How the Migrant Caravan Built Its Own Democracy – POLITICO

The caravan migrants who arrived at the border nearly a month ago don’t have a country. But they do have a government.

In the time since the caravan left Honduras in mid-October, the asylum seekers have fashioned a proto-democracy out of their group of some 6,000 migrants overwhelmingly from Central America, most of whom have walked for most of the trip, at times hitching rides in the backs of cars or trucks.

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To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the caravan is nothing more than a “lawless” mob of potentially violent criminals. But dozens of phone interviews and WhatsApp conversations with advocacy groups and migrants, as well as social media updates from groups on the ground, show that the migrants have organized a surprisingly sophisticated ruling structure, complete with everything from a press shop to a department of public works.

When the migrants needed to make public announcements, debate the best routes and vote on different plans, they established a nightly general assembly as a forum open to all, Athens-style. Their legislative floor was an abandoned truck parking lot or an unused sports stadium. Some of the migrants even took turns as communications directors, drafting press statements that were transmitted through a media group of more than 370 journalists on WhatsApp.

When a few of the men started drinking in the evenings to distract themselves, and mothers worried the noise was keeping their children awake, the general assembly set up a kind of internal police force made up of about 100 unarmed volunteers to reprimand the men with megaphones and keep them out of the migrant’s makeshift camps after the 7 p.m. curfew.

And when they needed to lobby higher-level entities, such as immigration advocacy groups, human rights watchdogs and local governments, the migrants elected a nine-person Governance and Dialogue Council to press for their most basic needs: food, shelter and safety. (The council formed after a group of migrants spoke with a phalanx of federal police who were blocking the route on the way from the southern state of Chiapas to the state of Oaxaca and convinced them to let them through.) Some of the representatives have served as secretaries of transportation at times, speaking directly with state and city governments to try to secure buses or rides to take them to the next stop in the meandering route. In Veracruz, the migrants petitioned the local government to get them transportation to Mexico City, but were ultimately unsuccessful.

Now, with most of these migrants stuck in tent camps on the border in Tijuana, the government waits, too, planning for what comes next.

Ask some on the right to define the caravan, and they might conspire about highly organized hordes of criminals funded by the Venezuelan state or billionaire philanthropist George Soros who want to rush the American border. (“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Trump said in reference to the Soros claim Oct. 31, one day after the migrants elected their Governance and Dialogue Council.) Some liberals, on the other hand, will try to convince you that this is a hapless, hopeless lot with no agency, no rights and no recourse for help.

The nuanced reality is far from either ideological extreme. In between one dysfunctional home country and one openly hostile destination country—at the end of November, the U.S. Border Patrol launched tear gas canisters into Mexico when a group of migrants from the caravan tried to rush the border—these thousands of caravaneros are proving that they can organize themselves to respond to their own needs, the same ones that the broken Central American governments they fled from were often unable, or unwilling, to meet.

“Life is practically worthless [in Tegucigalpa],” says Walter Coello, a Honduran migrant who has emerged as a de facto leader and spokesman for the migrants and who was elected to the Governance and Dialogue Council on Oct. 30. He left Honduras because of rampant gang violence. As a cab driver there, he was targeted by MS-13 members who demanded increasing extortion payments and eventually killed one of his colleagues. “The government won’t do anything. As soon as you file a police report about it, [the gangs] kill you. … If you protest the lack of food, the cops themselves will kill you.” Many in this first of at least four caravans with sights set on the United States cite similar experiences dealing with their own governments.

For people like Coello, the caravan government might be the first time they have trusted a government to be responsive and representative—even if it’s one they threw up essentially overnight.

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When bus and cab drivers in Oaxaca gave in to local and federal government pressure and rescinded an offer for free transportation in late October, the caravaneros were split about what to do next. The able-bodied single men and young boys wanted to continue on to Oaxaca, though making the trek through hilly roads and narrow paths would be difficult for a group mostly on foot. The parents, some of them with ailing children, preferred going through the flatter terrain of Veracruz, despite the risk inherent in traversing an area full of organized crime.

The officer presiding over the general assembly called the vote. The migrants raised their hands. Through Veracruz it was, no matter the danger.

In defending the Veracruz decision, which could have endangered the migrants’ lives, the caravan’s press shop put out a statement: “We hold the state government of Veracruz and federal authorities responsible for every person who is wounded, falls ill, faces extortion, is kidnapped, forcibly disappeared, trafficked, or murdered on this route that we are being forced to take.”

By holding Mexico responsible for any harm, the migrants were exercising a right that they had been arguing was inalienable all along: that they should be guaranteed the ability to move through Mexico freely without facing violence. If Central American, Mexican and American governments were going to deny them this right, the caravan’s thinking went, they would create a system in which it was recognized.

Many of the migrants are familiar with these sorts of informal, hyper-local governments, says Tristan Call, an anthropology PhD student from Vanderbilt University who came to Mexico to volunteer with the migrant advocacy group Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Because Central American governments have been broken for so long, Call says, these migrants are used to solving disputes through face-to-face conversations, without the intervention of a reluctant higher authority.

