Reframing Central American Migration From Narrative Journalism

Central American and Mexico Migration: From Figures to Context

Migration constitutes a crucial point for understanding the complexity of the Central American region, the Northern Triangle countries—El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—and Mexico. Even if migratory flows to the United States are not a novelty (Lesser & Batalova, 2017; Rodríguez, 2014), the dimension reached—more than 400,000 undocumented migrants arrive at the southern Mexico border each year (Organización Internacional de Migraciones, 2014), and in Fiscal Year 2016, 408,870 individuals were apprehended along the United States’ southwest border (González-Barrera & Krogstad, 2016)—and the dangers to which migrants are exposed (Casillas, 2011; Rios, 2014) set Central American migration at the heart of a humanitarian crisis. Nevertheless, figures reveal the scale but not the background of undocumented migrants, who are doubly victimized. Forced to abandon their home by criminal gangs that extort and threaten them with death—such as the maras ² (Cantor, 2014; Hiskey, Córdova, Orcés, & Malone, 2016; Kennedy, 2014)—once on the road, they robbed, assaulted, used as drug-slaves, sexually exploited, raped, kidnapped, or murdered; some just made to disappear (Amnesty International, 2010; Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, 2011). However, barely a minor part of the injuries is reported (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, 2011; Crisis Group, 2016).

Experts refer to a “violence-driven refugee crisis” (Crisis Group, 2016; Rios, 2014) exceeding the economic motivation argued by Mexico and the United States (Gómez-Johnson, 2015). The northern triangle reaches the highest levels of violence in the western hemisphere (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2017), and young people appear as “the most vulnerable” to it, as both perpetrators and victims. This fact has triggered an “exponential growth” of unaccompanied children and teen migrants (Hiskey et al., 2016; Rosenblum, 2015), labeled by U.S. President Barack Obama as an “urgent humanitarian situation” in 2014.

The vulnerable conditions of undocumented transmigrants were exacerbated in 2007, when the Mexican criminal organization Los Zetas ³ made them the target of a lucrative mass kidnapping and extortion activity (Crisis Group, 2016, pp. 12–13), a spiral of violence that reached its peak in the so-called Massacre of Tamaulipas (2010), where 72 persons, mostly migrants, were killed. These criminal groups infiltrated all routes and circuits used by migrants to journey north, from the cargo train La Bestia to humanitarian shelters. Historically unattended by the Mexican government (Casillas, 2015; Ramos, 2016), the disintegration of the few security areas across Mexico exposed migrants not only to the abuses of criminal gangs and individuals but also to those of corrupt members of the police and army members as well as migration authorities (Casillas, 2011, 2015; Crisis Group, 2016; Ramos, 2016; Rodríguez, 2014).

Researchers have emphasized the ineffectiveness of policies and deterrence campaigns launched by the United States and Mexico to dissuade Central American migrants and have called for an agenda prioritizing comprehensiveness, inclusion, and humanitarianism, as well as a clear commitment to investigate and prosecute crimes against migrants (Delgado, Márquez, & Puentes, 2013; Hiskey et al., 2016; Massey & Pren, 2013; Rodríguez, 2014).

News Framing and Migration

Media tend to produce easily digestible versions of the social reality, reducing complexity and presenting newsworthy issues within a particular frame. This involves a process of interpretation that brings to the audience the most relevant aspects of an issue and how to evaluate it (Entman, 1993; Goffman, 1974; Kim, Schefeule, & Shanahan, 2002; Scheufele, 1999). Although research analyzing coverage of Latino migration into the United States is quite recent (Chávez, Whiteford, & Hoewe, 2010), the frames show evidence of “problematic roles of news media in shaping public knowledge of immigrants” (Kinefuchi & Cruz, 2015, p. 334). Conclusions are consistent in focusing on negative stereotypes that link immigrants with drugs, crime, and instability, whether in research conducted by national leading newspapers or local TV news and web outlets (Chávez et al., 2010; Dixon & Williams, 2015; Fryberg et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2011; Kinefuchi & Cruz, 2015; Sui & Paul, 2017).

