By Sofia Menchu
GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Guatemalan authorities sent more than 2,000 Honduran migrants back to their home country over the past few days, officials said on Saturday, appearing to dissolve much of a caravan aiming to reach the United States.
More than 2,000 caravan members had crossed into Guatemala from Honduras without authorization last Thursday, pushing past troops at the border as they sought to escape poverty exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
Guatemala’s national police said 2,065 migrants were “returned” to Honduras between Thursday and Saturday, although not all were registered with Honduran migration authorities upon their return.
“This caravan is more disorganized than the past ones, and we saw many groups become lost because they didn’t know the right direction of the road,” said military spokesman Juan Carlos de Paz.
Honduran’s migration institute said it had registered 533 people as of Saturday who returned after setting out for Guatemala.
On Friday, the Honduran migrants trekking north had split into two groups, one headed for Guatemala’s Peten region, and the other for the Mexican border city of Tapachula.
It was not immediately clear if migrants from those clusters were pressing on with those plans.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has taken steps to curb illegal immigration so as to avoid entanglements with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump, has suggested that the caravan’s departure from Honduras had been timed to coincide with the U.S. election.
Trump had insulted and threatened Mexico repeatedly in his 2015-16 election campaign and has made cracking down on illegal immigration a priority during his presidency.
(Reporting by Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City, Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa, Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
