Los Invisibles: Nuances of Migration Along Mexico's Southern Border
Part 9 in a Series
TENOSIQUE, MEXICO – “The suffering came since I was born,” says Franklin Alcides, a 15-year-old orphan and migrant from Honduras. “Have you heard of the poverty of the orphans? I am one of them.”
That is how Franklin begins the story of his life while staying at La 72 Hogar Refugio Para Personas Migrantes, a migrant shelter in Tenosique, a city in Tabasco state not far from the Mexican-Guatemalan border. It is difficult for him to share his story with others, he says after choosing a corner where few people pass by.
Franklin’s parents abandoned him, and he spent his childhood on the streets of Honduras, he says. He suffered mistreatment and humiliation at the hands of others, sleeping in dumpsters or abandoned houses and feeding himself on food waste.
At age 10, Franklin went to live near Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, where a woman who sold tortillas used to give him a kilogram (2.2 pounds) each day so that he would have something to eat. One day, the woman asked him about his life. He confessed that he was an orphan.
“She asked me if I would like to have a mama,” he says. “I told her that was good. She told me, ‘Well, you have one.’ I ran to hug her.”
Franklin’s new mother, who was 75 years old and lived alone, brought him to her home, took care of him and bought him a pit bull, he says. His mother and dog are the two beings he considers family. He gets sad thinking of them, but he contains his tears in his small, almond-shaped, black eyes.
Fifteen days earlier, Franklin left Honduras to go to the U.S. to find work, he says. He did not even tell his mother he was leaving and has not spoken to her since.
The idea of migrating occurred to Franklin one day when his mother was sick and bedridden, he says. He had been lying in his bed and praying.
“I said to God: ‘Help me with my mother, that she is not going to go on me. Do not take her,’” he says. “And suddenly it occurred to me, that idea of going. In the United States, there is a lot more money than here in Honduras. I cannot do it and, without parents, even more so.”
When his mother asked him to go and buy some medicines, he left and never returned.
Franklin has spent a week in the shelter. He has delayed his departure because he is afraid to get on the cargo train, the primary mode of transport most migrants use to cross Mexico.
He has heard that there are criminals who extort migrants on the train or throw them from its moving cars if they cannot or refuse to pay, he says. Other criminals kidnap migrants. He knows he is alone, so there is no one to pay for his release if criminals kidnap him.
Franklin never imagined he would run into these problems, he says. He regrets leaving Honduras.
“I came thinking it was easy,” he says. “If I had known that this path was difficult, most likely, I would have stayed with my old lady.”
Still, he will continue the journey, he says. He does not know whether he would find his mother alive if he returned to Honduras.
Speaking in a low but firm voice, Franklin says he is confident he will reach the U.S. and then will contact his mother. He is conscious that something may happen to him on the journey but discounts the possibility.
“I know how to take care of myself,” he says.
Franklin is part of a group of migrants who are both highly vulnerable and largely invisible: children and teenagers who travel alone.
Among the many migrants who travel through Mexico on their way to the U.S., unaccompanied minors – youth under 18 traveling alone – are some of the most vulnerable to crime because of their lack of experience and protection. Youth principally migrate to find work, to reunite with family, and to escape from violence in their home countries. Mexican migration authorities say they take unaccompanied minors into custody in order to protect them from the dangers of the journey, but some groups that work with migrants respond that detaining minors violates their right to freedom.
At least 16,342 young people under 18 illegally entered the country alone between 2009 and September 2013, according to data from the National Institute of Migration, Mexico’s federal migration authority. It is likely the numbers are much higher because the institute tracks only the number of migrants taken into custody and does not have a tally of how many migrants enter the country in total because they do so illegally.
The majority of the young migrants were from Central America, principally El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, according to the National Institute of Migration data. And nearly 75 percent of young migrants from those three countries were between 12 and 17 years old.
Among the many migrants who travel through Mexico on their way to the U.S., unaccompanied minors – youth under 18 traveling alone – are some of the most vulnerable to crime because of their lack of experience and protection.
Young migrants have the advantage of being more agile than adults and more willing to take risks, says Nashieli Ramírez, general coordinator of Ririki Intervención Social, an organization that promotes the rights of children and adolescents.
Still, young migrants are also vulnerable to risky situations, including human trafficking, sexual or labor exploitation, physical and sexual violence, extortion and kidnapping, according to a 2011 UNICEF México report. At the other end of the spectrum, they may also become involved in criminal activity.
