9,000 Member Migrant Caravan On Their Way To The United States Clashes With Guatemalan Police

Guatemalan soldiers clashed with thousands of migrants from Honduras on Sunday after part of a caravan of as many as 9,000 people was held by authorities near where it had entered the country.
The soldiers, many wearing helmets and wielding shields and sticks, formed ranks across a highway in Chiquimula, Guatemala to block the procession which was seeking to reach the US.
Footage showed a large crowd pushing past the security forces along kilometer 177 of Vado Hondo, in Chiquimula.
After a small fight broke out, troops eventually eventually held the migrants back.
The latest clashes come after two groups of more than 3,000 Honduran migrants each pushed their way into Guatemala without registering on Friday night.
The group was part of a larger migrant caravan that had left the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula before dawn.
A third group entered Guatemala on Saturday.
The Honduran migrants are trying to reach the United States border.
However, several previous attempts at forming caravans have been broken up by Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.
Authorities tried to stop the migrants in the town of Vado Hondo on Saturday in the Chiquimula Department, to request the required documentation decreed by the country’s president earlier this week. No migrants had documentation or negative Covid screenings.
The Guatemalan government described the entry of migrants as a transgression to their sovereignty and called on the Isthmus’ governments to take action to avoid putting its inhabitants and the communities through which migrants transit at risk, in the face of the health risk derived from the pandemic.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei on Wednesday night decreed a “state of prevention” along the country’s border with Honduras.
The decree noted the threat of migrants entering without required documentation and without following pandemic-related screening at the border.
Guatemala is requiring proof of a negative COVID-19 test.
When hundreds of Hondurans tried to form a caravan last month, authorities stopped them before they even reached the Guatemala border.
Other attempted caravans last year were broken up by Guatemalan authorities before they reached Mexico.