The Historical and Contemporary Causes of «Survival Migration». From Central America’s Northern Triangle
Abstract
The past half decade of massive refugee outflows from the Northern Triangle of Central America –that is, from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras– emerge from a number of perverse and mutually reinforcing historical processes: the deeply flawed implementation of equally flawed peace accords that ended the region’s civil wars in the 1990s; the pursuit of neoliberal privatization and «market-friendly» economic policies that undercut advance toward sustainable social peace, including trade agreements that inflicted great damage to peasant agricultura; the pursuit of foreign investment in extractive sectors that displaced rural and indigenous peoples, and the policies of the major international institutions, and of the United States government in particular, which deepened all of these perverse trends that left people without livelihoods. The gang and criminal violence linked to the narcotics trade are manifestations of these underlying processes that expel people from the region in waves of forced «survival migration».
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