was yet another chapter unfolding in the mass movement of people that has arguably become one of the biggest stories of our time.

As the current migrant caravan as it’s known has moved closer to the US border, so the language from Washington has become excoriating.

With the country facing midterm elections, President Donald Trump has pulled out all the stops to use the caravan to stoke fears about foreigners as the poll approaches on November 6.

Trump, who has recently been stumping for congressional Republicans has already dubbed the poll the “election of the caravan”.

“Every time you see a Caravan,” he tweeted last week,“or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms!”

Though the caravan is still some 1,000 miles from the US border, Trump has hit his favourite cable news TV shows and been tweeting non-stop hoping his strategy will pay off in the final two weeks before election day.

“Hardened criminals” and “unknown Middle Easterners” are among the migrants’ ranks he insists, even though there is no evidence to suggest this is the case.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also sounded the alarm, calling it a “moment of crisis” for the US while 800 American troops will be deployed to the Mexican border to cope with the “threat”.

Despite such US claims of an unprecedented crisis, the fact is that migrant caravans are nothing new. For years, an annual caravan of Central American migrants travelling through Mexico to the US border received modest publicity until Trump condemned it in April, pitching the procession into the glare of the world’s media and into the homes of thousands of potential migrants.

What the Trump administration fails to mention though is that much of the current migrant situation is largely blowback as a result of US polices in Central America. Yes, the region is a mess and local elites and corruption are partly to blame, with some of the countries ranking among the most corrupt in the world. But so too is the US, given its decades of meddling in Central America.

Over the years, with CIA backing, coups have been staged in countries like Guatemala. In El Salvador too there was US support for a military junta, while in Honduras the Reagan administration used the country as a staging post for the far-right guerrilla group the Contras to prosecute a civil war in neighbouring Nicaragua against the leftist Sandinista government

All of these US-inspired actions not only helped destabilised the Central American region, but subjected generations to a cycle of extreme poverty and violence.

One of Trump’s favourite bogeymen is the infamous MS-13 street gang that began in the barrios of Los Angeles during the 1980s, formed by immigrants who had fled El Salvador's long and brutal US-fuelled civil war. Other members came from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

During his first 100 days in office Mr Trump ordered the deportation of some 46,000 convicts many of them MS-13 gang members who were repatriated to Central America. There the carnage and corruption in part already created by US policies, made it rife for these gang member to reinforce organised crime syndicates who thrive and terrorise the local population forcing many ordinary people to leave.

More recently, the same Trump administration endorsed Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez despite elections plagued by fraud allegations. It is from Honduras of course that the current migrant caravan making headlines set out on its journey. Last Tuesday, making an already bad situation worse, Trump posted the following tweet: “The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the US is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!”

Human right groups and migration monitors though say that such caravans are unstoppable when conditions at home are so bad.

Honduras’s murder rate is forecast to be 41 per 100,000 people this year. That’s about eight times higher than the US. Unemployment is almost seven per cent, while underemployment is an estimated 44 per cent.

Bodies like the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) insist that the best way to stop migration is not at the US-Mexico border, but thousands of miles south of it dealing first and foremost with the countries’ internal problems.

As for the migrants themselves on the caravan, they appear undeterred at the prospect of family separation or detention that is part of Trump’s “zero tolerance” stance on immigration.

In cities and villages, along rural roads and in town squares an outpouring of support has propelled along the caravan marchers. Local authorities, community groups and individuals have handed out free food and water, second hand clothes, blankets and loose change to help them move northward.

Among the throngs hiking into the centre of the Mexican city of Tapachula recently was Roger Pineda, a 16-year-old Honduran.

“I just want to find some food and a place to sleep,” he said, explaining to Reuters how he joined the caravan a few weeks ago with five family members and a group of friends fleeing from the violent city of San Pedro Sula.

Meanwhile new reports suggest that a second caravan of over a thousand migrants in Guatemala is now heading toward the Mexican border.

These mass movements of people are not of course only in Central America. All over the world people are moving, as they always done throughout human history.

Today, though, the scale of migration is unprecedented and the reasons ever more diverse.

Currently we are now witnessing the highest levels of movement on record. A staggering 258 million people, or one in every 30 were living outside their country of birth in 2017.

