 So I'm going to be signing a national emergency, because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it's unacceptable. And because he was already including gang members, so that they would find me and hurt me. So I knew that gang members have more power than the authorities in my country. So I knew that there were two things that could happen. One was that they achieved their goal and killed me, or that they took away my child, which was one of the two things they wanted. So the moment comes when after so many threats, so many bad deals, and all that, I decided to leave Honduras, basically almost three years ago, in 2018. Every day, entire families from Central America flee violence, chronic poverty, and failed harvests due to environmental degradation and climate change, embarking on a dangerous journey to the United States in search of asylum and a dignified life. This became visible to the United States public with a flood of unaccompanied minors from the three Northern Triangle countries, starting in 2012, and large caravans of migrants in more recent years. Well, I decided, we decided both, my husband and I, we decided to leave because of the situation, because when the flood came, we were taken to the church. So from there we decided to join a group of, like on the phone, there is a message that they send, so they send the caravan over, so we asked for the caravan, but the road is difficult because there is one that walks and walks, it's cold, it's hungry, we walk almost two weeks, just walking and walking. The mainstream narrative often implies that the poverty and violence that trigger the migration of Central Americans are of their own making. Some argue that immigrants should stay in their own countries and work to resolve their problems, but this fails to recognize the role of U.S. intervention. From outright military aggression to trade agreements that attack small farmers, all of these forms of U.S. meddling have contributed to the North Ward flow of migrants. The U.S. government has repeatedly intervened in Central America to protect U.S. companies, starting in the early 1900s with the United Fruit Company, which was the largest landowner between Colombia and Mexico, and which violently quashed all banana workers' efforts to organize unions. U.S. Marines were called in whenever necessary. My name is Selva Guilar. I came from El Salvador at the age of 36. The reason why I came was mainly economic. I saw that it wasn't enough to be a single mother. I saw that the situation was more and more difficult. I lived in that insecurity. In those boxes, all of them seemed to be locked in jail, because you don't know if someone will come in at night. As we said, we slept in El Salvador with one eye closed and the other open. The circumstances that forced me to go to the U.S. were poverty. Here in El Salvador, my father was killed in the war. In 1990, I was 5 years old, and my mother was left with 9 children. It was a very difficult time for me, because I always wanted to study and move forward. But my mother said that she didn't have money to give me, and I could continue a university career. The women and children separated in separate groups in the church, the convent and various houses. Around noon, they began taking the women and girls in groups, separating them from their children and machine gunning them after raping them. Many families were ordered to remain in their homes while soldiers set fire to their houses. Over 140 of the children, some mere infants, were jammed into the convent next to the church. Their soldiers blocked the doors, aimed guns through the windows, and fired into the mass of children, murdering them all in cold blood. They then threw an incendiary bomb into the building, collapsing the roof and adobe walls. In the 1980s, the United States armed, trained, and equipped the Salvador Armed Forces, in particular the Army. At El Mazzote, U.S. guns and bullets were used to massacre infants, children, women, and men. The causes for the recent wave of immigration from El Salvador date back to the early 1980s, a popular block inspired by the triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, clamored for change, including revolutionaries, group in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. In the face of this challenge, the United States and the President Reagan spent more than $6 billion in aid to the government and military. These programs contributed to the fierce repression that resulted in the death, disappearance, and rape of over 75,000 people in a cycle of violence that left the country with widespread poverty and long-term post-traumatic stress. In the 1980s, because there was a very large intervention of the United States, this intervention was military, economic, and political. We were about to have a progressive revolution, but just as in Vietnam, the United States intervened to prevent it, and what was achieved was a long civil war of 12 years, in which there were especially thousands of young men who were not recruited by the armed forces. They did not want to join the guerrillas either. When they arrived in the United States, they were alone, without family, without their mothers, without good friends, without a favorable environment to be able to study and overcome. What they found was a hostile environment of harassment by the gangs, and many of those young men, because of the desire to survive, joined these groups, in addition to seeking family heat. They found it somehow among the criminals on the street. After a while, these young men were sent to jail and deported to their countries of origin, Salvador, Honduras. The intervention of the United States has been in different frames, in different moments in our country, and these are the results. Right now I do not have a job. I am working in the maquilla of San Pedro, but I quit. I quit to emigrate because the minimum wage was not enough. I have four children. That is why it is my main base, to have a house for them. In the 1980s, the U.S. under the Reagan administration trained a paramilitary group known as the Contras on Honduran soil in an attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. The sale of arms and military aid to Honduras increased, as did the militarization of the country. This set the state for massive Honduran immigration to the United States. Another immigration surge occurred in the wake of the U.S. aided overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya, who implemented popular reforms. Since the 2009 coup, a series of corrupt administrations have unleashed open criminal control of Honduras, intersecting organized crime and drug traffickers with the country's police force, all with the blessing of the United States. We are not going to stop here. The minimum wage I earned was $2,900 or $2,300, because they made deductions for me. That is to spread it in my past, in the case of the school, the school, the university. I am Carla García. I am the coordinator of international relations of the fraternal organization Negro Hondureña. I have been living in New York for centuries. I have been in the United States for eight years. I work permanently to achieve what is claimed once the rights of our communities are defended. In this particular case of the Garipuna community. We defend life, we defend the territory. By defending the territory, we are defending the right of nature to continue being and providing for our generations, not only those of the Garipuna community, but generations around the world. However, we see how governments agree with cooperation. We talk about governments, for example, like the one in Canada, the government of the United States, the government of Japan, Taiwan, China. To stay with pieces of territory in Honduras that unfortunately are territories that are located in the areas where