Call points to a rich history of alternative and autonomous governance structures in Central America. Several constitutions in Central America, as well as the Mexican magna carta, recognize the usos y costumbres—norms and traditions—of indigenous communities. That is, they allow natives to govern and administer their own territories—at times because the natives have asserted their own rights, and at others because the state has never made contact with the peoples in what it calls zonas abandonadas. The communities take care of building water infrastructure and establishing schools with instruction in indigenous languages. In Totonicapán, Guatemala, for example, the local people administer a 52,000-acre forest that is one of the last remaining stands of endangered fir trees.

Call sees parallels between these structures, designed to give historically marginalized communities an alternative avenue for decision-making, and the caravan’s sets of rules and processes. “It’s not necessarily super romantic, but it’s familiar,” he says.

And though it is on a comparatively microscopic scale, the caravan government has been surprisingly successful in areas where actual democracies are not, such as with ensuring the representation of minority groups. One week before the United States elected its most diverse Congress in history, the migrants were also already giving voice to underrepresented communities. The Governance and Dialogue Council at first had seven people: three men, three women and one representative from the caravan’s 100-strong LGBTQ community, a gay man. But the council quickly expanded to nine when a group of trans women approached the leaders and said they felt that a gay man could not represent their specific needs; transgender migrants have faced catcalls and incessant sexual harassment along the way. The assembly elected a trans woman and another man to sit on the council.

And with men, women and children from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua—including a handful of migrants who made their way into the caravan from Cameroon—the group’s make-up also cuts across ethnic and racial lines.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. In fact, this informal governing structure has struggled with the same kinds of shortcomings that most other established democracies have. For one, civic participation is low, according to Margarita Núñez, an anthropology PhD student from Mexico who was in the middle of her field work for her dissertation on migration when she left to volunteer with the caravan. Núñez observed that only about 600 members participated in the assembly that elected the nine-person council to represent a caravan of more than 6,000. She also says women are often disenfranchised from the process because the meetings take place when they are lulling their children to sleep.

Then there are the logistics of trying to govern a fully mobile population. Because the road to Tijuana was long, the caravan would often break up into smaller groups that traveled at different paces, which meant that the Governance and Dialogue Council wasn’t able to meet consistently to discuss important decisions.

And already, some migrants are feeling disconnected from the institutions—and becoming more susceptible to the promises of outsiders. While in Mexico City, a Honduran journalist came to foment tensions in the caravan and convince some to protest in front of the UNHCR headquarters to demand transportation, a move unsanctioned by the council. His strident speeches could be seen in the Facebook page of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which live streams all the assembly sessions. “[UNHCR] has to tell us by tonight whether they will be giving us buses or not. … Nothing can stop you!” he says at one point in the footage, to uproarious cheers.

Núñez was miffed that he had come in and hijacked the weeks-long work of the council and other human rights organizations. The buses never came. The same night, the journalist mysteriously vanished.

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More recently, the council, staying at the border with the rest of the migrants, still tries to meet every day. It has been preoccupied with the day-to-day survival of the asylum seekers and their efforts to convince official governments to pay attention to their needs. To counter some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric the migrants have encountered daily at the border, the caravan’s assembly voted to set up a task force of cleaning squads to sweep the streets of Tijuana in goodwill, akin to a department of public works. Recently, some women on the Dialogue and Governance Council launched a hunger strike, which others across the caravan later joined in on.

The asylum seekers are preparing for when they might be allowed to cross into the United States, a day that is months—if not at least a year—away. Migrants have to get in line, literally writing their names in a ledger and waiting to be called on by other migrants who have volunteered to oversee the process. Once called, the migrants can cross the border for preliminary interviews with border authorities. (U.S. officials reportedly set the number of those allowed to cross at 30 to 90 each day.) By the time the caravan’s migrants got in line, the ledger already had thousands of names.

Despite the obstacles, the migrants are determined to stay and wait to be called. Two days after the tear gas incident, the council convened a press conference to address it. Its members were unyielding in their determination to continue onward. “We don’t want to go back to violence,” a statement from the caravan said. “It has not been easy to leave our countries, leave part of our families, expose our children and walk through unknown places to have a chance at living in the United States,” the statement continued. “We want [our children] to have access to an education, to health care and to a life without threats.”

If the asylum seekers want to build that kind of life, they’ll need an official state’s help. And right now, none seems eager to offer that. The Mexican and U.S. governments have kept their discussions about how to deal with the humanitarian crisis mostly behind closed doors, attempting to fashion a plan to keep migrants in Tijuana while their claims are processed stateside. When asked if the U.S. Department of State had spoken with caravan leaders, a spokesperson wrote only: “We appreciate Mexico’s cooperation and efforts to increase immigration enforcement and border security to reduce the flow of caravan immigrants to the United States.”

The only U.S. government representative who has taken action so far has been Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who traveled to the border in early December and helped broker the passage of five asylum seekers across the border. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida swiftly criticized Jayapal, blasting her as a “congressional coyote.”

Coello, who once had to negotiate for his life with MS-13, thinks he could rise above the classic Washington mudslinging and appeal to a higher sense of humanity. He knows exactly how he would lobby Trump if he was sitting across from him. “First, may God bless you,” Coello would say. “We want work. We are not criminals. We hope that God will soften your heart.”