By IPS Correspondents
QUITO, Sep 11 2002 (IPS)

Activists complain that controls on undocumented Latin American immigrants have been tightened in nations of the industrialised North since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington a year ago today.

“One year ago, dozens of Latin Americans who worked in the World Trade Centre in New York lay dead under the rubble. Today, other immigrants are victims, but of deportation, because they lack the necessary papers and have tried to settle in the (industrialised) North,” states a communique issued by Ecuador’s Llactacaru Immigrants Association.

According to police reports, some 12,000 Ecuadoreans trying to make it into the United States have been arrested so far this year in Mexico and Central America, compared to 7,000 in the same period last year.

For many people in this impoverished Andean nation, achieving the “American dream” means a six-month journey in precarious and often dangerous conditions, in which the migrants are frequently subjected to abuses and extortion, said Ecuador’s ambassador in Mexico, Gustavo Vega Delgado, a former dean of the University of Cuenca.

People traffickers, or “coyotes”, charge up to 8,000 dollars per person for smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States. But since last Sep 11, it has become increasingly difficult to make it across the Mexican-U.S. border.

In western Europe, Ecuadorean immigrants have faced a similar stiffening of controls, with more than 150 deported from Spain and Italy over the past two months.

Llactacaru and other immigrant rights organisations in Ecuador as well as Colombia protested the October 2001 implementation of Operation Ludeco, which increased surveillance of Ecuadorean and Colombian immigrants in Spain.

The Spanish government’s delegate for immigration affairs, Enrique Fernández Miranda, told Radio Televisión Española three months ago that it was necessary to step up the fight against illegal immigration, which was causing harm to his country.

Fernández Miranda argued that the presence of “sleeper cells of fundamentalist terrorists,” a growing wave of crime “committed by foreign citizens,” and “the increasingly pressing” problem of prostitution were the new fronts of struggle against illegal immigration.

Operation Ludeco targets suspected “criminal groups or individuals” from Ecuador and Colombia, he explained.

Under the security operation, Ecuadoreans and Colombians suspected of having engaged in criminal activity are taken into provisional custody, and their fingerprints and mug shots are taken by police, as a preventive measure.

“This indiscriminate procedure amounts to persecution and harassment of an entire social collective, based on a person’s physical appearance and country of origin, which constitutes a clear case of xenophobia and racism, while violating basic rights like ‘presumption of innocence’ and the right to freedom,” said the Llactacaru Immigrants Association.

The immigrant advocacy organisation also pointed out that although “the harassment presently targets Colombians and Ecuadoreans, there is no reason to suppose that the practice may not be extended in the future” to any person or social grouping seen as “different” or “problematic.”

The plan has generated concern, especially among Ecuadorean and Colombian migrant farm workers in Spain, because the vans that take them back and forth to the fields and greenhouses are frequently stopped and searched.

In Italy, bars, street markets, parks and even schools are combed by uniformed or plain-clothesed police officers “hunting down” people who might look Latin American, said immigrant callers to a Quito radio programme.

“We’re afraid to even go out on the street to buy something,” said Rosa Cárdenas, an immigrant from the southern Ecuadorean province of Azuay.

Studies carried out in Ecuador estimate that around 600,000 citizens from this country of 12.4 million are living in New York, 60,000 in Washington, D.C., 100,000 each in Chicago and Los Angeles, and over 350,000 in Spain.

In the United States, a broad coalition of civil liberties groups began to mobilise to protect the rights of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals against eventual “excesses” of the “war on terrorism” declared by the George W. Bush administration since the attacks on New York and Washington.

The coalition, “In Defence of Freedom”, which groups more than 150 civil liberties organisations from across the spectrum, including a group that is in favour of the right to bear firearms, criticised a bill aimed at stiffening U.S. policies on immigration.

At the Third South American Conference on International Migration, held in Quito last month, a regional plan was presented to deal with the flow of immigrants within the region and towards the industrialised North, and a campaign was launched against the trafficking of persons in South America.

Brunson McKinley, the director-general of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM), which organised the meeting, called for respect for the human rights of the most vulnerable immigrants, in the wake of the Sep 11 attacks.

McKinley said that protection for migrants could only be achieved through policies agreed on by the governments of countries of origin and destination.

“The last three decades have shown that unilateral migratory policies, for the most part restrictive, have not been very successful in halting the movement of people,” he stated.

McKinley added that there is still a long way to go before human beings enjoy the freedom of movement that the globalised world has begun to grant the items of trade.

He also pointed to the need to “change the traditional mindset that looks upon migration as a threat” posed by one part of the world against another.

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