The coverage of immigration is significant because news media content largely influences the public’s perceptions and attitudes (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). Risks of linking crime and migration have been highlighted by integrated threat research (Stephan, Diaz-Loving, & Duran, 2000), since they can be translated into political positions regarding immigration policies (Arias & Hellmueller, 2016), with implications for cross-cultural relations (Fryberg et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2011) or the support of security discourses aiming at border reinforcement and constraints on immigrants’ access (Lakoff & Ferguson, 2006; Massey & Pren, 2013).

Research analyzing media migration frames is usually carried out in hosting countries, but it is also interesting to review how the issue is addressed in sending or transit countries (Muñiz, 2011). Studies conducted in Mexico emphasize that the 2010 Tamaulipas Massacre was a trigger moment that caught media attention for what until then had been a mostly invisible topic. But, quite consistent with frame analysis in the United States, research highlights that, when reporting about migration, Mexican media give priority to security (García Lirios, Montero, Bustos Aguayo, Carreón Guillén, & Hernández Valdés, 2012) and crime issues over the migrants, who come across as mostly dehumanized and invisible as the news media rely on official sources and discourses (Berryessa-Erich, 2014; Ramos Rojas, 2015). In addition, Muñiz (2011) observes a kind of mirror effect since the majority of reported news in Mexican media comes from the United States, whereas events taking place in the country receive scarce coverage, particularly those on the southern border. Two academic studies carried out in El Salvador draw similar conclusions, underlying the prevalence of official sources and the focus on raids, arrests for common offences, and deportations (Calles, 2015) or the lack of an in-depth approach, relying on figures and secondary sources to report on a prominent issue in the country (Mejía, Girasol, Roque, Alejandro, & Rodríguez Serrano, 2016).

Newsroom Conditions and Alternatives

Despite the attention to Latino migration coverage and its effects, not much research has focused on the factors that lead media to specific frames. While target audiences have proved to be a frame predictor in for-profit media addressed to Spanish or English speakers or proximal to the U.S.-Mexico border (Branton & Dunaway, 2008), Scheufele (1999) stresses that social values, organizational constraints, and journalistic routines contribute to shape framing in media news. Overall, it is not surprising that “a significant amount of media coverage of the border follows a similar formula,” with a clear dependency on official or police sources, focusing on controversial aspects (Davis, 2016, p. 2). Time pressure and immediacy lead journalists into routinized sources (Phillips, 2010), which institutionalizes a voiceless presence for migrants in the media (Thorbjørnsrud & Figenschou, 2016) and collides with standards and news ethics (Tiffen et al., 2014).

The fragmented and episodic approach to a complex issue such as migration (Suro, 2011), paying attention only to critical events—massive arrests or raids—and prioritizing breaking news over other journalistic genres that provide better conditions to explain it in-depth, promotes arbitrary and inconsistent coverage (Pauli, 2016). To deal with ethical challenges when reporting migration, professional associations and scholars have suggested new approaches to reporting, aiming for narrative mediation (Pauli, 2016) and slow journalism (Davis, 2016; Le Masurier, 2016; Neveu, 2014). Proposals are consistent in supporting new gathering and storytelling techniques that do not match with for-profit media but are inspired by high-quality standards combining explanatory, in-depth investigative and narrative journalism.

Pauli (2016) calls for “multi-genre coverage of immigration issues by combining individual narratives with policy analysis” (p. 61) engaging with the social sciences, while Neveu (2014) suggests that “ethnography and sociology supply a rich tool-kit of methods for observation, investigation and reflexive understanding of what is trustworthy or not in the data collected by legwork” (p. 539) and that it can also provide interpretive tools to make sense of complex causal relations. Similarly, Davis (2016) focuses on a type of journalism that “connects research with strengthening journalistic coverage” (p. 3), as in the multiplatform Borderland: Dispatches from the US-Mexico Border (2014). Relying on extensive background research, Borderland links individual life stories to a series of data-driven interactive visuals to display “the complexity of life on the border” (Davis, 2016, p. 11). This option, avoiding sensationalist coverage in stories that call for a strong emphasis on human interest (Benson, 2014) and rehumanizing migration discourses, is consonant with the central role of the “strategic ritual of emotionality” in quality journalism, as Wahl-Jorgensen (2013, p. 130) underlines. Trindade and Inácio (2017) also stress the adequacy of literary journalism strategies to deal with human rights and integration issues.

