Agrarian processes, territorial structuring by agriculture and labor movements

Regional mobility has historically been related to agrarian dynamics and the advance of the agricultural frontier. Since the 19th century, the growing importance of export crops destined for the global market ─particularly coffee, bananas, cacao, and sugarcane─ has profoundly structured the territorial organization of the region (^{Baumeister, 1994}; ^{Demyk, 2007}), based on an outward-oriented economic model and a socio-political organization deeply marked by the control of two fundamental sources: land and labor. Therefore, population movements were closely linked to the different stages of agrarian reform, colonization, and the increase in value of land considered “empty”. Often, pressure on land was combined with social tensions in contexts of concentration in the hands of exporting farms and the expulsion of peasant populations. For example, in Guatemala, during the colonial period, the establishment of cocoa or sugarcane plantations often led to forced displacements and, after independence in 1821, large estates were essential to the continuity and deepening of inequalities. These migrations of laborers from the highlands to the farms of Chiapas in Mexico continue to this day, marking key spatial, economic, and social boundaries, both nationally and across borders (^{Angulo Barredo, 2008}; ^{Martínez Velazco, 1993}).

The case of El Salvador is also relevant, with a period of strong migration movements that crossed the national border to Honduras in search of land (^{León & Salazar, 2016}). Demographic growth, population density, the tradition of temporary mobility, and inequality in the agrarian distribution in the country led a large number of peasant families to settle and colonize the land in southern Honduras; in 1960, 12% of the Salvadoran population was in the neighboring country (^{Faret, 2015}). It is important to note that this process generated high levels of tension between the two countries (the 100-Hour War or Soccer War in 1969), a phenomenon instrumentalized by political and economic elites who preferred to turn their attention and generate xenophobic hatred toward Salvadoran farmers and settlers to avoid a more equitable agrarian reform in their country.

Highly dependent on global trade and focused on intensive agriculture as a comparative advantage, Central American territories have been largely organized in relation to the evolution of these monocultures. This sector generated population displacements at different times in the last century, either in a lasting manner (settlement and colonization, with the advance of agricultural frontiers, as in the case of bananas in Honduras, coffee or cattle in Guatemala and Nicaragua, for example) (^{Baumeister, 2001}; ^{Euraque, 1996}; ^{Pérez Brignoli & Samper, 1994}) or with flows of temporary and circulatory mobility, in specific and segmented labor markets, such as the emblematic case of Nicaraguan farmers in Costa Rican coffee farms or pineapple fields (^{Rodríguez Echavarría & Prunier, 2020}).

Labor markets and regional mobility

Beyond the agricultural sector, labor mobility contributes to the structuring of Central American territories, creating unequal borders and productive spaces. On the one hand, urban centers attract national workers or workers from neighboring countries, for whom crossing the border is part of the logic of expanding the labor market and diversifying productive activities and spaces. These workers integrate into the sectors of the informal urban economy, domestic service, public works, or construction, according to processes of mobility that may involve long-term settlement (with the whole or part of the domestic group), or migration circulation with frequent returns to the place of origin (^{Prunier, 2017}). It is worth highlighting three important aspects of this labor mobility on a regional scale. First, the importance of female mobility for care or domestic work activities that involves both movements from the countryside to the cities and the crossing of national borders. Second, the role of megaprojects in the mobilization of temporary labor ─essentially male─ in sites that require large numbers of workers for set periods, for example, for the construction of tourist complexes or of large transportation and communication infrastructure plans (as in the Gulf of Fonseca¹) (^{Morales Gamboa et al., 2011}). Finally, there is replacement or relay migration in the less attractive labor sectors (physically laborious, with precarious conditions and low wages), with jobs filled by the most vulnerable groups willing to migrate. This phenomenon has been observed since the 1990s, for example, in Costa Rica, due to the increase in the educational level of the population and the growing incorporation of women into the labor market; or in El Salvador, where massive migration to the United States and the importance of the receipt of remittances in the family economy have led to a desertion of the national labor force from the most demanding jobs (^{Cañada, 2011}).

