Ready to risk everything

HONDURAN MIGRANTS: DEFYING TRUMP TO MAKE NEW HOMES IN US

Driven from their homeland by violence and poverty.

Mexico

The caravan of Honduran migrants defying President Donald Trump by slowly trekking to the United States includes hundreds of children whose parents are ready to risk everything to give them a better future.

In the past five days alone – since the thousands of migrants crossed from Guatemala into Mexico – the children’s parents have exposed them to a stampede, a treacherous river crossing and searing heat.

Driven from Honduras by violence and poverty, they have little choice, they say.

Many of the mothers travelling in the caravan are barely 20 years old.

But they tend to have one thing in common: they are fleeing Honduras to prevent gangs from killing or recruiting their sons, from kidnapping or raping their daughters, a fate that befell many of them.

In a journey fraught with danger, there are plenty of worries to keep a parent awake at night, despite the fatigue. First among them: losing a child in the human ocean.

“Help me grab this child!” one of the volunteers accompanying the caravan shouted at a recent stop, clinging to a 10-year-old boy who was trying to run off in search of his mother, who had lost him.

Ana Rivera, 27, walked beside her two-year-old son, who was dressed only in a nappy, searching for her daughter in an improvised camp.

Nearby, an adolescent approached an ambulance to take a look at her three-year-old son, who was almost constantly vomiting. She was told to come back later, when the queue had died down.

The caravan, which left Honduras on October 13, comprises more than 7 000 people, according to the United Nations. Humanitarian organisations say a quarter of them are babies and children.

At the border crossing, many migrants opted to try to navigate the Suchiate river in improvised rafts made of inner tubes with a wooden board on top.

Guadalupe Del Carmen, 29, was one of them. But her nineyear-old son got scared and started crying.

“I explained we can’t go back, that the situation in our country is too difficult and that’s why we had to run away,” said Del Carmen, who has been unable to sleep soundly since leaving Honduras. –

Picture: AFP DESPERATE. Honduran migrants, heading in a caravan to the US, rush through the Guatemala-Mexico international border bridge after tearing down its gate in Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas state, Mexico.