On January 14, 2020, a new Central American Caravan left San Pedro Sula: the first of that year. Although the COVID-19 pandemic was only starting, these caravans would continue. By March 2021, an unprecedented number of Central American migrants were located on the border with the United States. In complex humanitarian emergencies such as this, not only the causes and effects are multiple, but so are the ways in which States and societies respond to them. By observing these responses, we established the link between peace, violence, and migration in three ways. First, we briefly analyze the Central American path to peace since the signing of the Esquipulas-II Agreement by all regional state authorities in 1987, building up a critique of the hegemonic vision of peace imprinted in the said treaty and observing how human mobility was part and process of this transitional period.

The second part develops the theoretical approach based on Oliver Richmond’s work on peace formation. In this section, we seek to position the current migratory crisis within the overlaying efforts of local authorities, regional states, and the international society in promoting an enduring peace within the region. The research addresses the historicity as well as the political, social, and economic function of the migrant bodies in forming a new social order, the subject of the hegemonic vision of peace since the 80s and 90s.

In a third moment, through an ethnographic exploration, we observe several responses developed by state and social actors when addressing migration. Through these responses, we derive the relevant role of fluid social networks in dealing with or preventing some forms of violence and their capacity to reinforce the infrastructures of peace in the region. Nevertheless, other social networks operating in the same time and space, sometimes even interconnecting with the first ones, are responsible for increasing migrants-based networks’ vulnerability to cooption, control, and grave human rights violations. Like this, we aim to provoke a reflection on the process that gave rise to the Central American Migrant Caravans, positioning the migrant and associated social networks as critical forms of agency and integral parts of the social transformation process for building peace in the region.