Armed conflict and violence, refuge, and counterinsurgency

In Central America, intra-regional border spaces have played a central role during armed conflicts, both in the context of forced displacement and Cold War power relations expressed at the regional geopolitical scale.

In Guatemala, the long civil war that marked almost the entire second half of the 20th century provoked terror and extreme violence, which led to displacements within national borders, and significant refugee flows in neighboring countries (Honduras, Mexico, Belize) and the United States. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, the armed conflicts that began in the 1960s and ended in the early 1990s were responsible for deaths, confrontations, paramilitary violence, economic crises, and poverty that forced tens of thousands of people to cross borders in search of protection and employment. Honduras, a strategic point of U.S. military presence in the region, “protected” from revolutionary movements, and Costa Rica, a neutral country in the confrontation between two blocs and an economy in strong growth, were the two main territories receiving refugees. During the “lost decade” of the 1980s (marked by armed violence, political instability, and low levels of socio-economic development), Honduras was a country of reception rather than expulsion. Furthermore, cross-border areas were key spaces of the global ideological confrontation of the time, which structured strong lines of political opposition between the different countries of the region. From 1985 onwards, the southern zone of Honduras became a strategic platform for U.S. anti-communist policy, with the installation of training bases and logistical support for the Nicaraguan Contras.

It is necessary to emphasize the historical roots of Central American migration to the United States, which relates both to the context of civil violence in different countries of the region and to the flight of a significant number of refugees, as well as to the situation of profound economic vulnerability experienced by these populations, and more recently to the social violence linked to organized crime (^{Farah, 2012}, ^{Sampó, 2013}). The integration of these migrant workers into U.S. labor markets generated the formation of significant transnational communities that wove strong social and cultural networks, whose role is evident in the most recent dynamics of international migration to the north, particularly visible with the “caravans” of 2018, but which intensified from the first decade of 2000, due to the worsening poverty, social exclusion, and environmental deterioration in the region (^{Eguren & Hernández Bonilla, 2019}).

Border crossings by extracontinental migrants en route to the north

Today, the Central American region represents a critical zone in the trans-American migration corridor (^{Álvarez Velasco, 2016}; ^{Armijo Canto & Benítez Manaut, 2016}). The existence of new contingents comprised of extracontinental migrants from Africa, Haiti, Cuba, and Asia (with connections in Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador) provoked emerging debates in Mexico regarding its position and role as a transit country concerning the externalization policies of the southern border of the United States (^{Varela, 2015}; ^{Garibo, 2016}). This article emphasizes the impact of these corridors in the reconfiguration of border processes in Central America. On the one hand, these flows crossing the region toward the north constitute a new phenomenon that forces the different countries to define differentiated migration policies (control, humanitarian assistance, safe passage, and others). On the other hand, Central America is positioned in the intercontinental interaction of human mobility, which demonstrates the interdependence of migratory systems (South American, African, North American) and the key role of the region in the geopolitics of the global management of human mobility (^{Álvarez Velasco, 2016}).

Military-police control, stigmatization, and discrimination

The health emergency context highlights conflicts, contradictions, and forms of structural violence (^{Bourgois, 2009}; ^{Galtung, 1969}) that have marked the history of the region and its national divisions (see Table 1). Previous border conflicts give rise to tensions and expressions of social and institutional violence by governments in their challenges to coordinate containment measures and problems derived from them. Nationalist government policies and discourse, expressions of xenophobia and discrimination, constant threats of deportation, limited access to goods and services, and forms of social protection are historical conditions updated in light of the emergency that particularly affects the most vulnerable populations. A common trend in several countries of the region regarding the response to the pandemic is the increase in surveillance, control, and military-police presence in border areas. This has implied an intensification of some historical tensions in these areas and an aggravation of the conditions of mobility and residency of vulnerable migrant populations.

In Costa Rica, the border closure initiated on March 18, 2020 (operation “Secure Borders”) resulted in the rejection of more than 5 000 foreigners on the northern border in the first month of its implementation alone (^{Murillo, 2020}) and close to 16 000 by early July (^{Pomareda, 2020a}).² On the southern border with Panama, the situation was more serious for the extracontinental migrant population that used this route to reach the United States, as in the case of a group of Bangladeshi migrants who were detained by immigration authorities in mid-July and taken to a detention center of the Directorate of Migration and Foreign Affairs (Dirección de Migración y Extranjería) (^{Pomareda, 2020b}).

