Fleeing Despair Only to Die In Custody

SAN ANTONIO SECORTEZ, Guatemala — Claudia Maquin said goodbye to her 7-year- old daughter about a month ago, when the girl and her father left their village to make a new life in the United States.

Now she has to say goodbye to her again.

Ms. Maquin’s husband and daughter, Jakelin, made it across the border — but just over a day later, on December 8, the girl died in the custody of the United States Border Patrol.

Ms. Maquin, 27, has burrowed into the protective embrace of her family in a village in the hills of the Guatemalan lowlands.

Ms. Maquin has a simple explanation for why her husband made the dangerous journey: the lack of alternatives in this part of the country. Indigenous communities like theirs have endured centuries of poverty, exclusion and repression.

“I am living with a deep sadness since I learned of my daughter’s death,” she said in a Mayan language, Q’eqchi’, through an interpreter. “But there are no jobs, and this caused the decision to leave.”

In the United States, Jakelin’s death has emerged as another flash point in the debate over immigration. But in Guatemala, the flow of citizens out of the country is seen as an indictment of their government’s failure to provide opportunity, particularly for the indigenous groups that make up at least 40 percent of the population.

On paper, Guatemala is not poor; the World Bank classifies it as an upper-middle income country. But those statistics mask profound inequalities, the legacy of centuries of racism and economic control by powerful groups that resist attempts to address discrimination.

Guatemalans have always looked to migration to escape the divisions. In the past few months, though, apprehensions at the United States’ border with Mexico suggest that still more Guatemalans are attempting to cross.

Jakelin’s father, Nery Caal, 29, left because he believed that, with little formal education and a parcel of land too small to support the family, he had no hope of improving their lot.

His decision to leave Raxruhá, his impoverished municipality, was not unusual. There has always been maybe 10, 20 or 30 people leaving every month, said César Castro, the mayor. But in less than two months, he said, 200 families have left. He cannot explain the spike, but he offered one theory.

“Somebody came and tricked people and told them, ‘I will get you political asylum — and take a child with you,’ ” Mr. Castro speculated.

Mr. Caal’s family said he decided to take Jakelin with him because the young father and his daughter were especially close.

But Mr. Caal may have heard — from others who made the trip, or from the smuggler he paid — that he would have a better chance of remaining in the United States if he arrived with a child.

From time to time, villagers get good news: Someone has made it across the border to the United States.

In San Antonio Secortez, the Caal family’s community, families grow corn and beans, and raise goats, chickens and pigs. The fields no longer yield what they once did, said Domingo Caal, the 61-year- old patriarch. He is unsure whether changing weather patterns or declining soil quality may be to blame, or something else.

As the forest to the north is overtaken by oil palm plantations, there are fewer wild deer and boar to hunt and the large catches of river fish have dwindled, he said.

“Then the family grew,” Mr. Caal said. And there is scant help from the government, which has little money to spend. Guatemala’s government collects a smaller share of tax revenues, relative to the size of its economy, than any other country in the world, according to the World Bank.

Despite her grief, Ms. Maquin does not want her husband to come home and help her raise the couple’s three remaining children: Audel, 9, Elvis, 5, and Angela, 6 months old.

Mr. Caal is staying at a migrant shelter in Texas.

In a statement, the Border Patrol said its agents had done “everything in their power” to care for Jakelin.

Jakelin’s father has disputed an earlier statement by the Border Patrol that the girl had not eaten or drunk for days on her trip across the border. Ms. Maquin is angry at suggestions that the couple did not care properly for their daughter.

She sees no other route out of her poverty — now increased by their debt to the smuggler who took her husband and Jakelin to the border. The family will not say how much they paid, but Mr. Castro estimated it at between $5,000 and $10,000.