Irregular migration is risky for any person, regardless of age, but unaccompanied minors are at greater risk because they travel without protection and are seen as vulnerable, Ramírez says. Their lack of experience and, in some cases, physical strength makes them more likely to suffer the dangers of migration.
“The mobility is putting you in front of challenges, which you, at a young age, if you have not experienced any way of managing the risk, it makes you more vulnerable,” Ramírez says.
The majority of unaccompanied minors are male, according to statistics from the National Institute of Migration. For example, of the 3,581 minors whom the government deported between January and July 2013, only 17 percent were female.
This comparatively low proportion of females may come from the fact that families are more protective of girls and try to keep them from migrating, Ramírez says. And female migrants who are victims of sexual exploitation may fail to show up in official statistics because their captors hold them against their will in places such as brothels, which means immigration officials are less likely to take them into custody.
Youth principally migrate to find work, to reunite with family and to escape from violence in their home countries.
Many unaccompanied minors decide to leave their homes in order to find jobs that will improve their quality of life, according to a 2011 report from Sin Fronteras, a civil organization that works to protect migrants and to defend their rights. In migrants’ countries of origin, often pay is low, and conditions are precarious.
Noé Vázquez, 16, fits this profile. He is traveling from his home in Honduras to the U.S. with the hopes of finding a job that will enable him to send money to his father, two brothers and sister. Despite his short stature and boyish face, Vázquez has been telling other migrants at the Hermanos en el Camino, a migrant shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec, a city in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, that he is 18.
Vázquez’s mother died when he was 9 years old, leaving his father to raise him and his siblings, he says. It pained him to see his father work so much to provide for his other siblings and, even still, they did not have all they needed. He was able to go to school, thanks to an aunt who covered his costs.
But two years away from finishing his studies to become an agricultural promoter, a person who provides technical assistance to farmers, Vázquez decided to leave school in order to get a job, he says. He began working as a salesman in a clothing store.
But the 2,800 Honduran lempiras ($135) that he earned every two weeks were not enough to help his family. So he decided to leave his country in order to support his siblings.
“That is my goal: to help my siblings so they can get ahead and so they do not get only halfway, as I [did],” he says.
Other young people migrate in order to reunite with their families, according to the Sin Fronteras report. Many parents leave their children behind in the care of family members or friends when they migrate. Some parents, after a time, return to bring their children to their new homes, or they pay a trafficker, known as a “coyote” to guide them north.
But some youth decide to look for their parents on their own, such as Wesner Orellana, a 15-year-old from Honduras at the La 72 migrant shelter.
Wesner is trying to migrate to the U.S., where his mother works cleaning houses and lives with his younger siblings, he says. He does not know his mother because she left when he was just 5 months old. Wesner’s father abandoned her when she was pregnant with him. She gave Wesner to people who were not family members, and since then he has lived with various people.
Wesner does not know his three younger siblings either because they were born in the U.S., he says. He only found out that he had a mother and siblings at age 8, when an aunt found him and told him about his family. The aunt gave him his mother’s phone number in the U.S. He speaks to her at most four times per year.
When Wesner told his mother that he was going to travel north to reunite with her and his siblings, she told him she could not give him money for the trip, he says. She only told him that the journey was difficult and wished him luck.
“I came here with no one,” he says one morning in the migrant shelter. “I came only with God’s help, like a coyote. I do not wait for help from anyone. I hope to get to pass [the border]. It is my dream: to go to meet my mother, because I do not know her, and to meet my siblings.”
Wesner plans to climb onto the cargo train in the afternoon and to continue his journey.
Some youth migrate in order to become independent, to transition to adult life, to get out of a marriage, or to escape abuse or violence at home, according to the UNICEF México report.
After Wesner’s aunt found him in Honduras, she brought him to live with his maternal grandmother, with whom he stayed for two years, he says. But the grandmother abused him because he has dark skin because his father was Haitian.
“It did not help me at all to have found her,” he says. “There were only beatings, mistreatment.”
Many Central American youth also decide to migrate because they are fleeing violence in their home countries, which is often linked to gangs, Ramírez says.
Central America is the most violent region in the world, according to a 2012 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. One of the three main causes of this violence is gang activity, with some 70,000 gang members operating primarily in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, the World Bank reported in 2011.
