Guatemalans, particularly Maya Indians, also had a migratory tradition, especially to Mexico's Soconusco region and Chiapas in general (which had been part of Guatemala until 1824). There they found a Maya and mestizo population that shared cultural similarities. As Mexican workers sought employment in higher-paying industries, the Guatemalans provided the labor critical to the region's agricultural industry: an estimated twenty thousand to one hundred thousand seasonal workers in Mexico each year.86 Until the 1990s, illegal immigration was tolerated to maintain an abundant pool of low-wage labor for the harvest of coffee beans, sugarcane, and other agricultural products. The border was fluid, and trade, commerce, and family ties extended across national boundaries. Thus the historical, cultural, and commercial ties between Chiapas and Guatemala pointed to the artificiality of the political border.
Migration to more distant countries such as the United States and Canada was less common, although a few thousand Central Americans lived in cities such as Washington, San Francisco, New York, and Miami by end of the 1970s. As the wars escalated, these smaller northern populations served as magnets, encouraging further migration.87 The 1980 census in the United States, for example, counted 94,447 Salvadorans and 63,073 Guatemalans, and close to half had arrived in the previous five years. The detention of undocumented Central Americans on the United States-Mexico border also increased. In 1977, the first year for which such statistics are available, more than seven thousand Salvadorans and over five thousand Guatemalans were apprehended.88
Despite a migratory tradition within the region, the Central American nations were ill prepared to deal with the refugee crisis of 1974-1996. The wars in Central America displaced millions of people and forced them to migrate internally and across borders. As with most migrations, people traveled wherever they had networks of family, friends, or countrymen that could take them in and assist them in finding jobs. They followed established patterns of migration: Salvadorans traveled to Honduras and Guatemala because they had done so for decades; and Guatemalans crossed the border into Chiapas. But with each passing year, populations emerged in less traditional areas of settlement: Salvadorans settled in Mexico, Guatemalans in Belize, and Nicaraguans in Costa Rica. The clustering of several Spanish-speaking countries in a small geographic territory made it comparatively easy for migrants to move and seek safer opportunities elsewhere.
The international press commonly referred to these migrants as refugees because political upheaval played a role in their migration, but their legal status was far from clear and varied from country to country. According to article IA(2) of the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself to the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”89 Even though most Central American countries were signatories to the UN Convention and/or the 1967 Protocol, and to several regional conventions,90 the constitutions of most were not encoded with formal procedures through which to recognize refugees or grant asylum. These countries also demonstrated varying levels of commitment to the convention's principles of non-refoulement (no forced return) and refugee assistance.
Complicating matters, most Central American migrants did not meet the strict UN definition of refugee status, having fled their countries because of the generalized climate of violence rather than a “well-founded” fear of persecution for the listed categories. By 1980, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) readily admitted that the Convention and Protocol were too restrictive, and advocated a more lenient response to the so-called nonconvention refugees: those who did not meet the strict definition of the term but who had fled their homes, crossed an international border, and were living in refugee-like conditions. In May 1981 the UNHCR recommended that all Salvadorans who had left their country since the beginning of 1980 be considered bona fide refugees under a prima facie group determination because they had been displaced by political events and were likely to suffer if physically returned to their homeland.91 Three years later, the nonbinding Cartagena Declaration tried to offer further guidance in dealing with the Central American refugee crisis. According to the declaration, refugees were “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety, or liberty have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violations of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.”92
Each country conducted its own domestic debate on what constituted a refugee, and what types of programs should be made available to those so designated (i.e., asylum or temporary safe haven; resettlement; work authorization; social services, repatriation, etc.). Most governments preferred to view the Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans living among their populations as economic migrants because it freed them from any responsibility. Statistics compiled by state, private, and international agencies demonstrated how politicized the debate, and the collection and interpretation of migration data, became. In 1982, for example, the US Department of State estimated that 225,000 Guatemalans had been “displaced” by the political turmoil; the Roman Catholic Bishop's Conference of Guatemala, in turn, estimated that as many as 1 million Guatemalans had been displaced.93 Ironically, agencies often arrived at different statistics using the same sources; for example, using data provided by the Mexican government, the US Department of State concluded that 5,000 Salvadoran refugees were in Mexico, while the UNHCR placed the number at 120,000, and other NGOs estimated as many as half a million.94 Estimating the number of refugees and displaced persons was an inherently difficult task given the spontaneous and transient nature of this population; 95 but US government statistics were generally much lower than those compiled by the UNHCR and other NGOs because of their stricter definitions of refugee status. As the principal supplier of military aid to Central America, the United States was also reluctant to admit that its policies caused displacement and generated refugees. Instead, they categorized this migration as economically driven, and their statistics reflected this bias. Human rights organizations, in turn, were accused of inflating the numbers to promote their own political agenda, namely, increasing their operational budgets and critiquing state policies. Unfortunately, US government estimates were disproportionately influential in determining the amount of emergency aid available to those affected by the wars: by 1984 the UNHCR received one-third of its funding from the United States, and US contributions were adjusted according to the reports and estimates provided by the country's own State Department.96
The lack of protection offered by states, then, became one more means by which migrants became the victims and pawns of foreign policy decisions. Human rights organizations and other NGOs were at times the migrants' only advocates, urging a broader definition of their status that would facilitate their accommodation, and assisting in their temporary or long-term integration into host societies.97
In Nicaragua, the first large-scale migration out of the country began during the mid- to late 1970s, when the fighting between Sandinista rebels and the Somoza dictatorship was most intense. An estimated two hundred thousand Nicaraguans fled to other countries during this period, although the majority are believed to have returned after the Sandinista victory in 1979.98 A second wave of emigrants left after 1979 because of the Sandinistas' policies and/or the upheaval caused by the Contra war. For those who chose to leave the country, wealth, language, availability of transportation, and historical patterns of migration all played a role in determining the country of first asylum. The majority of middle- to upper-class exiles, for example, who perhaps had once studied or vacationed in the United States and had the financial resources to return, traveled to cities like Miami, Los Angeles, and Houston, where they found employment in the large Latino enclaves.