government's failure to investigate and punish human rights abuses; and military aid once again ceased in 1992.
As with the rest of the United States' Central America policy, its actions in Guatemala drew international criticism, particularly from its neighbors. This time, Canada served as cosponsor of the 1982 UN resolution condemning Guatemala. But to the disappointment of many Canadians, that was as far as Ottawa went to distinguish its foreign policy from that of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Mexico, in turn, was surprisingly less critical of Guatemala's human rights violations than it was of El Salvador's rightist regime, much to the dismay of moderate-to-left groups within Mexico. The silence was inconsistent but pragmatic: the Guatemalan conflict was closer to home and threatened to spill over into Mexico's southern states. Thousands of Maya refugees crossed Mexico's southern border and sought safety in the state of Chiapas, also home to a large Maya population that was actively involved in legal disputes over land and labor. Local and federal officials feared that the refugees would conspire with domestic opposition groups, and debated ways to control the border. The Guatemalan army, in turn, charged that the refugee camps were guerrilla bases and, beginning in 1981, crossed the border into Mexico to kidnap or murder suspected guerrillas. Nationalists demanded that their government stop this brazen violation of their sovereignty, but the Mexican government sent contradictory signals: while filing official diplomatic protests, it assisted Guatemala in its hunt for subversives and deported thousands of refugees. Not surprisingly, much of the rhetoric coming out of Mexico City blamed the country's problems on the United States, but the government was pragmatic enough to avoid any direct confrontation with either the United States or Guatemala. Domestic concerns far outweighed ideological commitments. In this particular instance, Mexico's policy vis-à-vis Guatemala complemented Washington's.
THE REFUGEES
Before 1970, migration within Central America was common. People migrated within and across borders for temporary work in farming, construction, and domestic service. Salvadorans had the longest tradition of cross-border migration, particularly to Honduras, where 350,000 had settled by the end of the 1960s, lured by the higher wages offered by the banana companies.84 In administering the most densely populated country in Central America, the Salvadoran government encouraged seasonal or permanent migration of rural workers and unemployed urban dwellers as a safety valve to avoid uprisings such as the one that occurred in 1932. In 1967, the Honduran government tried to discourage further Salvadoran immigration through legislation that restricted land ownership to the Honduran-born and, by mid-1969, through the deportation of three hundred thousand Salvadorans. Hostilities between Hondurans and Salvadorans climaxed in the 1969 “soccer war”: violence erupted at a series of soccer matches between the national teams of both countries, giving expression to the resentment that Hondurans had long felt toward the Salvadorans who had migrated illegally to their country and claimed land, especially in the disputed border territories. Thousands were killed and over a hundred thousand people left homeless. In the wake of the war, the countries severed relations with each other, and the Honduran government closed the border to further Salvadoran migration.85
Guatemalans, particularly Maya Indians, also had a migratory tradition, especially to Mexico's Soconusco region and Chiapas in general (which had been part of Guatemala until 1824). There they found a Maya and mestizo population that shared cultural similarities. As Mexican workers sought employment in higher-paying industries, the Guatemalans provided the labor critical to the region's agricultural industry: an estimated twenty thousand to one hundred thousand seasonal workers in Mexico each year.86 Until the 1990s, illegal immigration was tolerated to maintain an abundant pool of low-wage labor for the harvest of coffee beans, sugarcane, and other agricultural products. The border was fluid, and trade, commerce, and family ties extended across national boundaries. Thus the historical, cultural, and commercial ties between Chiapas and Guatemala pointed to the artificiality of the political border.
Migration to more distant countries such as the United States and Canada was less common, although a few thousand Central Americans lived in cities such as Washington, San Francisco, New York, and Miami by end of the 1970s. As the wars escalated, these smaller northern populations served as magnets, encouraging further migration.87 The 1980 census in the United States, for example, counted 94,447 Salvadorans and 63,073 Guatemalans, and close to half had arrived in the previous five years. The detention of undocumented Central Americans on the United States-Mexico border also increased. In 1977, the first year for which such statistics are available, more than seven thousand Salvadorans and over five thousand Guatemalans were apprehended.88
Despite a migratory tradition within the region, the Central American nations were ill prepared to deal with the refugee crisis of 1974-1996. The wars in Central America displaced millions of people and forced them to migrate internally and across borders. As with most migrations, people traveled wherever they had networks of family, friends, or countrymen that could take them in and assist them in finding jobs. They followed established patterns of migration: Salvadorans traveled to Honduras and Guatemala because they had done so for decades; and Guatemalans crossed the border into Chiapas. But with each passing year, populations emerged in less traditional areas of settlement: Salvadorans settled in Mexico, Guatemalans in Belize, and Nicaraguans in Costa Rica. The clustering of several Spanish-speaking countries in a small geographic territory made it comparatively easy for migrants to move and seek safer opportunities elsewhere.
The international press commonly referred to these migrants as refugees because political upheaval played a role in their migration, but their legal status was far from clear and varied from country to country. According to article IA(2) of the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself to the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”89 Even though most Central American countries were signatories to the UN Convention and/or the 1967 Protocol, and to several regional conventions,90 the constitutions of most were not encoded with formal procedures through which to recognize refugees or grant asylum. These countries also demonstrated varying levels of commitment to the convention's principles of non-refoulement (no forced return) and refugee assistance.
Complicating matters, most Central American migrants did not meet the strict UN definition of refugee status, having fled their countries because of the generalized climate of violence rather than a “well-founded” fear of persecution for the listed categories. By 1980, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) readily admitted that the Convention and Protocol were too restrictive, and advocated a more lenient response to the so-called nonconvention refugees: those who did not meet the strict definition of the term but who had fled their homes, crossed an international border, and were living in refugee-like conditions. In May 1981 the UNHCR recommended that all Salvadorans who had left their country since the beginning of 1980 be considered bona fide refugees under a prima facie group determination because they had been displaced by political events and were likely to suffer if physically returned to their homeland.91 Three years later, the nonbinding Cartagena Declaration tried to offer further guidance in dealing with the Central American refugee crisis. According to the declaration, refugees were “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety, or liberty have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violations of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.”92
Each country conducted its own domestic debate on what constituted a refugee, and what types of programs should be made available to those so designated (i.e., asylum or temporary safe haven; resettlement; work authorization; social services, repatriation, etc.). Most governments preferred to view the Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans living among their populations as economic migrants because it freed them from any responsibility. Statistics
