A migrant caravan that left Honduras on Saturday heading to the United States disintegrated upon arriving in Guatemala, although a small group continues its journey, an official source announced this Sunday.
“The movement of people disintegrated,” said Alejandra Mena, spokeswoman for the Guatemalan Institute of Migration.
The day before, Mena had reported that the Guatemalan police had detained about 200 migrants who had entered the country in the eastern Izabal department, near the border with Honduras, with the intention of going to the United States.
Now, according to the official, some 80 people have been able to move forward in small groups because they have the migration permits to transit through Guatemala, while the rest had to return to Honduras. This caravan had left Honduras on Saturday with over 500 people, mainly Venezuelans.
According to local media, the migrants left on foot from the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, in the north of the country, heading to the Guatemalan town of Corinto, on the border with Honduras.
According to Mena, this was the first migrant caravan that had left Honduras for Guatemala in 2024. “It is a mixed migratory flow made up of migrants of different nationalities,” Allan Alvarenga, executive director of the National Institute of Migration of Honduras, detailed on Saturday on Twitter.
Since 2018, Honduran migrants have formed caravans of thousands of people to try to cross Guatemala and Mexico on foot towards the United States. Migrants from South America who are also looking for the so-called “American dream” usually join these groups.
Some have crossed the inhospitable Panamanian jungle of Darien, on the border with Colombia, a route that more than half a million migrants traveled through in 2023, overwhelmed by poverty and violence in their countries.