Investigative Reporting and Expert Sources

The On the Road project and From Migrants to Refugees: The New Plight of Central Americans (Martínez, 2010, 2017) perfectly illustrate how investigative reporting in the field provides the conditions to gain knowledge about the subject. Chronicles from the main scenarios of Central America migration bring readers the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the real conditions of those trying to reach the U.S. border but also to understand how mafias exploiting migrants act. Martínez, who prefers to define his activity as in-depth journalism (in Revelo, 2014), uses all resources to investigate how drug smuggling, prostitution and human trafficking, kidnapping, slave labor, and extortion networks develop their activity:

The coverage model of the On the Road project demonstrates that, having time and resources, journalism can infiltrate even areas dominated by organized crime. . . .It is possible if you understand that journalism cannot be a pizzeria that pretends in half an hour to prepare and deliver its product but, on the contrary, realize that journalist carries out an intellectual activity. It strikes me how terribly harmful migration coverage has been.

In Migrants Who Do Not Matter, Martínez (2013) explains how he managed to contact with local sources who provided complementary information on the war involving drug smugglers and people traffickers. Otherwise, without being there, he would not have had access to a shelter worker and a pollero—a person smuggling migrants across the border—who explained to him how this war has led to massive migrant kidnappings (pp. 267–277). Trusted and confidential sources are crucial to achieve an in-depth insight and to explain how situations evolve:

Mr. X knows a lot about how the dirty work gets done in Altar. . . .The deal we made back in May 2007 is that I wouldn’t reveal who he was, what job he had, where he was from, what he looked like, how I found him, or anything at all about anything he does. (Martínez, 2013, p. 510)

Migrant Voices in the Text

In contrast with most journalistic practices, the reportages included in this study place migrants’ voices at the core of the story. Migrants tell their own experiences, and by means of this, readers can gain access to a multidimensional portrait of the reality, entirely different from that framed in the dehumanizing news reports that rely on police sources, which mostly perpetuate negative stereotypes about undocumented migrants. As Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) points out, “personalized story-telling enables empathy, or the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives” (p. 133).

News production routinely excludes immigrants—“irregular migrants make up less than 10 per cent of the quoted sources in the mainstream media coverage of unauthorized migration” (Thorbjørnsrud & Figenschou, 2016, p. 13)—making their disadvantaged position in accessing media impossible to reverse. The major challenge, as Martínez illustrates, is that journalists do not visit migrants’ spaces (in Revelo, 2014). The authors of the reportages analyzed here, in contrast, gather information in the field, interviewing migrants in the shelters where they find refuge, in La Bestia railway stations, or at any point along the route.

First-person testimony not only allows for insight into the conditions of migrants’ displacement but also reinforces the credibility of the story. Migrants’ experiences provide exceptional details of how they are caught in the hands of exploitation mafias, as with the example of C.M, a Nicaraguan who tried to reach the U.S. border—after being deported five times—and was forcibly recruited by a criminal group for a month and a half because he had no money or family to pay a ransom (Martínez, 2012b). The account of another migrant, Grecia, unveils mafias’ modus operandi, marking their victims like a commodity—with the tattoo symbol of Los Zetas—abusing them in several ways or selling them for prostitution, even after having received the ransom money demanded from their families (Martínez, 2012a). Migrants’ testimony is a fundamental resource to help readers to understand absolute helplessness involving Central American migration. “Grecia never tried to escape. Few would want to if they had seen what Grecia saw,” emphasizes Martínez, before letting Grecia describe how she witnessed a young girl once free (“because her family had paid the ransom”), going to report her case: “The migration authorities turned her back over to the same guys (the Zetas). They burned her alive; they beat over and over with a bat.”

