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Jocsan comes from a town called Avilés Díaz El Progreso – progress – but for him it was nothing. Unemployment shifted from Honduras in 2019 to the US. “I haven’t had a job in the last few years,” he explained, still entering the Mexican border two years later.
The plight of people like Avilés has only strengthened the reputation of poverty and hardship in Central America. The drought, in addition to violence, poverty and extortion, comes from the edge of the “dry corridor” driven by the drought. tens of thousands of desperate families Called the Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to try to enter the United States from Mexico.
The unauthorized border crossing from Mexico to the U.S. has risen to 20-year highs this year. This poses a serious political problem for President Joe Biden, has called on Vice President Kamala Harris to tackle the crisis and has put $ 4 billion in aid for the Northern Triangle. It is unclear how that will be spent.
“We want to help people find hope at home,” he said at a regional conference this month that the U.S. bans less, as in Donald Trump’s tenure, and more funding for development. “So we are focused on addressing the underlying factors and the underlying causes of migration.”
Since the end of the Central American Civil Wars in the 1980s, the region’s economic growth has steadily lagged behind the rest of Latin America. Over the past 30 years, per capita growth in gross domestic product has been 1.2 percent lower on average in the Northern Triangle, according to the NDF.
The 2004 free trade agreement with the US, known as Cafta-DR, was to increase access to the main North American market and to boost trade with the EU in 2012. Central American exports rose by an average of 6 percent a year between 1991-2017.
But in the meantime Costa Rica and Panama, the two best performers in the region, followed in the footsteps of ecotourism and financial services. The gains made in the Northern Triangle and Nicaragua have been elusive.
“Central America He has Cafta but still has not been able to move forward, ”said Laura Chinchilla, who participated in the negotiations for the Dominican Republic-Central America-US Free Trade Agreement and later, as president of Costa Rica, the EU regional trade agreement.
“For Costa Rica, Cafta was a qualitative leap in exports and investment. But no Nicaragua, Honduras, The Savior and Guatemala. ”
These four countries account for just over most of the region’s population and just over half of GDP, but four have the lowest incomes, according to the World Bank. Corruption, impunity, group violence and a weak rule of law are rampant. Experts say their governments have invested very little in education and infrastructure.
“Regional governments have not been able to create opportunities to make people prosperous simply because they do not have a development plan,” said Ricardo Castaneda, chief economist at the Central American Institute for Fiscal Research. .
Advocates for Cafta hoped that an increase in trade with the U.S. would provide better jobs and wages in 1994 as it consolidated Mexico’s North American Free Trade Agreement as a manufacturing hub even if it did not provide national development.
“Cafta-DR did not work as intended for various reasons: it was seen. . . As a way to ensure access to the U.S. market, rather than to integrate with each other; it was not effectively confused with Naphtha. . . and in the negotiations, the U.S. restricted the import of various products that made the region highly competitive, ”said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the American Council.
In fact, the U.S. appears to have benefited much more than the Northern Triangle: US goods exported to Guatemala rose by 140 percent in 2019 compared to previous Cafta levels, while Guatemalan exports to the U.S. increased by only 27% during that period, U.S. official data show. The increase in U.S. exports to Guatemala was three times greater than Guatemala’s exports to the U.S.
Higher exports led to employment, but most jobs were low-productivity and low-wage. not enough to round: More than 600,000 young people a year are only looking for new jobs in the region’s 250,000 formal sectors, according to the UN.
As a result, “instead of being successful and exporting goods and services, as Costa Rica has done, these countries have exported citizens,” Chinchilla said.
“Around 2009, approximately 1 percent of the population of the Northern Triangle has dropped and moves every year,” Ricardo Zúñiga Biden told the Council of America on the special envoy for the Northern Triangle. webinar. “There’s absolutely no way we’re going to be able to deal with it… Unless we create jobs in Central America that long-standing problem.”
The World Bank warns that the size of the working-age population in Central America will fall sharply by 2035 new report countries will need to boost productivity and integrate it into North American supply chains to ensure strong growth.
It is in high demand for many businesses in the region. Most are micro or small businesses with no ability to compete. “They’re in a Formula 1 race but on two-wheeled bikes,” Castaneda said.
Another problem is bad governance. Zúñiga left Honduras on his recent trip to the Northern Triangle – a sign of that President Juan Orlando HernándezPedro Barquero, head of the Cortes Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Honduras, said the U.S. prosecutor had called him an accomplice in drug trafficking. Hernandez denies the allegations.
In El Salvador, he was defended by President Zúñiga Nayib Bukele, who criticized excessive authoritarianism.
“The truth is that free trade agreements will do nothing if countries don’t work,” Barquero said, noting that Honduras has seen a significant drop in Transparency International’s corruption detection index over the past five years. its image as a place to do business.
Biden hopes to address the causes of migration from Central America with a $ 4 billion aid package, but Washington will need a long-term commitment to do so, and success, if it comes, will take many years.
“The reality is that the U.S. has had little success, if any, in nation-building or anywhere else in nation-building, at least since the Marshall Plan,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Washington Inter-American Dialogue. “It’s important to ask an uncomfortable question: where have they gotten what the U.S. is trying to do in Central America today?”
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