Los Planes (Panama) May 12 (EFE).- While thousands of migrants continue their journey to the United States in dozens of buses from a shelter in northern Panama, a few go the other way to return to their countries, fed up continued abuse.
After the hustle and bustle of the morning with a wave of migrants getting into the vehicles heading to the border with Costa Rica, a few remain in the Los Planes immigration reception center, managed by the Panamanian authorities, waiting for them to obtain the Permits needed to take a flight.
“One has gone through so many things that one seeks to return to the family (…) What I ask is that they give me the safe-conduct to be able to buy my ticket,” Venezuelan Yorgenis José Hernández, 30, the father of three daughters, told EFE. .
Hernández wants to return to Colombia where part of his family lives, and affirms that he even has enough money to buy the plane ticket, but he needs to formalize all the documentation to be able to leave Panama and end the trip.
Some decide to abandon the search for the American dream after trying a lot, but this young Venezuelan assures that he crossed the US border through Texas, where he received political asylum after spending “22 days in immigration detention.”
“I came because I was very disappointed, they treated me very badly on that side and they didn’t give me food, they didn’t let me bathe, nothing, and I decided to come. (…) I decided to leave because they treated me very badly during the 22 days that I lasted and I was just starting (in the country), so I was already scared, and now, I’m leaving better and I came back ”, Hernández sentences.
“Fucking Venezuelans, what are you doing here,” the officers told him. “I came because they treated me very badly, I didn’t like it,” he repeats.
So while others tried to cross the border into the United States, he crossed the border the other way into Mexico, and all the abuses he had suffered up north disappeared on his way to South America, taking one bus after another.
Heading north “it was very hard, all those countries make you suffer from hives, which we say, because they don’t even give you a little water, they don’t give you anything, and that’s walking and walking. I would walk about 60 km and return migration back, and walk it again,” he recalls, a trip that included a journey in Mexico on the trains known as “La Bestia”, three and a half days on board, enduring cold and hunger.
The wooden barracks of the Los Planes shelter, which decades ago housed the engineers and technicians who built a hydroelectric plant in that mountainous and green area, now have migrants lining their corridors who want to leave as soon as possible to continue their journey towards United States, or to return home.
The young Colombian Jonathan Andrés Arrubla cries inconsolably. “They told me that my mom got sick. I plan to return to Medellín, but to leave the country I have to have a passport, and I don’t have (…) I have the ticket, but I need them to help me get a permit to leave the country,” he laments.
VOLUNTARY RETURN PROGRAM
Both Hernández and Arrubla have taken advantage of the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) assisted voluntary return program, which offers them the option of returning to their country of origin.
“These programs are created for those migrants who are outside their own country and who at some point are unable to or decide that they do not want to continue with their migratory route,” explains Jorge Andrés Gallo, Regional Communications Officer for IOM Central America, North America and the Caribbean.
The UN agency, which joins others such as Unicef present at the shelter, helps migrants who “voluntarily accept these processes” to take commercial flights, “obviously after solving all the legal requirements so that the person can return regularly and safely to their country”, he details.
Sometimes they also cover the cost of the ticket “when there is budget availability and the person meets the legibility requirements depending on their nationality, because there are no assisted voluntary return programs in all countries, nor to all countries”, such as the case of Haiti for security.
Precisely, in the shelter, a young Haitian remains in the corridor in silence, with his hand on his head, thoughtful.
The Venezuelan policeman Johnny Sánchez also wants to return to his country. He earned $16 a month and it was not enough to support his family, but the journey to the United States has been too much and it is not worth continuing and risking losing his life.
“It was hard, the jungle is not strong at all like Honduras up,” explains Sánchez, safe now in the center of the Panamanian authorities. He says that the worst was Guatemala, where the border police even tried to abuse a colleague who was accompanying them.
“Bad, bad, that they even wanted to abuse her, they touched parts of her body to see if she had money, and she, scared, gave them 100 dollars, and it was all money, money, money (…) My brother was beaten for the ribs. They pushed us and that, because we had no money to give them, ”he recounted.
Also Venezuelan, José Moisses González, 22, has been away from his family for more than a year. He left, he says, to help his grandmother “with the medicine”, but after leaving her the woman became worse, “sentimental”, missing her eldest granddaughter.
González made it to Guatemala and from there he started his way back, stopping in Costa Rica to pick up coffee to buy a phone with which he could communicate with his family. He is now looking for a way to get “the money” to buy the plane ticket.
Why didn’t you decide to continue? “For the simple reason that there were many problems such as kidnappings, people killed by Mexico and that, and better before they are going to kidnap me, I return.”
Also, like others at the shelter, Sánchez is very aware of the recent attack on Venezuelan migrants in Texas, in which eight people died. The young man takes out his cell phone and shows the moment of impact of the vehicle, leaving many mutilated.
