The Hunduran department of El Paraíso, located 25 kilometers from the border with Nicaragua, has become in recent months a passageway for migrants guided by coyotes. This Tuesday they found 13 Cubans in the village of Las Manos and a smuggler, public TVO Danli on their social networks.
“Francisco Morazán, the detainee, is a resident of La Ceiba and faces charges for human trafficking to the detriment of the safety and freedom of 13 migrants,” according to the report of the Departmental Police Unit, 7,800 Nicaraguan córdobas were seized from him, 1,200 dollars and 800 Cuban pesos.
Since the beginning of 2021, migrants have searched for blind spots on the mountain and some on the embankment, he tells 14ymedio Bishop José Antonio Canales of the Jesus Is Alive evangelization center. “They enter in groups through the mountain in Trojes, others through Las Manos until they reach Danlí, where they take transport.”
The insured Cubans, the priest pointed out, are taken to shelters that the parishes have installed and the immigration authorities grant them a free safe-conduct to travel freely for five days through Honduras, but “we continue to have the problem of the police taking away their documents and they demand the payment of more than dollars“.
The bishop assures that the gangs have found in the migrants a source of profit. “They discard the Haitians and go after the Cubans who have allowed themselves to come in greater numbers since August,” he says. “Instead, the coyotes they pass by and locate the migrants in houses, far from the checkpoints and from Danlí, surely they are in collusion with some authorities”.
More than 3,000 irregular migrants, mostly Cubans, were detained in Honduras last year for entering illegally on their way to the United States, according to figures from the Honduran National Migration Institute (INM).
The flow of migrants is notorious in the vicinity of the bus terminal in Danlí. “The eastern zone has become a corridor for immigrants of different nationalities: Cubans, Colombians, Haitians,” released in december last year the Oriental Television.
Faced with the massive arrival of foreigners, the National Police extended patrols through the villages. Last Friday in Santa María, in the department of La Paz, two villagers who were traveling with 14 Cubans were arrested. A truck in which they would transport the island’s natives was seized from those arrested, in addition to 9,000 Honduran lempiras, 740 dollars and a cell phone.
On January 17, it was reported that a caravan made up of 2,000 migrants from Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Venezuela that left Tegucigalpa was broken up on the Guatemalan border by troops from the army and the National Police.
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