Youth are often a target of gang violence, according to a 2010 report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Still, like adult migrants, young migrants may not enter Mexico illegally. Mexican migration authorities take unaccompanied minors into custody while officials review their immigration status and repatriate them if they verify that they entered the country illegally. This is to protect minors from the dangers of the journey, officials say.
But UNICEF and other groups that work with migrants call it detainment, which they say violates minors’ right to freedom. UNICEF considers this detention an attack on young people’s rights to liberty. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child states that the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child should be “used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.”
Detention is highly traumatic for minors, according to a report from the International Detention Coalition, an Australia-based international network of 250 community organizations, academics and professionals who support refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants. Detention can cause or exacerbate a range of maladies, including depression, anxiety, and, in some cases, psychotic symptoms. It can also interfere with children’s ability to “experience life as predictable, meaningful and safe.”
Under Mexico’s migration law, when officials pick up unaccompanied minors, they should immediately transfer them to the care of the National System for the Integral Development of the Family, the government’s social assistance agency. Adult migrants, on the other hand, are under the supervision of the National Institute of Migration.
In Tapachula, a city in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, the social assistance agency operates a unit for unaccompanied minors within the immigration center Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI, according to an agency report. Officials send the majority of unaccompanied minors they take into custody throughout the country to this center.
Officials send only a small percentage of minors to stay in external shelters while processing their cases. In 2011, for example, the social assistance agency processed 2,816 minors in Tapachula and transferred only 9 percent to an external shelter.
The Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova, a human rights civil organization in Tapachula, does not consider the social assistance agency's unit for young migrants to be an alternative to taking minors into custody, according to a 2012 report the orgnaization published on the rights of unaccompanied minors on the Mexican-Guatemalan border. Part of the problem it identified was that Mexican law does not specify how long and under what conditions the agency can hold young migrants.
In July 2013, the then-delegate for the National Institute of Migration in Chiapas, José Luis Valles López, said the immigration center in Tapachula had adequate facilities to shelter unaccompanied minors.
López denied that the minors had been “detained” and instead used the word “lodged.” Immigration officials transfer minors to the center because they are traveling alone and need protection from the dangers of the journey, he says.
“Who has to watch for the security of these people?” he asks. “That person can fall into the claws of the crime of human trafficking or organ trafficking.”
López left his post in August 2013. His replacement, Jordán de Jesús Alegría Orantes, has not responded to multiple interview requests made through his office and the social communication office of the National Institute of Migration.
After lodging the minors, officials then work to contact their families or governmental institutions in charge of supervising them in order to repatriate them. Officials repatriate most unaccompanied minors, according to National Institute of Migration statistics.
The logic behind deportation is that minors are best off with their families, Ramírez says.
Yet, family reunification is not always in an unaccompanied minor’s best interest, Ramírez says. Many youth do not have the conditions in their families or communities that will allow them to survive or to have a secure future.
The human rights organization report recommended a number of changes in the government’s policies regarding these children and teenagers. Among them were guaranteeing young migrants due process and repealing policies that result in the holding or deportation of unaccompanied minors without taking into account the best interests and particular situation of each youth.
The human rights organization also urged the government to consider alternatives to deporting unaccompanied minors. Suggestions included allowing minors to stay legally in the country and bringing their families to live with them or helping to reunite youth with their families and then settling them in a third country.
For young migrants such as Franklin, the only option is to continue in hopes of making it to the U.S. It would not make sense for him to return to Honduras not knowing whether his mother is still alive, he says.
“If I return to Honduras and my old lady is no longer there, if they already buried her, there is not going to be a chance for me,” he says.
But migrating illegally through Mexico has reminded Franklin of the helplessness and neglect he felt when he lived on the streets.
“When I look at those who are migrating, if they do not know the life of an orphan, well, they are living it,” he says. “Because that is how it is, as they come enduring hunger, humiliations, sleeping in the street – this is the life of an orphan. For me, my path is the same. Here, we all go as orphans.”
Although the struggles of migration have frequented the media, coverage has been shallow about the diverse issues that Central American migrants who enter Mexico illegally face as they try to settle in the country or travel north. Mayela Sánchez, senior reporter for GPJ's Mexico News Desk, spent one month along Mexico's southern border delving into the nuances of employment, health, violence, gender justice and various human rights issues that push people to migrate and confront them along their journeys. GPJ will feature this series on the first Wednesday of October, November and December.
GPJ translated this article from Spanish.