we live, to make economic developments, whether it is a hotel or production. The production brings as a consequence chemicals that damage our land and hotel complexes do not allow us to return in a natural way to the beaches or to the sea. I have been analyzing, I am 36 years old. I have five children. I am from here in Progreso, and I dedicate myself to recycling of bottles and of iron. I was 16 years old, I worked more than that because I never had a study. My study is only the third degree. The work we do is, I leave from five in the morning until three in the afternoon. When things are going well, people give it to us because there are people who give the bottles, iron, they give the materials, so we fill the bottle, then we return in the morning, but when we do not, we have to walk all day. We always go crazy with the coffee, we eat all day, when we are like this, because when I help the children, instead of hitting them, then I do it, then people give me my bottles. But it is difficult. Good afternoon, my name is Ana Jose Farrayo. I am originally from Manabua, Nicaragua. My first career was when I left the university, I took industrial engineering, with the time and with the opportunities provided, I started studying pharmacy, I took medical technology, I took the career of business administration and I achieved the opportunity provided to be able to get a master's degree and a degree in public health, and a degree in sanitary registration. I took a degree in the morning and a degree in the afternoon and I was already taking a degree in the morning. It is a better opportunity to take a degree. The social political situation in Nicaragua, in the last nine years, it has been a little difficult. However, despite that difficulty, we continue to be the most secure country. Nicaragua is catalogued as one of the most secure countries in the last five years. The security in Nicaragua is marked, also because of the support or the level of organization that the population has developed and also because of the support that institutions in the government have been implementing. I think that the opportunities of work in Nicaragua have increased. In the case of women, each time we are having more opportunities, opportunities are being opened to study, to work, and that also helps and allows us to improve the family economy. So all of that helps us to keep in touch or to fight for being a family and to really take care of the family core that is very important. So there is a number of factors that we have to consider and that have allowed the situation of immigration in Nicaragua to be considered. In neighboring Nicaragua, few people are migrating north today. This is partially because the country is one of the safest in Latin America. In stark contrast with its Central American neighbors and also as a result of social programs implemented by the Sandinista government to alleviate poverty, the migration that occurs tends to be of a temporary nature, mainly seasonal work, to get higher wages. But Nicaragua is not free of U.S. intervention. In the 1980s, Nicaragua's popular revolution was stymied by the U.S. run counter-revolutionary war which killed over 30,000 Nicaraguan peasants and government workers, maimed thousands and decimated the economy. In a desperate bid to end the war, the terrorized population voted for Washington's candidate in 1990, ushering in 16 years of neoliberal rule. The Sandinistas returned to power in 2007. The U.S. responded by imposing sanctions to block Nicaragua from accessing development loans. Last year, journalists uncovered a U.S. aid plan for regime change in the country that seeks to impose a corporate-friendly economy. We also have a farm located in the municipality of Juy Galpa. We have five farms on land. We have a pig farm there. We have cattle, not a large amount of cattle, but milk is taken to farm, and we have chickens from different areas. I emigrated four years ago to meet the country of Panamá. Panamá, right? But I did this because I thought I wanted to strengthen that farm that we have because we have various fruit plants. My father used to tell me that he wanted to emigrate because he was looking at the wages and the policies offered to young people. Those policies are false from all the countries where they tell us that if you emigrate to a country you will have a very good salary earning well and that you will be able to send returns to your country, to your family. But it really isn't like that. Nicaragua is an evidently agricultural country. The effects of climate change generated in previous years migration from the city, from the countryside to other countries, especially Costa Rica, thanks to the institutionalization of productive programs for the agricultural sector, the government of reconciliation and national unity. Families are doing resistance in the countryside through agricultural production. Programmes like Hambresero, Usuracero, the food product, among others are programs that have come to transform the quality of life of women, to transform the quality of life of families and above all to generate development in the countryside. I was chosen within the whole place. We were chosen several times. And they took me with a cow. She was pregnant. So she brought another little cow which is now also pregnant. This is her. And this little one is the one she is breastfeeding. US-backed governments in Honduras and El Salvador have promoted free market capitalist policies known as neoliberalism that go hand in hand with the weakening of the country's limited social programs which in turn has exacerbated social economic inequalities and poverty, setting off the massive migration that we have seen in recent years. Corporations undertake mega-projects for the exploitation of natural resources which have a devastating environmental effect. ruining small farmers who end up leaving the area. Finally, women are the violent victims of the violence that these Washington-promoted policies have produced. Just as they are the most vulnerable in their own violence-ridden countries, they are the most vulnerable in the precarious journey north. What conditions would have allowed me to stay in Honduras? A little more security? Well, a little bit of security. I would have been able to stay. At this moment, it is very difficult. The insecurity is terrible. It increases more and more and the economic situation is extremely difficult. I think that it is very difficult to stay in Honduras. It is very difficult because the economic situation is very difficult in my country and when the economic situation is very difficult, insecurity grows much more. When we look at the history of the United States' intervention in Central America and its impact on migration flows, it becomes clear that the best path to immigration reform is to reform U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps if the U.S. could see its southern neighbors and respect their differences, Central Americans could work out their problems without having to leave their home and we could begin to work together as equal partners to tackle the world's biggest problems that require global cooperation, such as pandemics and most particularly the climate crisis. For migration, the war on drugs, poverty and the environment, we only stand to benefit from a policy that is facing peace, cooperation and respect. Go to codepink.org slash good neighbor to find out more and let's work together to transform the U.S. into a good neighbor. You can also take action against sanctions and economic war by visiting sanctionskill.org slash petition to tell the new U.S. administration to end economic sanctions in the face of the global pandemic. Also, if you want to read a good analysis of the Biden-Harris administration plan for Central America, go to migrantroutes.org slash reports.