Officials in Costa Rica on Wednesday (January 6) outlined some of the logistical details of a pilot plan to transport stranded U.S.-bound Cuban migrants out of the country. The first leg of the journey, from Costa Rica to El Salvador via airplane, is scheduled for Tuesday (January 12).
A group of around 180 people will be able to leave on a flight to El Salvador on Tuesday evening, they will then have ground transportation to the Guatemala-Mexico border, Manuel Gonzalez, Costa Rica’s foreign minister said.
Subsequent flights from Costa Rica will depend on the success of this one.
Since mid-November, the number of Cuban migrants stuck in limbo inside Costa Rica’s northern border with Nicaragua has grown steadily. An estimated 8,000 Cubans are now stuck there.
The flow of migrants from the Caribbean island has surged as the process of a detente between Washington and Havana stirs fears that preferential U.S. asylum rights for Cubans may soon end.
Gonzalez said the total cost of the journey from Costa Rica to Mexico came to a total of $555 dollars per migrant.
“It’s 555 dollars (price of the journey) and returning to the list, which includes transport form the hotel to the airport, from the airport in San Jose to the airport in El Salvador, from the airport in El Salvador to the border with Guatemala via land in bus and from the Guatemala border to the Mexico border, between Guatemala and Mexico by land in bus. It includes food, exit fees that each one needs to pay from Costa Rica, it includes the 60 dollar tax that El Salvador charges and the 10 dollar tax that Guatemala charges,” he said.
In December, Central American countries agreed to a pilot programme to start allowing thousands of Cuban migrants stranded in Costa Rica to continue onward to the United States.
Kathya Rodriguez, director of Costa Rica’s Migration Department, said only adult migrants would be allowed to undertake the pilot journey and that they would be chosen based on when they arrived in Costa Rica.
“We are going to test the route, to see if all the stops are as they should be, if the times work, etc. And for that reason we have to do it with adults, we can’t do it with children, this is the pilot plan so there are four basic parameters for the 180 people that will be on this flight, one will be for the amount of time spent in Costa Rica, that is to say, we will start with the people that had their visa stamped on November 14,” she said.
Migrants became stranded in Costa Rica after Nicaragua, which is a close ally of Cuba, shut its borders in November, saying that Costa Rica had sparked a “humanitarian crisis” after Costa Rica issued transit visas to more than 1,000 Cubans.