Giving voice to migrants is particularly important to contrast governmental and police sources, as Ureste (2015) did, to prove that the Southern Border Plan, supposedly aimed at helping undocumented migrants, actually increased their risks by making them targets of security forces. Undocumented migrants, such as a 46-year-old Salvadoran, explained that the police pressure is raised until the point that it is not possible to travel for 15 minutes in a combi-car without meeting a migration checkpoint. And even on board, they are not safe, because drivers extort migrants under the threat to hand them over to the police. As a result, undocumented migrants are forced to follow more remote and dangerous routes (Ureste, 2015), facing extraordinary risks and sometimes made to disappear, as missing migrants’ families report (Turati, 2015).

Narrative and Multimedia Strategies

Literary techniques and strategies can enrich nonfiction stories (Abrahamson, 2010; Kramer, 1995). By using descriptions or providing a complete profile of the characters, reconstructing dialogues, or recreating scenes (Wolfe, 1976), journalists can bring in-depth knowledge of the situations. Together with a description of a tattoo and its symbolism—“To erase tattoos is, in Salvadoran gang law, to write your own death sentence”—Martínez (2017) provides readers with the context of violence involving minors as both victimizers and victims: “He was arrested for a homicide when he was just 15. He spent only two years behind bars. . . .But that did not stop him. Prisons in El Salvador don’t do rehabilitation.” In the format of dialogue, with direct questions—“How many homicides have you participated in?”—and answers, the author shows an 18-year-old man who explains and justifies his criminal record with unexpected coldness—“A lot. But I have also seen a bunch of my friends killed, too.” He tells us that he fled El Salvador after leaving the gang and killing his girlfriend’s murderers: “I eliminated those two idiots in Izalco and all hell broke loose. . . .No matter where you look, there is someone after me.” Quoting his own words express the disdain for the murdered and the fear for his own safety more suitably than any form of reported speech.

In Of Slaves and Serfs: Guatemala’s “Occupied” Bodies, Gutiérrez (2012) relies on the recreation of scenes to show how migrant women in the hands of slave sexual networks leave the brothel with clients as if they were free:

The woman who was dancing . . . disappears from the scene. That will happen all night long: suddenly one of the four women will vanish with a man, returning half an hour later from one of the cheap motels around the corner.

Manuel Ureste (2015) explores the strength of the scene-by-scene construction to narrate how a group of migrants leave a shelter and prepare themselves to board La Bestia train. But suddenly, they recognize security guards on board who have been known to force migrants to get off the train while it is moving if they get caught, and thus they have to change their plans. Reproducing the scene that he witnessed, Ureste conveys to the reader the sense of frustration experienced by migrants long awaiting the opportunity to continue their journey.

In contrast with media focus on immediacy, Martínez (2017) does not just summarize the main characters’ stories who flee the maras violence. Rather, he reports each move in detail, from the first—“The first time he had to run away was from the metropolitan municipality of Apopa, in San Salvador, after the Barrio 18 gang kidnapped his two daughters. . . .He recovered his girls and moved to Acajutla, on the Salvadoran coast”—to the fourth—“He fled again, further north . . . where his mother had always lived . . . years later, in 2014 . . . four gang members came to the house and beat him. . . .Half dead, he fled to Guatemala on a bus the next day”—to make readers aware of the true dimension of the problem: their lives under constant threat despite the change of residence that motivates the displacement of thousands of people. As Neveu (2017) points out, “understanding of the most subjective experiences of individuals and groups—the emotional dimensions of social life—can result in meaningful knowledge of social facts” (p. 1298).

The crossmedia work On the Road offers three complementary approaches to Central American migration, employing both narrative and audiovisual formats. The photography book (Ponces et al., 2010) documents the journey of thousands of persons across Mexico, bringing face and identity to them. Pictures are not aimed at illustrating Martínez’s chronicles but at offering a complete report that restores to migrants the humanity and dignity often stolen in conventional media. Also focusing on the journey, the documentary Maria in No Man’s Land (Zamora-Chamorro, 2011) emphasizes the experience through the eyes of two migrant women—a perspective that often remains out of the media’s attention.

