The Children of the Drug Wars
A Refugee Crisis, Not an Immigration Crisis
CRISTIAN
OMAR REYES, an 11-year-old sixth grader in the neighborhood of Nueva
Suyapa, on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, tells me he has to get out of
Honduras soon — “no matter what.”
In
March, his father was robbed and murdered by gangs while working as a
security guard protecting a pastry truck. His mother used the life
insurance payout to hire a smuggler to take her to Florida. She promised
to send for him quickly, but she has not.
Three
people he knows were murdered this year. Four others were gunned down
on a nearby corner in the span of two weeks at the beginning of this
year. A girl his age resisted being robbed of $5. She was clubbed over
the head and dragged off by two men who cut a hole in her throat,
stuffed her panties in it, and left her body in a ravine across the
street from Cristian’s house.
“I’m going this year,” he tells me.
I
last went to Nueva Suyapa in 2003, to write about another boy, Luis
Enrique Motiño Pineda, who had grown up there and left to find his
mother in the United States. Children from Central America have been
making that journey, often without their parents, for two decades. But
lately something has changed, and the predictable flow has turned into
an exodus. Three years ago, about 6,800 children were detained by United
States immigration authorities and placed in federal custody; this
year, as many as 90,000 children are expected to be picked up. Around a
quarter come from Honduras — more than from anywhere else.
Children
still leave Honduras to reunite with a parent, or for better
educational and economic opportunities. But, as I learned when I
returned to Nueva Suyapa last month, a vast majority of child migrants
are fleeing not poverty, but violence. As a result, what the United
States is seeing on its borders now is not an immigration crisis. It is a
refugee crisis.
Gangs
arrived in force in Honduras in the 1990s, as 18th Street and Mara
Salvatrucha members were deported in large numbers from Los Angeles to
Central America, joining homegrown groups like Los Puchos. But the
dominance in the past few years of foreign drug cartels in Honduras,
especially ones from Mexico, has increased the reach and viciousness of
the violence. As the United States and Colombia spent billions of
dollars to disrupt the movement of drugs up the Caribbean corridor,
traffickers rerouted inland through Honduras, and 79 percent of
cocaine-smuggling flights bound for the United States now pass through
there.
Narco
groups and gangs are vying for control over this turf, neighborhood by
neighborhood, to gain more foot soldiers for drug sales and
distribution, expand their customer base, and make money through
extortion in a country left with an especially weak, corrupt government
following a 2009 coup.
Enrique’s
33-year-old sister, Belky, who still lives in Nueva Suyapa, says
children began leaving en masse for the United States three years ago.
That was around the time that the narcos started putting serious
pressure on kids to work for them. At Cristian’s school, older students
working with the cartels push drugs on the younger ones — some as young
as 6. If they agree, children are recruited to serve as lookouts, make
deliveries in backpacks, rob people and extort businesses. They are
given food, shoes and money in return. Later, they might work as
traffickers or hit men.
Teachers
at Cristian’s school described a 12-year-old who demanded that the
school release three students one day to help him distribute crack
cocaine; he brandished a pistol and threatened to kill a teacher when
she tried to question him.
At
Nueva Suyapa’s only public high school, narcos “recruit inside the
school,” says Yadira Sauceda, a counselor there. Until he was killed a
few weeks ago, a 23-year-old “student” controlled the school. Each day,
he was checked by security at the door, then had someone sneak his gun
to him over the school wall. Five students, mostly 12- and 13-year-olds,
tearfully told Ms. Sauceda that the man had ordered them to use and
distribute drugs or he would kill their parents. By March, one month
into the new school year, 67 of 450 students had left the school.
Teachers must pay a “war tax” to teach in certain neighborhoods, and students must pay to attend.
Carlos
Baquedano Sánchez, a slender 14-year-old with hair sticking straight
up, explained how hard it was to stay away from the cartels. He
lives in a shack made of corrugated tin in a neighborhood in Nueva
Suyapa called El Infiernito — Little Hell — and usually doesn’t have
anything to eat one out of every three days. He started working in a
dump when he was 7, picking out iron or copper to recycle, for $1 or $2 a
day. But bigger boys often beat him to steal his haul, and he quit a
year ago when an older man nearly killed him for a coveted car-engine
piston. Now he sells scrap wood.
