Who is leading the caravan? Depends on who you ask.

Kate Morrissey Contact Reporter


After Maria Elena Benavides saw a flyer about a group of people leaving her country of Honduras for the U.S. border shared on Facebook over and over again, she decided it was time to go.

Benavides, 42, hadn’t been able to work because rival gangs were fighting in the area where she lived. To escape the violence and to live in a place with a stable economy, she fled with her three-year-old daughter to join the caravan.

“We came here with a positive dream,” Benavides said in Spanish, her tone sad and pensive.



She’s lost faith in that dream in the weeks they’ve been stuck at the border with limited guidance about where to go from here, she said. She’s thinking about going back to Honduras in the hopes of finding a place to live that is safer than the city she left. She’s not sure when she’ll make that decision.

“I think this is the end,” Benavides said.

The experience taught her not to believe things as they appear, she said. Many in the caravan have said they felt deceived by the messages they received along the way about what awaited them at the U.S. border.

The caravan had leaders as it traveled north, Benavides said, but she hadn’t seen them since Sunday’s march to the border.

Though she had family in the U.S. ready to help her if she’s allowed inside, she didn’t know how to begin the process of asking for asylum or where to go for information.

Getting accurate and useful information to a group of more than 5,000 people can be challenging, and the caravan’s nebulous leadership structure only adds to the difficulty.

How the caravan came to be and who led it to its current limbo depends on who you ask. Some say that there are no leaders, that the caravan acts as a united people.

Others say that they used to have leaders or still have leaders, pointing to either members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras — an organization that has escorted caravans of migrants to the U.S. border for years and joined this group as it reached Mexico — or caravan representatives working with the collective.

Meanwhile, Pueblo Sin Fronteras has adamantly denied being the leaders of the caravan, saying the group works to facilitate conversations between members of the caravan so that the caravan can make its own decisions. But the number of caravan members who know about or participate in that decision-making process is small, Pueblo Sin Fronteras member David Abud admitted.

The caravan members working with Pueblo Sin Fronteras hope to get the caravan organized enough to end the confusion and causing a growing number to choose to go home. They hope to do that without being labeled as leaders themselves, worrying that such a move could be seen as a power grab by the larger group.

The makings of the caravan

On October 4, Honduran activist and journalist Bartolo Fuentes posted a flyer on Facebook about the “Caminata Del Migrante” that would leave from San Pedro Sula, in Northern Honduras, on October 12 at 8 a.m.

“We’re going to accompany these people,” he wrote in Spanish.

“It’s a shame that there are no institutions in Honduras that can offer support to keep migrants from leaving without orientation, to fall into danger. Let’s at least support their exit.

Let’s denounce the terrible situation we are living in Honduras: unemployment, insecurity, poverty. And those whom we protest persecute us or shoot live bullets.”

The flyer he posted went viral and was featured on Honduran news. It was this flyer that prompted many of the thousands in the caravan, including Benavides, to join it.

Fuentes initially accompanied the caravan until he was deported to Honduras from Guatemala on October 19. He left Honduras toward the end of October and met the caravan again in Mexico City, where he spoke at a press conference with fellow Honduran journalist Milton Benitez, who is making a documentary about the caravan.

“Caravans organize every day in Honduras. Every day groups of 8, 12, 15 people organize in different neighborhoods,” Fuentes said, citing Honduran statistics that 250 to 300 people leave Honduras daily. “What bothers [the Honduran government] is that [this group] left visibly.”

Though many have pointed to Fuentes as the organizer of the caravan, he has repeatedly denied it and instead blamed Juan Orlando Hernández, the current Honduran president, as the reason for the exodus.

Hernández took office in 2014 and was reelected toward the end of 2017. That election was rife with controversy, and the Organization of American States, which monitored the vote, questioned its validity and called for a do-over. More than a dozen people died in protests over the potential election fraud.
U.S. officials chose to recognize Hernández’s win despite pushback from some members of Congress.