Defining what a migrant is or distinguishing them from refugees though has often proved problematic. Some presume a migrant is on the move to seek a better life. But if that person is leaving the poverty and starvation of a dustbowl farm in the deserts of West Africa in order to survive, are they a migrant or a refugee?

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the definition of a migrant is any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a state regardless of legal status, whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary, what the causes for the movement are, and what the length of the stay is.

Currently great swathes of humanity fit this definition and criteria with most embarking on long and dangerous journeys to flee poverty, conflict, terrorism or the effects of climate change, often seeking refuge or the chance of a better living in countries with stronger economies or more stable politics.

While hiking the coast of southern Spain that runs along the Strait of Gibraltar recently, time and again I would come across small deflated rubber dinghies lying semi-submerged in sand and seawater, all testimony to a perilous passage.

Almost daily before the winter weather worsened in this region, men, women and children most from sub-Saharan Africa could be seen disembarking from rescue boats, exhausted bewildered and shivering. Most had made the dangerous crossing from Morocco that sits barely nine miles away across the Strait of Gibraltar.

According to the IOM more than 15,000 migrants have already entered Spain this year via the short but treacherous trip across the strait where the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean meet.

Over 2,700 more migrants crossed into Spain by land in its North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

“We’ve known for months that this could happen,” Francisco Ruiz, the mayor of Tarifa one of the coastal towns was quoted as saying by Europa Sur newspaper recently. Tarifa is one of a few towns in the region that has struggled to cope with accommodating the increased number of migrants at emergency relief centres that have been rapidly set up.

“As a council, we are doing what the government is asking of us but also what our citizens demand, which is that we show maximum solidarity,” was how Ruiz summed up their approach.

Not everywhere, of course, adopts such a welcoming attitude as Spain whose authorities to their credit have shown considerable compassion to the plight of the migrants while enforcing the country’s immigration policies.

Spain’s stance is in marked contrast to that of the Trump administration right now, which remains determined to use the migrant caravan and immigration issue as a key weapon in the US mid term elections.

Many US observers point to the fact that the caravan issue could not have arrived at a more opportune time for Trump, playing right into the President’s hands.

“The President is doing what he does best, seizing national attention with a flood of outrageous and improbable lies that drown out rivals, leverage his brawling personality and rip at fault lines of race, identity and patriotism,” observed CNN White House reporter Stephen Collinson.

“Above all, Trump is hardening his line on immigration, the explosive issue that is usually a winner for him, in a strategy designed to drive his loyalists to the polls to defy ominous midterm omens that haunt every first-term president,” Collinson added.

Currently migration is arguably politically less acceptable than at any point since the end of the Second World War. The hardening anti-immigration response of governments across Europe, and in American and Australia has sent quite clear signs to some of those frontline countries that they can build barriers and force back those seeking safe havens.

“The last few years have seen quite threatening movements by countries that had offered refugees a relative degree of safety,” said Steve Valdez-Symonds, the director of refugee and migrants’ rights at Amnesty International.

This will not deter most from embarking on their journeys with the latest revised projections indicating that there will be 405 million international migrants by 2050.

This weekend, those Central Americans continue on their weary way in an effort to escape gang violence, drug wars and corruption. The time is a long way off yet before the march of the migrants and movement of peoples slows – whatever Donald Trump might say or do.

FACTFILE: The marchers

The United Nations refugee agency, which has helped coordinate relief efforts, said as many as 7,000 people have travelled with the caravan. Unicef estimates at least 2,300 children are among the group. The Mexican government has cited a smaller figure, around 3,600 participants.

Whatever the number, it has shifted as some people joined and others left, worn down by exhaustion, illness or injury. Some people have applied for asylum. The United Nations refugee agency has reported that some 1,500 people lodged claims for asylum in Mexico.The caravan is a mix of those who face grave danger in their countries and intend to petition for asylum and those fleeing poverty and unemployment.

Most are Honduran, though other Central Americans have joined in smaller numbers. Many are travelling with their children. Over the past days the health of those in the caravan has deteriorated. In Mapastepec, Mexico, more than 4,400 people were treated in medical tents last week. The most common ailments have been dehydration, sunburn, blisters and swollen feet from walking dozens of miles a day in flip-flops or flimsy footwear, medical workers say. Most travellers have little sense of the political debate their journey has generated in the United States.