From crisis of migrant children to the crisis of Cuban migration: Geopolitical interests and social expressions of the migration system crisis in United States-Mexico-Central America from 2014 and 2015

Abstract

This article analyzes the crisis surrounding the current migration system from Central America to Mexico and to the United States. The article reviews the myriad of geopolitical interests behind the detention of 68.000 migrant children from the Northern Triangle of Central America on the Southern border of the United States in 2014, and the crisis of Cuban migrants transiting through Central America that exploded in mid-November of 2015. Both of these instances form a contradictory whole and are framed in the context of the strategic importance of the southern border of Mexico for Central American, South American and Caribbean migration. It is stated that media attention on both events, mediated by political considerations represents a disruption of the “migratory normalcy”, but fails to see these events as what they truly are: crises inherent to said normalcy, that go beyond the limits of its origin given the aggressive and continued violation of migrants’ human rights.