On the northern border, “the extreme vigilance (…), the arrests, and the identification of infection hotspots in packing plants and farms where Nicaraguan migrants work has also unleashed a xenophobic reaction from broad sectors of the population” (^{Pomareda, 2020a}). Although various international bodies have described the handling of the pandemic by the Nicaraguan government as insufficient and even irresponsible and risky (^{OPS reitera advertencias a Nicaragua sobre manejo de la pandemia, 2020}; ^{AFP, 2020}; ^{Wallace, 2020}), this has provoked official and social discourse in Costa Rica with a nationalist and securitarian tone, which generates the conditions for an increase in xenophobia and discrimination (^{Chavarría, 2020}).

The pandemic has justified a perverse intersection between health policies and mobility control in different national spaces in the Americas. This has exacerbated the common perception constructed by the government and the media that associates the figure of the foreigner with the “plague”. Thus, in general terms, migrants ─even more so if they are irregular─ are seen as a threat to public health because they are supposed to be vectors of contagion. At the same time, amid economic collapse, the figure of the foreigner is perceived as a “social burden”, particularly for the receiving states (^{Álvarez Velasco, 2020b}; ^{Chacón, 2020a}; ^{Pomareda, 2020a}).³

Outbreaks of social violence accompanied these situations, directly impacting vulnerable populations’ access to health and other forms of protection. In turn, this impacted the containment of the spread of the virus, which does not respect borders or military posts but is aggravated by the conditions that arise from rejection and neglect.

A clear example of these contradictions is the measure by the Costa Rican government, at the end of May, to demand the presence of police and immigration agents as a requirement to attend to foreigners in local health posts. Although it was a provision by the local health authorities (Los Chiles), the central government supported it. The measure established that “for all undocumented patients, an immediate call must be made to the office of Migration and Public Force” and that people would not be attended to until these authorities were present (^{Ugarte, 2020b}).

Another population affected by containment measures was the refugee or asylum-seeking community. In the general balance for the Latin American region, it is possible to state that, although official measures have been diverse, the tendency is for the responses to be “limited, reduced, and have not sought to extend the right to asylum and refuge for the vast majority of applicants”, in addition to reducing “the number of recognitions […] to transfer this process to third countries, putting this universal right at clear risk” (^{Álvarez Velasco, 2020c}).

In the case of Costa Rica, one of the countries with the highest rate of refugee population in the region (^{Gatica López, 2018}), the measures to close or virtualize institutions and services, both governmental and non-governmental, generated new risks and conditions of vulnerability added to those already known: unemployment, lack of housing, barriers to access health services, and the impossibility of returning to Nicaragua due to the political situation and the closing of borders (^{Muñoz, 2020}). Thanks to a previous agreement between the Costa Rican Social Security Fund and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), medical insurance continued to be financed for 6 000 refugees and asylum seekers, now with priority for people with health conditions and precarious economic situations (^{ACNUR, 2020}). However, this was not enough to ensure the stability of this population as a whole. Due to the legal limbo caused by the reduction in the management of certain institutions because of the virtualization of work and the suspension of the granting of refugee status,⁴ around 1 200 Nicaraguans abandoned their applications and had to return to their country.

Honduras also decided to reinforce control at its border with Nicaragua in mid-May. There was special emphasis on the “irresponsibility” of the Nicaraguan government, which, in addition to not having taken contingency measures or closed national borders, was in a position of denial of the pandemic and even organized massive events (“Love in times of COVID-19. We walk as a people with faith, life, and hope”, in March 2020) (see ^{Collombon, 2020}). Furthermore, due to the measures implemented by the government, most of the state and private institutions providing care to the migrant population were paralyzed, health and migration control at customs intensified, and police and military were deployed at blind spots along the border, accompanied by a discourse of stigmatization and mistrust toward people who might cross irregularly from a country where the official figures of COVID-19 cases seemed underestimated (^{Honduras se blinda para frenar ingreso de nicaragüenses por COVID-19, 2020}).