The political turmoil is only one part of the difficult living conditions in the country, which makes up one-third of the Central American region known as the “Northern Triangle.” Its murder rate is among the highest in the world, and corruption among the police and judiciary protects those who commit crimes rather than their victims, according to a 2018 report from Human Rights Watch.

Leadership and organizing

As the caravan made its way north, Pueblo Sin Fronteras organized assemblies to help the migrants discuss options and decide their next move.

It’s not clear how many of the migrants participated. When asked about the meetings, many of the younger men in the group recalled attending and sharing their opinions. Women and older men tended to say they thought Pueblo Sin Fronteras was in charge of where they went though some were heavily involved in the discussions.

Abud, one of the Pueblo Sin Fronteras members who has accompanied the caravan, said that different migrants have taken on leadership roles over the course of the journey.

“The leadership’s always changing and fluctuating,” Abud said. “We provide stability so they can organize themselves.”

Following the demonstration at the border Sunday that led to an exchange of tear gas and rocks between Border Patrol agents and migrants, members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras along with Honduran journalist Benitez, helped a group from the caravan host a press conference. The five speakers called for an end to what they called arbitrary and manipulated deportations, faster processing of asylum by the U.S. and a Mexican commission to negotiate a permanent solution for caravan members, among other things.

The five were elected by the caravan, they said, though Abud later admitted that many in the caravan probably didn’t know the press conference was happening.

David Vasquez, a 22-year-old caravan member from Guatemala, was among the speakers. He said that because they had been traveling together for a month, caravan members knew each other and organized together.

“We're going to explain the reality we're living here,” Vasquez told the swarm of reporters in Spanish. “We're not leaders, just voices of the migrant exodus.”

He's been working with about 50 or 60 others as volunteers to handle different tasks around the camp, he said, and was also a volunteer along the journey to keep the group organized.

He worries about the lack of information in the camp and those who feel so hopeless that they're deciding to give up and go home.

“They need to know everything I know,” Vasquez said. “They need to know where they are. They need to know their rights.

They need to know clearly where they're going and what they want.”

He believes many in the caravan have cases that would qualify them for asylum, but they don't understand how to begin the process. He said many of them have bad information, and he's trying to find a way to change that without making himself a de facto leader.

It’s important to him that people discuss their perspectives and come to a consensus, he said.

“That’s how there are no leaders,” Vasquez said.

Losing hope

Julio César Esquivel Contreras, a 23-year-old from Guatemala with family in San Diego, joined the caravan because he thought it was well organized. On the journey, he followed instructions from people in vests carrying megaphones, he said. He hadn't seen them after arriving in Tijuana.

He's been trying to figure out on his own what to do with guidance from his uncle, who has brought him food from across the border a few times.

Jonathan Pedneault, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who has been monitoring conditions in Tijuana, said there’s a lot of misinformation among the migrants, and the fact that many come from rural areas where they didn’t have access to much education only makes it more difficult to help them understand their reality.

“The asylum process, which is complicated for people like me, is an abstraction for these people,” Pedneault said. “They didn’t come here in bad faith. They were badly equipped to understand the U.S. asylum process.”

“What we have now is a mass of people beginning to realize how complicated things are, and an administration making things even more complicated,” he added.

He’s seen many organizations bringing in volunteer attorneys to try to explain to what is happening to them, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

“It’s a tall order, and ultimately the decision is theirs,” Pedneault said.

A growing number of caravan members have opted to either sign up to voluntarily return to their home countries or to get one-year work permits in Mexico. Many who have applied for work permits say they don’t intend to stay in Mexico permanently but that working will allow them to get out of the squalid conditions at the makeshift shelter while they try to figure out their way forward.

Some caravan members noted that people with vests and megaphones periodically came through the camp at the sports complex Benito Juárez in Tijuana to announce meetings to try to organize.

Jose Franco, a 35-year-old from Honduras, said he heard about the meetings but didn't bother going.

“I thought there would just be the same thing,” Franco said in Spanish. “When I left my country, I came with the goal of going alone. I thought going with the caravan would help, but it was a lie.”

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