Three eras, three ways of experiencing the border. The duty spoke to asylum seekers affected differently by Canadian border policies before, during and after Roxham Road. Second in a series of three texts.
Andrés Cardoso Gutiérrez is not used to being the subject of the interview. Just over a year ago, he was still the one holding out the microphone and asking the questions.
A passionate journalist in Colombia serving the public interest, he had to be threatened with violent death by a dangerous armed group for him to decide to leave everything behind. He sought refuge via Roxham Road in Canada in March 2022, almost a year to the day before the Canada-US border was further sealed.
“Those who think we came to get rich don’t understand what it’s like to have to save your life,” he says, now living in Sherbrooke with his wife.
He too believed in peace there after more than 50 years of civil war. In 2016, after the signing of the treaty between the Colombian government and the biggest guerrillas in the country, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombians lived in hope. After the demobilization of the FARC, he made some optimistic reports on these transition zones where former guerrillas who exchanged their weapons for a few hectares and small houses plant pineapples.
A flourishing and fantastic time to “do your duty as a journalist”.
“But the illusion quickly dissipated,” continues Andrés. And it was from the front row that he saw his entire region and his country sink into violence again.
Andrés was a reporter for one of the most important television channels in the country, Caracol, with “national broadcasting”, as he repeats during the interview. His investigations led him to become a target of armed groups. “It’s sadly ironic to think that the better I did my job, the more I became a person to be eliminated in their eyes,” he mused aloud.
death every day
Gradually from 2019, his sources started calling him. Teachers, who wanted to denounce the recruitment underage students to “return to the mountains” or the jungle, that is to say to a group of guerrillas, as the popular expression in Colombia has it. “Mothers who had just lost their child because he had been recruited to go to war. » Deminers, who saw anti-personnel mines being « replanted » as the demining progressed. The national army, too, who invited him to accompany him in the Amazonian forest to see them destroy clandestine airstrips used for drug trafficking.
He saw and felt the noose of danger tighten around him. In January 2022, he must report the news of an attack on the governor of the Caquetá region, which killed two of his security team.
However, this politician is on the same list of people to assassinate as him. The list was decreed by an armed group called the Nueva Marquetalia, made up of former guerrillas dissatisfied with the peace process and who have taken up arms again.
Colombia therefore sees today a multiplication and a reconfiguration of a multitude of armed groups linked, to varying degrees, to dissidents from the former guerrillas and to the illicit trade in drugs or minerals.
Andrés Cardoso did try to obtain the protection of his State, since the threat to his life was “identified by my own government as ‘very serious’”, according to all the official documents it presents.
In total, the organization Reporters Without Borders also recorded the murder of three journalists in 2022, including a man who was under escort provided by the government.
The year 2022 has been particularly emblematic of the continuation of conflicts. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded an increase in violence, listing 92 massacres with 321 deaths. More than 200 social leaders, often human rights or environmental defenders, were also put to death.
A journey that leaves marks
But all that, Andrés Cardoso knew better than anyone. Yes, practicing your trade in your home country sometimes meant having to go out in a bulletproof vest. But there is no question of waiting for death.
Young and newly married, he chose Canada for safety and “for its message of peace.” Getting stuck in the United States would have meant staying in a country he still sees as taking part in the Colombian conflict.
To achieve this, he crosses from Mexico to the United States. There, he is intercepted and separated from his wife and two sisters-in-law. They are all taken into custody, the American norm on the southern border. Andrés then spends 17 days without being able to communicate with them, nor with his family in Colombia, even if he implores the staff with great reinforcement of his official documents and his proofs of threat to his life. “They were expecting me, but they had no news,” he said.
His wife is already on the Canadian side and he accelerates to join her. The minute he was about to cross Roxham Road, an officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police read him the usual formalities: “He told me that I was going to be detained if I crossed,” he said. He then relives his difficult days in thought. But once the border is crossed, he has the possibility of filing his asylum application.
“I made the decision to come via Roxham Road because I had no alternative,” he insists, now living in Sherbrooke with his wife. From Colombia, however, he tried several steps, calling the Canadian embassy and contacting the federal immigration department directly. The answer was “that the only way to have this status was to achieve a entry point by land, air or sea,” he says.
He is well placed to understand that asylum seekers, especially those who have come through Roxham Road, are sometimes looked down upon, sometimes “singled out as expensive” to the government, he says.
But by dint of wanting to demonstrate that he “wants to integrate”, that he does everything to “belong to Quebec”, he is visibly out of breath. Andrés Cardoso tries to explain himself in French: “In the morning, I have level 4 French lessons. In the evening, I work from 3 p.m. to midnight in a furniture factory. »
A certain sadness seems to inhabit him, even if he documents, online, with humor the things of daily life in Quebec.
A “certain sadness” inhabits him, he admits, taking a moment from his journalistic professionalism. “I hope this country will give me the opportunity to return to my profession and what I love to do. It’s not easy to work eight hours in a company doing the same thing, thinking about your soul in journalism and that you left behind everything you had built. »