This triggered abuses by the authorities, highlighting the case of more than 80 irregular migrants in transit waiting at the Choluteca border, who, at the end of April, while staying in hotels, religious group shelters, community centers, and private homes, were assaulted by police authorities during a forced eviction operation. According to a report by several local organizations, the operation also involved acts of extortion, threats, and other violations of the rights of the waiting migrants, which included pregnant women and children (^{La impaciente espera de los migrantes en Choluteca, Honduras, 2020}). Moreover, after the eviction, they were forced to sleep on the streets (^{Migrantes violentados por autoridades en medio de emergencia nacional, 2020}).

At the end of January, in El Salvador, one of the earliest countries to take closure and control measures, the migration authorities implemented sanitary measures at borders and airports (^{Migración refuerza medidas sanitarias en fronteras y aeropuerto por Coronavirus, 2020}). By the end of February, it had established around forty sanitary surveillance centers at different points of the national territory to control and eventually detain the population and implement mandatory quarantines. Additionally, it established that people entering the country through blind spots should face judicial charges (^{Álvarez Velasco, 2020d}), and from the beginning of March, increased all controls and mechanisms for the detention and monitoring of the population at border points (^{Migración refuerza medidas sanitarias en fronteras y aeropuerto por Coronavirus, 2020}).

Stranded populations, internments, deportations, and mandatory quarantines

Another common factor in the region and the hemisphere is the impact on the dynamics of transnational mobility as a result of national measures and the absence of international coordination. In particular, there is the case of populations stranded in border areas or interned in detention centers in inadequate conditions.

In Costa Rica, a significant case was that of more than 2 600 migrants front Asia, Africa, and Haiti, who arrived from South America in early March bound for the United States, and were detained at the border with Panama. After several weeks of immobility and in inadequate detention conditions, the Costa Rican government established an agreement with the Panamanian government to develop a controlled transfer to the northern border, where they would remain in a detention center until they could enter Nicaragua to continue their transit to the United States (^{Peña, 2020}). However, this was not possible because, in addition to the logistical problems, only part of the group could be transferred; the Nicaraguan government announced the closure of borders with military surveillance, even for humanitarian cordons, so the population remained stranded between Costa Rica and Panama (^{Miranda & Murillo, 2020}).

One of the border points where this phenomenon has occurred in the largest numbers is the Darien Gap, where Haitians, Cubans, South Americans, and extracontinental migrants in transit to the United States have been stranded. At the beginning of March, the Panamanian government closed its borders to the entry of people. By mid-April, there were already more than 2 000 migrants (mainly from Haiti, Congo, Bangladesh, and Yemen) located in the Migrant Reception Station (MRS) “La Peñita” in the community of Bajo Chiquito, and others in the MRS “Los Planes”, in Chiriquí (^{Pomareda, 2020b}). The conditions of overcrowding, lack of food, sanitary problems due to waste management, and the increase of anxiety and stress in the population led to critical situations that increased the conditions of risk in the context of the pandemic and demonstrated that governments were not only unprepared to face a situation like this but also could not establish coordinated and joint measures (^{OIM, 2020}).⁵

It is on the region’s northern border, between Guatemala and Mexico, where forced mobility has been starkly demonstrated. For Juan Luis Carbajal, priest and director of the Pastoral Human Mobility of the Episcopal Conference of Guatemala, the situation has shown “a lack of respect for migrants”, since the authorities of both countries “have simply taken on the task of removing, sweeping away migrants regardless of their health conditions [and] without considering alternatives”. This entails non-compliance with regional deportation protocols, agreements, and memorandums of understanding and increased vulnerability and risk for deportees. According to Carbajal, these measures demonstrate “a new migratory reality, where health control is the justification for the control of migrants and where stigmatization has been a constant” (^{Pomareda, 2020a}).