But
all of this was nothing, he says, compared to the relentless pressure
to join narco gangs and the constant danger they have brought to his
life. When he was 9, he barely escaped from two narcos who were trying
to rape him, while terrified neighbors looked on. When he was 10, he was
pressured to try marijuana and crack. “You’ll feel better. Like you are
in the clouds,” a teenager working with a gang told him. But he
resisted.
He
has known eight people who were murdered and seen three killed right in
front of him. He saw a man shot three years ago and still remembers the
plums the man was holding rolling down the street, coated in blood.
Recently he witnessed two teenage hit men shooting a pair of brothers
for refusing to hand over the keys and title to their motorcycle. Carlos
hit the dirt and prayed. The killers calmly walked down the street.
Carlos shrugs. “Now seeing someone dead is nothing.”
He
longs to be an engineer or mechanic, but he quit school after sixth
grade, too poor and too afraid to attend. “A lot of kids know what can
happen in school. So they leave.”
He
wants to go to the United States, even though he knows how dangerous
the journey can be; a man in his neighborhood lost both legs after
falling off the top of a Mexican freight train, and a family friend
drowned in the Rio Grande. “I want to avoid drugs and death. The
government can’t pull up its pants and help people,” he says angrily.
“My country has lost its way.”
Girls
face particular dangers — one reason around 40 percent of children who
arrived in the United States this year were girls, compared with 27
percent in the past. Recently three girls were raped and killed in Nueva
Suyapa, one only 8 years old. Two 15-year-olds were abducted and raped.
The kidnappers told them that if they didn’t get in the car they would
kill their entire families. Some parents no longer let their girls go to
school for fear of their being kidnapped, says Luis López, an educator
with Asociación Compartir, a nonprofit in Nueva Suyapa.
Milagro
Noemi Martínez, a petite 19-year-old with clear green eyes, has been
told repeatedly by narcos that she would be theirs — or end up dead.
Last summer, she made her first attempt to reach the United States.
“Here there is only evil,” she says. “It’s better to leave than have
them kill me here.” She headed north with her 21-year-old sister, a
friend who had also been threatened, and $170 among them. But she was
stopped and deported from Mexico. Now back in Nueva Suyapa, she stays
locked inside her mother’s house. “I hope God protects me. I am afraid
to step outside.” Last year, she says, six minors, as young as 15, were
killed in her neighborhood. Some were hacked apart. She plans to try the
journey again soon. Asking for help from the police or the government
is not an option in what some consider a failed state. The drugs that
pass through Honduras each year are worth more than the country’s entire
gross domestic product. Narcos have bought off police officers,
politicians and judges. In recent years, four out of five homicides were
never investigated. No one is immune to the carnage. Several Honduran
mayors have been killed. The sons of both the former head of the police
department and the head of the national university were murdered, the
latter, an investigation showed, by the police.
“You
never call the cops. The cops themselves will retaliate and kill you,”
says Henry Carías Aguilar, a pastor in Nueva Suyapa. A majority of small
businesses in Nueva Suyapa have shuttered because of extortion demands,
while churches have doubled in number in the past decade, as people
pray for salvation from what they see as the plague predicted in the
Bible. Taxis and homes have signs on them asking God for mercy.
The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently interviewed 404
children who had arrived in the United States from Honduras, El
Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico; 58 percent said their primary reason for
leaving was violence. (A similar survey in 2006, of Central American
children coming into Mexico, found that only 13 percent were fleeing
violence.) They aren’t just going to the United States: Less conflicted
countries in Central America had a 712 percent increase in asylum claims
between 2008 and 2013.
“If
a house is burning, people will jump out the window,” says Michelle
Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s
Refugee Commission.
TO
permanently stem this flow of children, we must address the complex
root causes of violence in Honduras, as well as the demand for illegal
drugs in the United States that is fueling that violence.
