"Caravans of Hondurans" more democratic than the country they're coming to

To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the caravan is nothing more than a “lawless” mob of potentially violent criminals. But dozens of phone interviews and WhatsApp conversations with advocacy groups and migrants, as well as social media updates from groups on the ground, show that the migrants have organized a surprisingly sophisticated ruling structure, complete with everything from a press shop to a department of public works.

When the migrants needed to make public announcements, debate the best routes and vote on different plans, they established a nightly general assembly as a forum open to all, Athens-style. Their legislative floor was an abandoned truck parking lot or an unused sports stadium. Some of the migrants even took turns as communications directors, drafting press statements that were transmitted through a media group of more than 370 journalists on WhatsApp.

When a few of the men started drinking in the evenings to distract themselves, and mothers worried the noise was keeping their children awake, the general assembly set up a kind of internal police force made up of about 100 unarmed volunteers with megaphones to reprimand the men and keep them out of the migrants' makeshift camps after the 7 p.m. curfew.

And when they needed to lobby higher-level entities, such as immigration advocacy groups, human rights watchdogs and local governments, the migrants elected a nine-person Governance and Dialogue Council to press for their most basic needs: food, shelter and safety.

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In between one dysfunctional home country and one openly hostile destination country—at the end of November, the U.S. Border Patrol launched tear gas canisters into Mexico when a group of migrants from the caravan tried to rush the border—these thousands of caravaneros are proving that they can organize themselves to respond to their own needs, the same ones that the broken Central American governments they fled from were often unable, or unwilling, to meet.

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And though it is on a comparatively microscopic scale, the caravan government has been surprisingly successful in areas where actual democracies are not, such as with ensuring the representation of minority groups. One week before the United States elected its most diverse Congress in history, the migrants were also giving voice to underrepresented communities. The Governance and Dialogue Council at first had seven people: three men, three women and one representative from the caravan’s 100-strong LGBTQ community, a gay man. But the council quickly expanded to nine when a group of trans women approached the leaders and said they felt that a gay man could not represent their specific needs; transgender migrants have faced catcalls and incessant sexual harassment along the way. The assembly elected a trans woman and another man to sit on the council.

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More recently, the council, staying at the border with the rest of the migrants, still tries to meet every day. It has been preoccupied with the day-to-day survival of the asylum-seekers and their efforts to persuade official governments to pay attention to their needs. To counter some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric the migrants have encountered daily at the border, the caravan’s assembly voted to set up a task force of cleaning squads to sweep the streets of Tijuana in goodwill, akin to a department of public works.

  Politico