The case of Nicaragua is more complex because, although the government did not establish restrictions on the entry of foreigners by land or air, it did prohibit the return of hundreds of nationals who had lost their jobs abroad, especially in Costa Rica, and were seeking to return to their country (^{Cajina, 2020}). In Honduras, toward the end of June, a group of around 150 migrants, including older adults, women, and children, left the San Pedro Sula bus terminal for the border of Corinto, in the northwest of the country, where police and military authorities of both countries detained and placed them in detention centers where they had to undergo mandatory quarantine. Another group of about 250 people from Africa, Cuba, and Haiti were stranded on the Honduran side of the border and detained in immigration centers in Tegucigalpa and Choluteca (^{Pomareda, 2020a}).

On the other hand, the phenomenon of deportations from the United States added another degree of complexity to the regional panorama. In Guatemala, for example, despite the closure of international borders and cancellation of flights declared on March 13, the country continued to receive flights of deportees from the United States (more than 5 162 people) and by land from Mexico (6 522 people) (^{Instituto Guatemalteco de Migración, 2020}). Although the last planes that arrived in September transported migrants already recovered from COVID-19, the Guatemalan government claimed that the United States did not respect sanitary protocols on different flights during March, so that between 50% and 75% of the people on these flights returned infected with COVID-19 (^{El Faro/AFP, 2020}). This situation caused concern among associations defending the rights of migrants (^{Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación y Comunicación ERIC-SJ, 2020}) and a climate of suspicion and rejection toward these people, undoubtedly related to the statements of the president himself, who spoke of the “cursed flight” (^{Reyes, 2020}).

In the case of El Salvador, deportations also resumed on March 24, just after “the U.S. Department of Homeland Security pressured the governments of the Northern Triangle to lift their quarantines at airports to admit the arrival of deported migrants” (^{Cáceres et al., 2020}). According to Ovidio González, director of the organization Tutela Legal Dra. María Julia Hernández, the government itself contributed to their stigmatization and vulnerability, calling them “the infected”, and determined from the beginning that they would not be allowed to enter the country. For César Ríos, director of the Salvadoran Migrant Institute (Spanish: Instituto Salvadoreño del Migrante, Insami), this implied a change in the return cycle because now they are not only detained for months in the migration centers in the northern country, but are locked up again when they return, “thus extending the grief of migration in this new reality, and after being in transnational confinement, they come to be in national confinement” (^{Pomareda, 2020a}).⁶

Impacts on economic sectors dependent on migrant labor

As argued in the first part, the reality of the Central American region is that of historical cross-border regional migration associated with production processes, particularly in agriculture, which has also been impacted by the context of the sanitary emergency and the governmental containment measures associated with it. The Costa Rican case stands out because it receives the Nicaraguan population working in agricultural production, domestic work, and construction labor markets, and the indigenous Ngäbe population working mainly in the agricultural sector (^{Ugarte, 2020a}), particularly coffee harvesting.

Concerning the former, the emergency context and the associated governmental responses, both from the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican governments, generated a highly vulnerable situation for these populations, as noted above. In addition to the containment measures and border closures, there were the activities of several agricultural companies located mainly in the Huetar Norte region, which continue to hire undocumented migrants in exploitative conditions without respecting labor guarantees (^{Paniagua Arguedas, 2007}; ^{Rodríguez Echavarría & Prunier, 2020}; ^{Segura Hernández & Ramírez Mora, 2015}), and with a high level of risk in light of the pandemic. Although the Presidency of the Republic and the Ministries of Security, Interior and Police, and Agriculture and Livestock signed a decree at the end of September to fine agricultural, agro-export, and agro-industrial companies that hire undocumented migrants or those without their regularization in process, no follow-up actions have been established to enforce the rule fully.⁷

Faced with this situation, in mid-June, an alliance of organizations and institutions issued a statement calling on public authorities to enforce the guarantees and rights of this population, specifically concerning the known practices of exploitation and violation of migrant workers by agribusinesses (^{Chacón, 2020a}). Given the inaction of the respective authorities and the continuation of bad labor practices, at the beginning of July several organizations issued a new statement in which they called for the drafting and approval of a law to authorize the Labor Inspectorate (part of the Ministry of Labor) to establish direct sanctions against agribusinesses that fail to comply with labor legislation. Furthermore, the statement emphasized the concern about the increase in cases of contagion among migrant workers in these companies, associated with the working and living conditions in which the employees were kept (^{Chacón, 2020b}).

