Pubdate: Sun, 20 Jul 2014
Source: Tampa Bay Times (FL)
Copyright: 2014 St. Petersburg Times
Contact: http://www.sptimes.com/letters/
Website: http://www.tampabay.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419
Note: Named the St. Petersburg Times from 1884-2011.
Author: Sonia Nazario
Note: Sonia Nazario is the author of "Enrique's Journey: The Story of 
a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With His Mother." This item 
appeared in the New York Times.

THE CHILDREN OF THE DRUG WARS

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 Motino 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 after 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 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 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 Sanchez, 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 Lopez, an educator with Asociacion Compartir, a 
nonprofit in Nueva Suyapa.

Milagro Noemi Martinez, 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.

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.

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 Jose 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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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom