New York Times
By Frances Robles
July 9, 2014
SAN
PEDRO SULA, Honduras — Anthony O. Castellanos disappeared from his
gang-ridden neighborhood on the eastern edge of Honduras’s most
dangerous city, so his younger brother,
Kenneth, hopped on his green bicycle to search for him, starting his
hunt at a notorious gang hangout known as the “crazy house.”
They
were found within days of each other, both dead. Anthony, 13, and a
friend had been shot in the head; Kenneth, 7, had been tortured and
beaten with sticks and rocks.
They were among seven children murdered in the La Pradera neighborhood
of San Pedro Sula in April alone, part of a surge in gang violence that
is claiming younger and younger victims.
The
killings are a major factor driving the recent wave of migration of
Central American children to the United States, which has sent an
unprecedented number of unaccompanied
minors across the Texas border. Many children and parents say the rush
of new migrants stems from a belief that United States immigration
policy offers preferential treatment to minors, but in addition, studies
of Border Patrol statistics show a strong correlation
between cities like San Pedro Sula with high homicide rates and swarms
of youngsters taking off for the United States.
“The
first thing we can think of is to send our children to the United
States,” said a mother of two in La Pradera, who declined to give her
name because she feared gang
reprisals. “That’s the idea, to leave.”
Honduran
children are increasingly on the front lines of gang violence. In June,
32 children were murdered in Honduras, bringing the number of youths
under 18 killed since
January of last year to 409, according to data compiled by Covenant
House, a youth shelter in Tegucigalpa, the capital.
With
two major youth gangs and more organized crime syndicates operating
with impunity in Central America, analysts say immigration authorities
will have a difficult time
keeping children at home unless the root causes of violence are
addressed.
In
2012, the number of murder victims ages 10 to 14 had doubled to 81 from
40 in 2008, according to the Violence Observatory at the National
Autonomous University of Honduras.
Last year, 1,013 people under 23 were murdered in a nation of eight
million.
Although
homicides dropped sharply in 2012 after a gang truce in neighboring El
Salvador, so far this year murders of children 17 and under are up 77
percent from the
same time period a year ago, the police said.
Nowhere
is the flow of departures more acute than in San Pedro Sula, a city in
northwestern Honduras that has the world’s highest homicide rate,
according to United Nations
figures.
Between
January and May of this year, more than 2,200 children from the city
arrived in the United States, according to Department of Homeland
Security statistics, far
more than from any other city in Central America.
More
than half of the top 50 Central American cities from which children are
leaving for the United States are in Honduras. Virtually none of the
children have come from
Nicaragua, a bordering country that has staggering poverty, but not a
pervasive gang culture or a record-breaking murder rate. “Everyone has
left,” Alan Castellanos, 27, the uncle of Anthony and Kenneth, said in
an interview in late May. “How is it that an
entire country is being brought to its knees?”
He
said the gangs operated with total impunity. “They killed all those
kids and nobody did anything about it,” Mr. Castellanos said. “When
prosecutors wanted to discuss
the case, they asked us to meet at their office, because they were
afraid to come here. If they were afraid, imagine us.”
The
factors pushing children to migrate vary, according to an analysis of
their home cities by the Department of Homeland Security.
The
Guatemalan children who arrive in the United States are more often from
rural areas, suggesting their motives are largely economic. The minors
from El Salvador and
Honduras tend to come from extremely violent regions “where they
probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the U.S. preferable to
remaining at home,” the analysis said.
“Basically,
the places these people are coming from are the places with the highest
homicide rates,” said Manuel Orozco, a senior fellow at the
Inter-American Dialogue,
a Washington-based research group. “The parents see gang membership
around the corner. Once your child is forced to join, the chances of
being killed or going to prison is pretty high. Why wait until that
happens?”
A
confluence of factors, including discounted rates charged by smugglers
for families, helped ignite the boom, he said. Children are killed for
refusing to join gangs,
over vendettas against their parents, or because they are caught up in
gang disputes. Many activists here suggest they are also murdered by
police officers willing to clean up the streets by any means possible.
In
the case of the Castellanos family, the police said the older boy was a
lookout for the gang and had decided to quit. The order to kill him,
the police said, came from
prison.
Several
arrests have been made. Héctor A. Medina, 47, who the police said lived
at an abandoned house controlled by the 18th Street gang, where Kenneth
was killed, was
charged in the boys’ deaths. “It’s a serious social problem: any
children born in this neighborhood are going to get involved in a gang,”
said Elvin Flores, a police inspector in charge of La Pradera. “Our
idea is to lower crime every day. We need a state
policy to involve kids from when they are little to go to school.”
But gangs, which rob, sell drugs locally, kidnap people and extort money from businesses, often recruit new members at schools.
In
some cities, blocks are empty because gangs demanding extortion
payments have forced out homeowners. Many people have had to move within
the country in a displacement
pattern that experts liken to the one seen in Colombia’s civil war.
The
office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that
from 2008 to 2013, the number of asylum claims filed in Mexico, Panama,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica
and Belize increased sevenfold.
Most
were from people of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the three
nations with large numbers of migrants now arriving at the United States
border.
Refugee
advocacy organizations have urged the State Department to treat the
children arriving at the United States border as refugees, and proposed a
processing system
where asylum claims could be reviewed in Central America and those
accepted could move safely to the United States or countries willing to
accept them, as was done in countries such as Haiti and Iraq. They have
not yet received a response, the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops said.
Mr.
Obama urged Congress on Wednesday night to pass a $3.7 billion budget
supplement that would, among other things, beef up border security,
hasten deportations and help
Central American nations address security problems. “The best thing we
can do is make sure the children can live in their own countries,
safely,” he said.
During
a recent late-night visit to the San Pedro Sula morgue, more than 60
bodies, all victims of violence, were seen piled in a heap, each wrapped
in a brown plastic
bag. While picking bullets out of a 15-year-old boy shot 15 times,
technicians discussed how they regularly received corpses of children
under 10, and sometimes as young as 2.
Last
week, in nearby Santa Barbara, an 11-year-old had his throat slit by
other children, because he did not pay a 50-cent extortion fee.
“At
first we saw a lot of kids who were being killed because when the gang
came for their parents, they happened to be in the car or at the
location with them,” said Dr.
Darwin Armas Cruz, a medical examiner who works the overnight shift.
“Now we see kids killing kids. They kill with guns, knives and even
grenades.”
Dr. Armas said his family was thinking of migrating, too.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment