Marchers flee deadly Central America to protect children
In 2015, I marched with a migrant caravan through Mexico that was much like the migrant caravan headed toward the United States today. We marched day after day with pregnant women and babies, grandfathers and precocious teenagers. We marched in 110-degree heat. We marched without food or water, relying on the generosity of Mexicans to feed and shelter us. We usually did not have access to showers or bathrooms. We did not have bandages for the blisters on our feet, or baby formula, or tampons, or medicine.
We marched onward anyway, just as today’s migrant caravan does, because it was the only option. By traveling together, we found safety in numbers and were finally able to make visible the terrible conditions migrants suffer while fleeing their home countries.
Gangs like the MS-13 have taken over vast swaths of Central America. These gangs are not only deadly, they place a stranglehold on life. Children can’t go to school for fear of being attacked, and parents can’t run the small family business for fear of being extorted.
Brayan Hernández, a 15-year-old from Honduras, had been living on the streets for the past few years.
“After elementary school, my family kicked me out,” he said. “So I had to live on the street. One day the gangs came up and shot my best friend in front of me. That’s why I left.”
This idea — that people migrate only for economic reasons, or only for refuge — overlooks a much more complicated situation. The people I walked with were both poor and in danger, but the kind of danger the U.S. government refuses to recognize. Along with gangs and drug cartels, the people I walked with did not have access to life-saving medical treatment.
Many faced the danger of going hungry, like in Guatemala, which has the fourth highest level of chronic malnutrition in the world. Half of young children there are stunted because they don’t have enough to eat.
Or of not receiving an education, like in El Salvador, where only education through age 15 is open to all.
Or the danger of living under a dictatorial regime that the United States openly supports, like in Honduras.
As Mildred Mendoza, a single mother from Guatemala City traveling with her three children, told me, “Ten years ago, my husband was murdered in the U.S. in a robbery gone wrong. Since then, I swore I would never set foot in the country. But now the gangs are threatening to kill my children at school, so we have to flee.” (Her husband, a farmworker was attacked by two men who had broken into his house.)
Cries for these people to simply “fix their own country” ask the impossible. The United States has covertly sabotaged campaigns for basic economic, educational and social reform in Central America for decades because it would mean that U.S. corporations operating in the region would finally have to pay their fair share of taxes. Migrant caravans are not part of a foreign invasion — they are the result of one.
Yet President Trump has said he will send up to 15,000 U.S. troops to stop the caravan at the border — 5,000 are already on their way. He also said he plans to build tent cities at the border to incarcerate asylum seekers for indefinite periods of time rather than release them pending their court hearing.
Such actions are directly against international human rights law, as well as basic human decency. We have a choice: We will either allow U.S. administrations to continue destroying Central American lives and livelihoods, or we can forge a new path and welcome our neighbors in need.