The Salvadorans and Guatemalans followed a similar pattern. Those threatened by the warring factions were the most likely to leave. Salvadoran migration increased after October 1979, when the death squads intensified the campaign against the opposition. According to the UNHCR, half a million Salvadorans fled their homeland during the period 1979-1982. By the end of the 1980s, one million people were estimated to have migrated, and over half a million were internally displaced.99 In turn, Guatemalan migration increased during 1982—1984, when the governments of Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores escalated their counterinsurgency campaigns. According to UNHCR estimates, over one million people became internal migrants or refugees in Guatemala during the 1980s. According to US estimates, only one-fourth of the Salvadorans and Guatemalans displaced by the war received assistance, mostly in camps and settlements in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The UNHCR placed the number as low as 10 percent.100
The countries that bordered Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala suddenly found themselves reluctant hosts to thousands of refugees. Humanitarian concern for the refugees was tempered by political and economic considerations: politicians feared that comprehensive assistance would encourage the refugees to stay permanently within their borders and increase resentment among nationals, who would have to compete with the refugees for jobs, housing, and social services. The presence of thousands of dissidents and rebels could also potentially destabilize their own countries. Central American governments therefore tried to discourage large-scale migration, and isolated the refugees in rural areas far from their population centers, where they would draw as little attention as possible, and their movement and activities could be controlled. The UNHCR as well as NGOs such as OXFAM, Catholic Relief Services, and the Church World Service played a critical role in helping the region to cope with the refugee crisis. By 1990, an estimated hundred international NGOs and six hundred grassroots NGOs operated in Central America.101 However, paramilitary groups often equated assistance to refugees and displaced persons with support for guerrilla insurgents, and interfered with the delivery of humanitarian assistance and harassed, arrested, and even murdered aid workers.102
The UNHCR advocated resettlement in neighboring countries because such an arrangement would facilitate eventual repatriation. The UNHCR provided millions of dollars in funding to local government agencies to establish camps and to provide emergency food and medical care. Unfortunately, the agency's budget, stretched by refugee crises around the world, limited the amount of assistance it could offer in Central America. The refugee camps that emerged throughout the region varied in quality and in the level of social services. Camps that were designed as a temporary measure became permanent housing; some residents remained in their camps for as long as ten years with limited opportunities for education and recreation. In many cases, camps housed thousands more than they were designed to hold, and individual countries restricted the refugees' movements outside the camps as well as their opportunities to engage in wage-earning labor. International NGOs experimented with “durable solutions”—projects designed to make the refugees self-supporting through farming, artisanry, or industrial shops—but budgetary constraints limited the quality of these programs as well.103 Not surprisingly, most refugees bypassed these camps altogether. Instead they chose to live as anonymously as possible as illegal immigrants in major cities. Others decided to try their luck further north, seeking employment in the more developed economies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
Honduras and Costa Rica provide important—and opposite—case studies of the regional responses to refugee accommodation and assistance. Honduras became one of the principal refugee-recipient nations in Central America, in part because of foreign policy decisions that placed the Contra soldiers and their families in camps on the Honduras-Nicaragua border, but also because of traditional patterns of migration. The Honduran government recognized the UNHCR's principle of non-refoulement in its domestic legislation, but did not have formal procedures for determining refugee status.104 The government (which had reestablished diplomatic relations with El Salvador in 1980) insisted that Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees live and work in certain zones and not within the general population. The UNHCR established “reception areas” along the border, where refugees were met and transported to one of several camps or supervised settlements, which some likened to concentration camps because of the visible army presence patrolling the zones.105 These camps included Colomancagua, La Virtud, Guarita, El Amitillo, Guajiniquil, Los Hernandez, and San Antonio, but the largest camp was at Mesa Grande, which offered the most protection from roving Salvadoran army units who frequently crossed the border to kill suspected rebels. By 1983, the camps and settlements housed 18,000 Salvadorans and 550 Guatemalans.106 The security violations made life extremely difficult, as did the normal tensions, rivalries, and anxieties that accompanied the concentration of people in a small geographic space.107 The inability to sustain themselves through agriculture, construction, or other trades made the refugees dependent on relief agencies, and this further decreased morale among the camp population. If the Salvadorans left these camps, they forfeited their refugee status and became subject to deportation.
Ironically, Honduran policy toward Salvadorans and Guatemalans stood in direct contrast to the government's treatment of Nicaraguan refugees. Thirteen thousand five hundred Miskito Indians, regarded as political allies in the US-Honduran Contra War, were allowed to settle on agricultural land or work in internationally funded refugee projects, as long as they remained in the Mosquitia region.108 Nicaraguan ladinos were also more favorably treated: they lived in settlements, but unlike the Salvadorans, were granted freedom of movement. By the end of the decade, government sources showed that the number of official refugees from Nicaragua had increased steadily each year but the number of Salvadorans had not, reflecting Honduras's more generous policies toward the former. However, government sources estimated that as many as 230,000 Central Americans lived illegally in Honduras.109
The Honduran army carried out its separate immigration policy. Honduran families living along the border were warned by the military not to assist any refugees or aid workers, or they would face reprisals. On May 14,1980, when four thousand Salvadorans tried to cross the Sumpul River into Honduras to escape the Salvadoran army's campaign in Chalatenango, they were met by the Honduran military and forced to return at gunpoint. More than six hundred people were then massacred by Salvadoran troops.110 A few months later, in March 1981, seven thousand tried to cross the Lempa River into Honduras to escape the military actions in Cabañas, but as they crossed the river they were shot at by both Salvadoran and Honduran soldiers.
The UNHCR tried to negotiate minimum safeguards for the refugees with local civilian and military authorities, but these agreements were repeatedly violated.111 Relief workers were continually harassed, and refugees were kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured by Honduran army officers, or turned over to Salvadoran authorities. On August 29, 1985, for example, Honduran soldiers entered the Colomoncagua refugee camp and kidnapped, raped, and murdered some of the residents. In February of the following year Honduran soldiers once again entered Colomoncagua, and this time set up machine guns around the perimeter of the camp, including the soccer field, as a means of surveillance as well as psychologically harassing the camp residents.112 Hoping that international pressure would force the Honduran and Salvadoran armies to respect refugee rights, the Evangelical Committee for Development and Emergency in Honduras, working with various international NGOs, created a “visitors program”: hundreds of volunteers from North America and Europe traveled to Honduras to live and work in the camps, serve as bodyguards, and act as witnesses to the human rights violations. Teams of volunteers patrolled the border and accompanied the refugees as they traveled to the various camps. No army incursions occurred in camps or villages where the international visitors resided; but when the program ended at mid-decade, the kidnapping and torture resumed.113
Costa Rica's experience, in turn, demonstrated the difficulties that even stable democracies faced when reconciling national interests with international commitments. Unlike Honduras, no military force patrolled the border of Costa Rica