Sawt Falasteen - Booming migrant charter flights to Nicaragua prompt US crackdown

Irma Perez, a 28-year-old Cuban, told AFP she arrived in the Nicaraguan capital Managua last month aboard a charter flight run by Mexican aviation firm Viva Aerobus.

"We had a 45-minute layover in Cancun (Mexico) without disembarking, and then came to Managua," she said.

Perez was speaking from Mexico, after she, her husband and one-year-old son traveled there overland with the help of a people-smuggler. The family plans to head towards the United States.

Several Cuban migrants told AFP they had traveled with the same company on flights chartered by small travel agencies.

Viva Aerobus, which does not advertise fights between Cuba and Nicaragua on its website, did not respond to AFP's requests for comment.

Perez said she and her husband paid $1,250 each for their tickets, and $350 for that of her son. The people-smuggler cost them another $2,100.

- 'New phenomenon' -

The use of charter flights to aid migrants in getting to their dream destination "is a relatively new phenomenon," said Manuel Orozco, a director of migration issues at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

The Central American country of Nicaragua has not required visas for Cubans since November 2021.

Since then, a record 421,000 Cubans have illegally entered the United States, according to official figures from Washington.

Two other Central American nations, Panama and Costa Rica, imposed a transit visa on Cubans in 2022 to tackle the influx of migrants.

A report by the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank said that an average of 50 charter flights a month traveled between Havana and Managua between January and October 2023.

Meanwhile flights between Haiti and Nicaragua quadrupled in the past three months.

"Nicaragua was a bridge for almost 100,000 people," seeking to migrate, since January, according to the report.

Orozco believes that airline operators and Nicaraguan airport authorities made "an economic calculation" for their "mutual benefit."

A 37-year-old Cuban accountant said he paid $1,800 in October for a flight with Aruba Airlines, whose web page offers ticket sales through a WhatsApp number.

He traveled from Havana to Managua with a stopover in Aruba, a small Dutch island in the Caribbean.

"I had to send the money to a friend in the United States and she was able to have the ticket issued," he explained, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He was on his way to Mexico before hoping to reach the United States.

- US sanctions -

Advertisements abound on Facebook: "Tickets available Havana-Nicaragua (...) prices for families, charter and regular flights," read one.

At the beginning of November, Brian Nichols, the US Deputy Secretary of State, expressed concern about the "dramatic" increase in these flights.

"No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants -– not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments," he wrote on Twitter.

On Tuesday, Washington announced it would restrict visas for those in charge of the aviation companies.

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told journalists that the number of flights has begun to decrease.

Mexico began requiring an airport transit visa for Cubans in late October.

A taxi driver from Managua, who consults the airport website every day for his work, told AFP on condition of anonymity that he had noticed the number of planes carrying migrants had dropped from "22 to 23 daily" to six.

N.Awad--SF-PST