Intersectionality, violence, and migration during COVID-19: women on the move in Central America

This chapter analyses the challenges experienced by migrant women (in their diversity) during their transit through Central America, especially with the closing of borders and other travel restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. A securitization paradigm has shaped efforts by governments worldwide to contain the pandemic, with people on the move often characterized as carriers of the virus. This has led to the adoption of xenophobic policies and discourses (akin to Mbembe’s necropolitics) that cannot be justified on health grounds, and to violence against migrants/refugees. Women, girls and LGBTQI+ people experience violence at every stage of the migratory journey (origin, transit, destination and return). Border closures, gendered quarantines and other pandemic-related restrictions have accentuated the invisibility of, and discrimination against, people on the move. This chapter applies an intersectional lens in analyzing power relationships and systems of oppression that intersect to perpetuate the exclusion of migrant/refugee women in their diversity. It highlights measures taken by certain governments to grant migrants temporary protected status and proposes a gender-sensitive approach that opens channels for regular migration without discrimination and violence, with a view to transforming necropolitics into rights-based politics and addressing the structural violence experienced by migrant/refugee women.