Why migrate?

Higher costs of living and increasing unemployment have made it harder for migrants to integrate into Latin American states, and made it difficult for them to restart lives in another country.

Quiceno says they are finding it hard to settle down in countries where they had been staying, and there is "no effective juridical or economic integration." She says people need to "understand the reasons for migration, the situations a person faces in an unknown country. Certain societies reject migrants, and they're turned away."

With an inflation rate of around 100%, Argentina has unleashed a new wave of migration, or remigration, of Venezuelans who came to the country to escape economic disaster at home.

As Venezuelans arrived in 2019, the U.S. dollar bought you 38 Argentine pesos, whereas today, the informal rate runs at around 700 pesos to the dollar. Some will try to reach Canada but for the most part, the chief destination is the U.S.

Haitians who were in Chile since 2010 also began to leave in 2021, citing rising joblessness and poverty, as well as hostility from locals and harsher immigration laws.

A dangerous — and often repeated — journey

In Latin America, three times is not an unusual number of migratory trips. It has become one of the world's leading regions in terms of displaced populations. The UN refugee agency's latest Global Trends report found that two out of every five asylum seekers in the world were from Latin America.

There's an increasing number of unaccompanied children and teenagers

UN data also shows that Latin America and the Caribbean are the most significant departure points for migrants heading to the U.S. and Canada (25.4 million), followed by Asia.

Their journeys and life histories are often harrowing. Mayner Rodríguez is a psychologist with a mobile MSF unit operating in Danlí and Trojes in Honduras.

She is familiar with the cases of people who leave their families to set out on a harsh trip that promises violence and possibly death. And the longer the trip, the greater its dangers.

She recalls the siblings whose parents died on the route, and who were left to survive as best they could. The older brother took the youngest with him, and had to abandon the middle one. "It was very sad, but they had no choice," she says.

Quiceno is particularly concerned by the increasing number of unaccompanied children and teenagers "traveling without their parents or other relatives or the care of any responsible adult."

Migrants face many challenges including theft, days without eating, sleeping in parks, walking hundreds of kilometers, and abuses and sexual violence.

José Rafael Cumare, a 38-year-old migrant from Venezuela, lived in Argentina for three years before leaving for the U.S. via the dangerous Darién Gap. He told MSF he had seen and heard "ugly things inside the forest."

Deciding to give it another try is not easy. Quiceno told Clarín that "people face uncertainty. They're not sure whether or not the situation has improved, and if it makes sense anymore to keep trying from where they are." Others, she recalled, said that they "feel a little ashamed having to tell their families and neighbors that they failed to find the dreams they had gone after."