In
the meantime, however, we must recognize this as a refugee crisis, as
the United Nations just recommended. These children are facing threats
similar to the forceful conscription of child soldiers by warlords in
Sudan or during the civil war in Bosnia. Being forced to sell drugs by
narcos is no different from being forced into military service.
Many Americans, myself included, believe in deporting unlawful immigrants, but see a different imperative with refugees.
The
United States should immediately create emergency refugee centers
inside our borders, tent cities — operated by the United Nations and
other relief groups like the International Rescue Committee — where
immigrant children could be held for 60 to 90 days instead of being
released. The government would post immigration judges at these centers
and adjudicate children’s cases there.
To
ensure this isn’t a sham process, asylum officers and judges must be
trained in child-sensitive interviewing techniques to help elicit
information from fearful, traumatized youngsters. All children must also
be represented by a volunteer or government-funded lawyer. Kids in Need of Defense,
a nonprofit that recruits pro bono lawyers to represent immigrant
children and whose board I serve on, estimates that 40 percent to 60
percent of these children potentially qualify to stay under current
immigration laws — and do, if they have a lawyer by their side. The vast
majority do not. The only way to ensure we are not hurtling children
back to circumstances that could cost them their lives is by providing
them with real due process.
Judges,
who currently deny seven in 10 applications for asylum by people who
are in deportation proceedings, must better understand the conditions
these children are facing. They should be more open to considering
relief for those fleeing gang recruitment or threats by criminal
organizations when they come from countries like Honduras that are
clearly unwilling or unable to protect them.
If
many children don’t meet strict asylum criteria but face significant
dangers if they return, the United States should consider allowing them
to stay using humanitarian parole procedures we have employed in the
past, for Cambodians and Haitians. It may be possible to transfer
children and resettle them in other safe countries willing to share the
burden. We should also make it easier for children to apply as refugees
when they are still in Central America, as we have done for people in
Iraq, Cuba, countries in the former Soviet Union, Vietnam and Haiti.
Those who showed a well-founded fear of persecution wouldn’t have to
make the perilous journey north alone.
Of
course, many migrant children come for economic reasons, and not
because they fear for their lives. In those cases, they should quickly
be deported if they have at least one parent in their country of origin.
By deporting them directly from the refugee centers, the United States
would discourage future non-refugees by showing that immigrants cannot
be caught and released, and then avoid deportation by ignoring court
orders to attend immigration hearings.
Instead
of advocating such a humane, practical approach, the Obama
administration wants to intercept and return children en route. On
Tuesday the president asked for $3.7 billion
in emergency funding. Some money would be spent on new detention
facilities and more immigration judges, but the main goal seems to be to
strengthen border control and speed up deportations. He also asked
Congress to grant powers that could eliminate legal protections for
children from Central America in order to expedite removals, a change
that Republicans in Congress have also advocated.
This
would allow life-or-death decisions to be made within hours by Homeland
Security officials, even though studies have shown that border patrol
agents fail to adequately screen Mexican children to see if they are
being sexually exploited by traffickers or fear persecution, as the
agents are supposed to do. Why would they start asking Central American
children key questions needed to prove refugee status?
The
United States expects other countries to take in hundreds of thousands
of refugees on humanitarian grounds. Countries neighboring Syria have
absorbed nearly 3 million people. Jordan has accepted in two days what
the United States has received in an entire month during the height of
this immigration flow — more than 9,000 children in May. The United
States should also increase to pre-9/11 levels the number of refugees we
accept to 90,000 from the current 70,000 per year and, unlike in recent
years, actually admit that many.
By
sending these children away, “you are handing them a death sentence,”
says José Arnulfo Ochoa Ochoa, an expert in Honduras with World Vision
International, a Christian humanitarian aid group. This abrogates
international conventions we have signed and undermines our credibility
as a humane country. It would be a disgrace if this wealthy nation
turned its back on the 52,000 children who have arrived since October,
many of them legitimate refugees.
This is not how a great nation treats children.
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