The behavior of the domestic service sector also revealed the great paradox of the irregular or precarious migrant as an indispensable worker. Quxabel Cárdenas, the coordinator of the Asociación Enlaces Nicaragüenses in Costar Rica, has argued that the COVID-19 crisis affected migrant women and their families in Costa Rica in three ways: layoffs without respect for labor rights, reduction of working hours with significant drops in income, and increase in workload without compensation in salary (particularly for female workers) (^{Mejía, 2020}).

Central America and the permanent crisis

According to Acuña González, “having closed borders contained the virus moderately, but not the exacerbation of vulnerability for hundreds of people in contexts of ‘confined’ mobility” (^{Acuña González, 2020}). The global economic crisis associated with COVID-19 has national and local impacts throughout Central America. Table 1 systematizes the main socio-economic indicators for the six countries in the region and the latest data available up to February 2021 regarding their evolution due to the health emergency.

It is worth noting that the negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth forecasts for 2020 worsened as of the second half of the year, with severe recessions of up to -8.6% or -8.3% for El Salvador and Nicaragua, respectively (^{CEPAL, 2020b}). Figures on formal employment losses are a variable subject to many variations depending on the sources. It is worth noting that the maquiladora sector specializing in textile and biomedical material production, generally installed in tax-except free zones, is one of the main generators of jobs in this country and employs mostly women. In Honduras, where the number of maquila workers is estimated at 150 000, there have been massive layoffs and serious labor rights violations, such as the counting of vacation days and holidays during the closure of companies due to contingencies, all permitted by the Honduran Labor Secretariat, according to the Business and Human Rights Information Center on March 26 (^{Empresas pueden conceder a cuenta de vacaciones los días de la cuarentena, 2020}). In addition to being illegal, this measure proved to be unsustainable since it only allowed the suspension of the contract to be postponed until mid-April (the number of vacation days of a Honduran worker is barely more than two weeks). By halting production in the maquilas and suppressing the meager wages of thousands of workers (the minimum wage is 350 USD per month, barely enough to cover the basic food basket, and with very low retirement and health benefits), it was mainly women who were affected, and with them poor single-parent households that nevertheless constituted a sector of relative economic stability compared to others in the country (^{Torres Zelaya, 2020}).

However, it is clear that these fragile assessments of formal employment do not reflect the real situation of Central American labor markets, given the high proportion of informal and precarious jobs. In addition to salaried workers who have been laid off without benefits or respect for basic labor rights (often with the blessing of governments that favored support for the business sector), the number of people whose economic activity has declined significantly or stopped completely is incalculable (for example, in sectors such as small businesses, transportation, and services).

Since May 18, the maquila sector in Honduras has gradually been reactivated, while the process of economic reopening at the national level (announced at the beginning of June, under a progressive format and a division of the country into three regions) regressed to phase 1 or even 0 in certain areas, due to the increase in cases of contagion (^{Gonzalez et al., 2021}). Similarly, the economic reopening plan of El Salvador, “Toward the new normality”, planned in five stages, began its implementation on August 24, after many tensions between the executive branch, the Supreme Court, the Legislative Assembly, and the Constitutional Court regarding the definition of a balance between the establishment of a state of exception restricting individual liberties and the need to reactivate the economy.

On the other hand, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) forecasts a reduction of around 10% in exports from Central America for the entirety of 2020, with strong disparities according to sectors and countries. However, in the first five months of the pandemic, exports increased for Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala (the only four countries in Latin America where this phenomenon occurred) due to U.S. demand for manufactured health, personal protection, and agricultural products. For El Salvador, maquila exports fell 42.4% in the textile sector and 24% in the productive sectors as a whole (^{Cepal, 2020a}).