The examples considered in this article take advantage of the digital environment to enhance the information with videos, which reinforce credibility and transparency, giving readers the opportunity to listen to the sources and to explore the scenarios that migrants visit in their journeys in a more immersive experience. This helps to build significant narratives and reinforces the sense of authenticity (Jacobson, Marino, & Gutsche, 2016; Lassila-Merisalo, 2014). Furthermore, these instances appraise the power of animated mini-documentaries to showcase in images the first-person account of the migrants, as in From Migrants to Refugees. Particularly noteworthy is the “interplay” between multimedia and textual elements (Jacobson et al., 2016, p. 10), both integrated and conceived as an ensemble that benefits from the best format to tell each story, in which multimedia complements the writing (Giles & Hitch, 2017).

Charts, maps, and statistics become extraordinary tools to provide contextual data to understand all dimensions of the migratory process, from causes to developments. These resources, mostly interactive, allow the audience to go deeper into the context, avoiding the data overload in the text. Gutiérrez (2012) offers statistics of homicides, sentences, and victims, while Esclavos del Narco: Migrantes (Martínez, 2012b) presents three interactive maps and charts that help readers to figure out the dimensions of the organized crime problem, both geographically and chronologically. In addition to that, the multimedia piece has uploaded full reports and statistics, which evidence a great commitment to transparency. This point is particularly important in More Than 72 (Turati, 2015), which provides access to all documents gathered during the production process—including diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks about the Massacre of Tamaulipas—to highlight that information dealing with serious human rights violations should be public.

Interactive charts also act as argumentative tools. In Southern Border Plan (Ureste, 2015), statistics serve as proof to denounce the program aimed to protect migrants—as Mexican authorities advocated—as having functioned more as a means to hunt undocumented migrants.

Reframing Migration

The projects examined frame migration in a radically different way than traditional media. Far from being a menace, aliens involved in drug smuggling or crime, migrants are presented as victims of different kinds of violence that compel them to flee their country and start a journey full of dangers. Migrants are not carriers of violence but vulnerable scapegoats to a variety of victimizers, from pandillas and maras, which eject them from their homes and into the hands of criminal gangs that abuse them in several ways. In a series of long-form journalistic pieces, Martínez (2010, 2017) has masterfully pulsed the intricate landscape of Central American undocumented migration. His texts cover all issues involving causes and circumstances, connecting flow processes with the conditions of migrants’ lives. This is clearly displayed in the latest reportage he coauthored, whose title—From Migrants to Refugees: The New Plight of Central Americans (Martínez, 2017)—reframes the new dimension that migration has acquired for thousands of Central American persons.

The three documents dealing with migration that form Slaves of Organized Crime in Latin America emphasize the dangers and offenses suffered by migrants, representing a radical shift from the usual way they are framed. In this sense, the alleged threat for hosting societies is reversed by exposing their vulnerability, exploited by criminal organizations that use them as slaves, “in the most barbaric forms of servitude and exploitation, both labor and sexual” [own translation] (Martínez, 2012b). The examples analyzed highlight the main causes behind this situation, describing how migrants’ routes overlap with those used by drug smugglers and showing the impunity surrounding human rights abuses. In particular, Martínez’s (2010) book denounces corrupt practices that permeate all public spheres and institutions, from policy makers and the army to migration authorities.

Southern Border Plan (Ureste, 2015), in a sharp contrast with U.S. media, provides a dissonant outlook from the border. Migrants are not presented as criminals, as illegals who break laws and regulations to cross borders without the required documents, but rather as the victims of a criminal justice system unable to guarantee basic human rights or to provide refuge to people fleeing from violent situations. Contrary to what Mexican authorities claimed when the plan was launched, it has served not to protect migrants but to transform them into hunted persons, since all the security machinery have been engaged to catch, arrest, and expel undocumented migrants.

Among the examples that contribute to reframing migration from menace to vulnerability, the multimedia More Than 72 (Turati, 2015) emphasizes the most dangerous scenario: the ways in which the concurrent forms of violence cause thousands of migrant deaths on the road. Through the testimony of relatives of the victims and with reconstruction of particular stories, it offers dozens of examples of migrant disappearances that remain unsolved.