Images of the caravans of Central American migrants crossing the continent to reach the U.S. shocked media audiences around the globe. Associations were inevitable with the war in Syria and other countries that have provoked comparable displacements of people. The migrants' testimonies stated that they were fleeing violence, lack of employment, government corruption, a social crisis akin to a state of war.

In the essay: The Central American caravans: uncivil wars, migration and the refugee status crisis, Héctor M. Leyva, fellow of the Knowledge Laboratory: Visions of Peace, pays attention to the forms of diffuse and persistent violence against the population in the north of Central America (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala) which, occurring in the ambiguous space created by criminality, private interests, corruption and the powers of government agents, could be not only scarifying the population but also dissociating the legal and political order and, consequently, making the framing of conflicts and the search for solutions more complex.