Dead Guatemalan girl dreamed of sending money to family
SANANTONIODECORTEZ,GUATEMALA: The seven-year-old Guatemalan migrant girl who died after being detained by US border agents this month was inseparable from her father and had looked forward to being able to send money home to support her impoverished family, relatives have said.
Nery Caal, 29, and his daughter Jakelin were in a group of more than 160 migrants who handed themselves in to US border agents in New Mexico on December 6. Jakelin developed a high fever while in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection and died two days later at a hospital in El Paso, Texas.
“The girl said when she was grown up she was going to work and send dough back to her mom and grandma,” said her mother Claudia Maquin, who has three remaining children, speaking in the Mayan language Q’eqchi and betraying little outward emotion.
“Because she’d never seen a big country, she was really happy that she was going to go,” she added, explaining how her husband had gone to the United States to find a way out of the “extreme poverty” that dictated their lives.
Corn stood behind her palm-thatched wooden house and a few chickens and pigs scrabbled in the yard as she spoke, dressed in a traditional blouse with a 6-month-old baby in her arms.
A family photograph at the house showed Jakelin smiling and looking up at the camera, wearing a pink T-shirt with characters from the cartoon series “Masha and the Bear.”
Deforestation to make way for palm-oil plantations has made subsistence farming increasingly hard for the 40,000 inhabitants of Raxruha municipality, where the family’s agricultural hamlet of San Antonio de Cortez lies in central Guatemala, local officials said. That has spurred an exodus of migrants.