Guatemala had only two large urban hospitals and a regional patchwork of smaller medical facilities; its capacity to contain a virulent pandemic was limited. The government of President Alejandro Giammetti, who was a trained surgeon, suspended international flights into the country, and border transit largely ceased. But could the government persuade the Trump administration to help it limits the spread of the coronavirus? The United States was fast becoming the global epicenter of the pandemic. As of late April, there were some five thousand Guatemalans in US immigration detention, and every week the Department of Homeland Security was sending between one and five flights to Guatemala City, each carrying up to 135 deportees.
Other countries in the region were forced to deal with deportees infected with the virus, including Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and Haiti, many of which had fragile health care systems, scant hospital space, and a dearth of ventilators. The United States deported eighteen thousand people in March, and nearly three thousand in the first eleven days of April. In multiple cases, US officials knew that they were spreading COVID but didn’t seem to care. A twenty-six-year-old Haitian man who’d become infected in a Louisiana detention center was put on a plane despite two positive tests; he claimed to know four others from the jail who were also sick but getting deported with him.
The irony was not lost on Central Americans. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during earlier waves of mass deportations, US and Latin American law enforcement personal resorted to metaphor to describe what was happening: the gangs were replicating and expanding through the region like a virus. In 2020, the deportations were spreading an actual virus.
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