Tapachula, Mexico – Luis Alfredo Rodriguez held his younger son’s hand as he walked alongside a busy avenue close to Tapachula’s central plaza, asking for cash from these passing by.
The 27-year-old Venezuelan migrant had simply crossed into the Mexican border metropolis hours earlier with seven of his kinfolk, together with his spouse and youngsters.
However they arrived with no cash, Rodriguez defined. The whole lot they’d was misplaced to extortion as they travelled northward by way of neighbouring Guatemala.
“At each police checkpoint, the law enforcement officials demanded cash,” Rodriguez instructed Al Jazeera, his brow creased with fear as he saved a watch on his youngsters. “It was some huge cash.”
A whole bunch of hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers like Rodriguez cross by way of Guatemala yearly, as they make their method by way of Central America to the southern border of the US.
However many are reporting that the nation is one in all a number of hotspots for extortion, as officers and safety forces goal travellers with pay-for-passage schemes.
Al Jazeera interviewed 25 migrants in Guatemala Metropolis and Tapachula for this story, all of whom mentioned they’d been focused for extortion whereas in Guatemala.
For Rodriguez, the expertise dwindled his meagre financial savings to zero. He and his household handed 5 police checkpoints, and at each, officers demanded extortion charges starting from 30 to 150 quetzales — about $4 to $20 per bribe.
Rodriguez mentioned the police threatened to show his household over to immigration officers and expel them south to Honduras. “In case you don’t pay, they are saying they may return you,” he defined.
He was one in all a number of migrants and asylum seekers who described Guatemala as essentially the most tough nation he crossed, calling it much more difficult than the Darien Gap, a notoriously perilous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama.
“I believe the route by way of Guatemala is tougher, a tougher expertise to undergo,” mentioned Martina, a 30-year-old migrant from El Progreso, Honduras, who requested to make use of a pseudonym in her interview with Al Jazeera.
She reported being pressured to pay 500 quetzales — about $65 — at a police checkpoint outdoors of the capital Guatemala Metropolis.
“They ask for cash to have the ability to cross,” she defined. “As a result of if not, they will return you to Honduras. They instil worry in you in order that you need to give them cash.”
Extortion schemes have lengthy been a difficulty in Guatemala, based on Eduardo Woltke, a migrant rights defender within the workplace of the nation’s Human Rights Ombudsman.
However Woltke instructed Al Jazeera that the issue has just lately grown worse. He has obtained reviews of officers abusing their positions not solely to compel funds but in addition to coerce sexual acts.
Extortion “is a recurring grievance from people who find themselves in transit by way of the nation, concerning the police”, Woltke mentioned. “However in current months, we have now heard extra about any such violence, together with accusations as extreme as assault and sexual assault.”
In the meantime, the pool of potential victims continues to develop. The United Nations estimates a record number of individuals migrated north by way of Central America in 2023, with at the least 500,000 migrants and asylum seekers documented within the Darien Hole alone.
Some 22,000 had been expelled from Guatemala between January and November, based on knowledge from the nation’s Immigration Institute.
The federal government has grappled for years with how one can deal with extortion among the many burgeoning inhabitants of migrants and asylum seekers.
Accusations grew to become so widespread that, in November 2022, the then-secretary of Guatemala’s congressional migrant fee, Ligia Hernandez, held a gathering with officers to debate the difficulty.
Among the attendees, nevertheless, brushed apart questions of extortion as unfounded rumours. “There are not any particular complaints,” police director Héctor Leonel Hernández Mendoza instructed the assembly, based on native media reviews.
However Ligia Hernandez, who has since change into president of the Regional Integration Fee — a congressional physique tasked with addressing considerations stemming from regional tendencies — mentioned she heard testimony suggesting there’s a community of corruption that spans the nation, concentrating on migration routes.
“Extortions happen from the second migrants enter the nation’s borders,” Hernandez mentioned. “To this point, there isn’t a actual coverage from the [state] establishments to cease this abuse. There are not any free reporting mechanisms for migrants or prospects for rapid investigation.”
Nonetheless, 20 officers have been dismissed in 2023 alone for extorting migrants, based on Hernandez.
Jorge Aguilar, the spokesperson for Guatemala’s Ministry of the Inside, instructed Al Jazeera that the nationwide civilian police has a zero-tolerance coverage in opposition to extortion.
Any officer accused of extorting migrants will probably be investigated by the Inspector Common of the Police and fired if discovered responsible, he added.
However Woltke, the migrant rights defender, mentioned instances typically stall as a result of nature of the crime.
“[Migrants] wish to go away the nation as quickly as potential,” Woltke mentioned. With the victims absent, the general public prosecutor’s workplace usually closes extortion instances, he defined.
Some migrant rights advocates additionally level to corruption in Guatemala as a barrier to justice.
Statistics cited by the US Company for Worldwide Growth (USAID) point out that 61 percent of Guatemalans really feel corruption is widespread amongst public officers. And interference within the 2023 presidential election has drawn worldwide consideration to longstanding problems with corruption in Guatemala’s authorities.
“Migrant brothers and sisters are affected by the scourge of corruption we have now in Guatemala,” mentioned German Tax, a friar who oversees a Franciscan-run migrant shelter in Colonia Mezquital, a city south of Guatemala Metropolis.
“The place are they going to complain? Who’re they going to file a grievance with? Who’s going to concentrate to him then?”
Some migrants who spoke to Al Jazeera laughed outright when requested whether or not they would file a grievance in regards to the extortion they endured. Reporting their experiences, they mentioned, was merely not an possibility.
“Possibly a grievance could possibly be made, however would doing it imply that the federal government of Guatemala goes to do something?” mentioned Hector, a 25-year-old migrant from Honduras who declined to offer his final title for worry of reprisals.
He mentioned he paid round 2,500 quetzales, over $300, for him and his son to cross seven completely different police checkpoints in Guatemala.
Nonetheless, submitting a report felt like a pointless endeavour. “It wouldn’t be price it,” Hector mentioned, “as a result of every thing is managed by corruption.”
Al Jazeera correspondent John Holman contributed to this report.