Like most countries with a strong migratory tradition, Central American economies are highly dependent on remittances. This situation becomes apparent when comparing their contribution with other significant indicators at the national level (see Table 2) and is particularly noticeable for El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

As a result of the global health emergency, there was an abrupt decrease in remittances between February and April (for example, from +10% to -40% compared to the same month of the previous year, in the case of El Salvador [^{Cepal, 2020b}]). However, they rose again from May onwards, reaching record figures in the case of Guatemala, for example, with 1 billion USD received in remittances in July 2020 (^{Morales Rodas, 2020}). These consecutive dynamics present two reactions (connected and not contradictory) of migrants and their families to crises. First, a reaction of caution and a decrease in remittances to the place of origin, in light of the uncertainty caused by the loss of jobs and the lack of knowledge of the medium or long-term impacts on the labor market in the receiving country. Second, the maintenance and reactivation of remittances can be explained by mechanisms of resilience, solidarity, and continuity of labor activities for these essential workers of the so-called “front lines”, despite the crisis.

Finally, it is worth highlighting Central American economies’ extractivist and dependent character to analyze the potential effects of the current health and economic crisis in terms of borders. It is essential to think of the border from the perspective of inequalities, asymmetries, and socio-economic fractures, with a focus on understanding their effects in terms of exclusion, marginalization, and violence as key factors in the current dynamics of migration and exile of a large part of the Central American population. Therefore, the suggestion is to pay attention to the political and economic governance modes manifested amid the pandemic. In Honduras, for example, civil society organizations and territorial defense movements ─such as the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras) (Copinh) or the Black Honduran Fraternal Organization (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña) (Ofraneh)─ denounced a form of exploitation of the health crisis by the Hernández government to censor the opposition and community or local resistance initiatives in the face of dispossession and privatization of resources. At the same time, the placement of foreign capital was promoted through mechanisms that lacked transparency and democracy. The case of the Roatán Employment and Economic Development Zone (Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económic, ZEDE) provoked significant indignation in early October 2020 (^{Vallejo Larios, 2020}), demonstrating once more the links between political and economic interests, the mechanisms of corruption, and the loss of sovereignty, as well as the creation of territories characterized by “exception” and “extraterritoriality” (^{Roux & Geglia, 2019}). The Honduran government played a key role, being the one to select the zones, promoting accumulation by dispossession thanks to its capacity for expropriation, and, finally, promoting privatization mechanisms of certain strategic sectors (intensive agriculture, tourism, maquiladoras, and others) to meet the objective of being part of the value chains of the global economy.

The exacerbation of vulnerability and marginalization

The impacts of the health emergency on employment and social cohesion appear to be particularly severe on youth. The interruption of educational processes, the reduction of family income, domestic violence, and the difficulty of accessing employment have affected the younger generation in countries where it represents a significant proportion of the total population, for example, 57% in countries such as Honduras and Guatemala, more than 10 points above the average for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The demographic structure of Central American countries is an essential factor to consider when observing the impacts of COVID-19 on border dynamics. In full productive age and a situation of economic responsibility toward dependent family members (children and parents), the young population was already at a labor disadvantage concerning the economically active population before the health crisis (^{Sandoval García, 2017}). However, the widening of the labor gap and the increase in the number of young people marginalized by the double impossibility of improving opportunities is concerning. Without study or work, this population sees their level of socio-economic desperation skyrocket: poverty, family disintegration, and gang violence comprise a complex combination of reasons for migration to the north (^{Salazar Araya, 2017}).

On the other hand, the United Nations World Food Program warned that “the health pandemic is driving hunger and food insecurity” (^{Programa Mundial de Alimentos, 2020b}). In addition to particularly vulnerable groups such as Haitians or Venezuelans (who are in their countries or areas of mobility due to exile), the UN World Food Program draws particular attention to the region of the “Central American dry corridor”, where people, who were faced with hunger in the pre-pandemic period, are now threatened by job losses and the hurricane season, additional pressure on subsistence production and social protection programs.⁸

It is worth noting that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported, through its tool for monitoring and analyzing food prices, a significant increase in the prices of basic grains in all countries of the region for April 2020─corn and black beans experienced a 20% increase in El Salvador and 30% in Guatemala, compared to the same month of the previous year.⁹ This phenomenon occurred due to the increase in domestic demand following the implementation of containment measures and the strong demand for exports on the global market, confirming the close relationship between trade dependence of national economies turned outward and food insecurity of a population unable to meet its basic needs.

