Tapachula, Mexico – Luis Alfredo Rodriguez held his younger son’s hand as he walked alongside a busy road 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 family, together with his spouse and youngsters.
However they arrived with no cash, Rodriguez defined. All the pieces they’d was misplaced to extortion as they travelled northward by means of neighbouring Guatemala.
“At each police checkpoint, the cops demanded cash,” Rodriguez instructed Al Jazeera, his brow creased with fear as he stored an eye fixed on his youngsters. “It was some huge cash.”
Tons of of 1000’s of migrants and asylum seekers like Rodriguez cross by means of Guatemala yearly, as they make their means by means of Central America to the southern border of america.
However many are reporting that the nation is one in every of 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. “If you happen to don’t pay, they are saying they are going to return you,” he defined.
He was one in every of a number of migrants and asylum seekers who described Guatemala as essentially the most troublesome nation he crossed, calling it much more difficult than the Darien Hole, a notoriously perilous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama.
“I feel the route by means of Guatemala is tougher, a harder 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 compelled to pay 500 quetzales — about $65 — at a police checkpoint exterior of the capital Guatemala Metropolis.
“They ask for cash to have the ability to cross,” she defined. “As a result of if not, they’ll return you to Honduras. They instil concern in you in order that you must give them cash.”
Extortion schemes have lengthy been a problem 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 not too long ago grown worse. He has acquired experiences 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 means of the nation, relating to the police”, Woltke mentioned. “However in current months, we’ve heard extra about one of these 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 document quantity of individuals migrated north by means of Central America in 2023, with a minimum of 500,000 migrants and asylum seekers documented within the Darien Hole alone.
Some 22,000 have 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 tips on how to tackle extortion among the many burgeoning inhabitants of migrants and asylum seekers.
Accusations turned 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 problem.
Among the attendees, nevertheless, brushed apart questions of extortion as unfounded rumours. “There aren’t any particular complaints,” police director Héctor Leonel Hernández Mendoza instructed the assembly, based on native media experiences.
However Ligia Hernandez, who has since grow to be president of the Regional Integration Fee — a congressional physique tasked with addressing considerations stemming from regional traits — 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 any actual coverage from the [state] establishments to cease this abuse. There aren’t any free reporting mechanisms for migrants or potentialities for quick 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 towards extortion.
Any officer accused of extorting migrants shall be investigated by the Inspector Normal of the Police and fired if discovered responsible, he added.
However Woltke, the migrant rights defender, mentioned circumstances typically stall because of the nature of the crime.
“[Migrants] wish to go away the nation as quickly as attainable,” Woltke mentioned. With the victims absent, the general public prosecutor’s workplace frequently closes extortion circumstances, 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 % 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’ve 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 concerning the extortion they endured. Reporting their experiences, they mentioned, was merely not an possibility.
“Perhaps 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 identify for concern 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 the whole lot is managed by corruption.”
Al Jazeera correspondent John Holman contributed to this report.
