Children Fleeing Death

"It's not that they're bad parents. They're afraid that their children will be murdered here. They cannot foresee any future."
"I can't express in words (how bad it is). It's unthinkable. In the (Southern U.S. border) centres where (the migrants) are detained, they have a better life than they have here." Beatriz Valle, formerly Honduras ambassador to Canada

"Anybody in their right mind would probably run as far as possible (from Honduras). It's only the crazy ones, like me, who stay."
Rodolfo Pastor, ex-Honduran diplomat at Washington embassy

A group of immigrants from Honduras and El Salvador who crossed the US-Mexico border illegally are stopped in Texas. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

They come in their droves, from Honduras, from Guatemala, from El Salvador, from Mexico, filtering across the border from Mexico into the United States. Some hoping to be re-united with their father or their mother, living illegally in the United States, others just hoping that America will allow them to stay, to find a place for themselves, safe and secure from the violence and the endemic poverty that haunts their homeland.

In this June 19, 2014 photo, a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl traveling alone waits for a northbound freight train along with other Central American migrants, in Arriaga, Chiapas state, Mexico. The United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number of Central American migrants crossing into its territory, particularly children traveling without any adult guardian. More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended since October.

Hondurans are sending their children to the United States in the hopes that they will find haven there, that by some miracle of compassion their presence will be permitted and the children will grow to an adulthood with promise for the future. There is no future for them in their place of birth, only violence, fear and foreboding; no opportunity to advance themselves by any measure of human achievement.

In the Honduran newspapers the latest news feature was the beating and torture of a young man by gangsters. The victim, 24-year-old Luis Alfonso Cabrera, was left in a hospital, untreated for two weeks, just languishing. He was eaten alive by maggots while awaiting treatment. When news broke of this atrocity, the national government sent in the military to take over the hospital security operation, with hints that powerful criminal forces had infiltrated the administration of the hospital.

Crumbling institutions, violent crime, accusations of malevolence toward people from authorities and criminals alike, rampant corruption. Mario Catarina hospital's fall from grace as a medical institution that the population could rely upon to deliver emergency treatment when needed in a country where 'accidents' could take place without warning, requiring that some agency respond to save the lives of the unfortunate, reflects the fading prospects of the entire country.

Which goes quite a long way to explaining why it is that children in their thousands are converging in desperation on a country where a way of life unknown to them in their own experience holds out faint promise that it can be theirs eventually too, if they but make the prodigious effort it takes to find their way, unaccompanied by adults, in desperation to prolong their lives and reach their future.

These are not children abandoned by their families, but children urged by their desperate parents to make the perilous journey that may deliver them from fear, misery and violence.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, surging impossibly forward. Young children are forced into gangs or murdered. Beatriz Valle points out one of the causatives for the country's economic, social collapse and crumbling social services; the U.S.-led war on drugs hadn't helped one iota. She speaks of the losing strategy in fighting narcotics that seems only to be a success for the criminal gangs who make their fortunes from moving drugs.

Another ex-Honduran diplomat, Rodolfo Pastor remembers disbelief washing over him while working at the embassy in Washington when a high-ranking American official informed him that the war on drugs was a runaway success. So successful that Honduras represents the country believed to be the greatest source of migrant influx into the United States.