Throughout the region, hunger has turned into famine, particularly in the three northern countries, where white flags have begun to hang in the windows of inns in working-class neighborhoods or in small houses that dot the landscapes of the countryside. They are families calling for help when children, adults, or the elderly suffer from a lack of food; they also represent a silent protest in the context of absent governments and great social anguish.¹⁰ Other manifestations of hunger were road blockades, barricades, curfews, signs of social irritation, and spontaneous protests to demand government food aid.¹¹ Poverty rates before the pandemic are a variable that has been added since March to an acute economic and employment crisis. Food precariousness can be found in urban areas ─with highly marginalized groups in search of daily income and who find it impossible to comply with quarantine measures─, and in rural areas (49% of the population in Guatemala or 42% in Honduras; against 20% for Latin American countries as a whole) which are structurally fragile and weakened at social and productive levels by environmental deterioration, the expansion of monocultures, and the expulsion of the peasantry.

Temporary and regional mobility strategies hindered: impacts on the Central American migration system

In addition to the difficulty in obtaining income from local jobs or informal activities, part of Central American family economies face the impossibility of activating temporary, regional migration strategies due to closing borders with neighboring countries. These traditional dynamics of circulation and short mobility are essential for family reproduction in many Central American households, where survival depends on the combined logic of precarious activities in the place of residence and temporary activities in other nearby labor markets, sometimes on the other side of the national border. Although academics and the media often focus on the mechanisms for solving the problems of poverty, violence, and unemployment through international migration towards the United States (due to the spectacular nature of the caravans, the geopolitical implications for the relationship between Mexico and its northern neighbor, or the symbolic effect of crossing the Guatemala-Mexico border in terms of breaking a regional boundary), it is essential to highlight the importance of temporary mobility and the relative permeability of intra-regional borders to understand better the challenges facing Central America in the time of COVID-19. These forms of mobility have been a long-standing strategy of excluded and precarious populations in the region in light of the historical cleavages and conflicts described above. The interdependence of territories is especially demonstrated in border areas. The search for temporary jobs or integration into regional trade dynamics gives rise to frequent displacements and a socio-economic fabric that crosses borders for generations.

In the case of Nicaragua, mobility to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, is relatively easy in administrative and economic terms (because of the Central American Convention on free mobility or CA-4), constituting a means of integration into labor markets beyond the area of residence, integrating into fragile resource systems where short-distance and duration migration allows for the reinforcing of resilience strategies (^{Prunier, 2018}). Labor force sharing (different family members in different mobility spaces) is, above all, a mechanism used by families with lower economic and social resources who cannot invest in extra-regional migration. In other words, without underestimating the importance of exile and the processes of flight of migrants who decide to seek employment or asylum in the United States, it is worth emphasizing another side of the Central American migratory reality, strongly affected by the health crisis: the centrality of temporary displacements on a regional scale as a resource to maintain and reproduce life in the place of origin (education, health, housing). Therefore, although no current systematized study can measure the extent of the impacts of national border closures as of March 2020, it is possible to hypothesize serious effects on family economies that previously relied on pluriactivity and diversification mechanisms, both of activities and regional labor market spaces.

A complex reading of migratory systems is encouraged, where scales, productive territories, and different migration flows cannot be separated. Gildas Simon defines these systems as a “dynamic interaction of migratory spaces and fields on a broad geographical scale […] that produces a territorial construction at the regional level, structured by governmental formations and the effects of regulatory devices” of border control (^{Simon, 2008, p. 21}). From this perspective, it is necessary to understand the impacts of globalization on the constitution of labor markets and mobility at the Central American scale and the emergence of migration flows involving other spaces, particularly Mexico and the United States. The close relationship between the two border dynamics (intraregional and extraregional) is essential for understanding the Central American migration system since temporary and circulatory mobility of the south-south type is not unrelated to migration strategies toward the north both at the individual and family trajectory levels.