Transnational Violence: Understanding the Central American Refugee Crisis
Elio was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, known as the most murderous city in the most murderous country in the world. At the age of twelve he decided to leave home. His dream was not to reach the United States, but rather to escape the dangerous conditions of his neighborhood and arrive to Mexico, where he hoped to find work and send money home to his mother. Elio had four siblings in Honduras, including two older brothers. And while many adolescent boys look up to their older brothers, Elio feared his. “They do drugs, they have guns. I’m scared of my own brother. I’m scared to be in my own country.”
Elio told me about the first time he witnessed death. He was hanging out with a group of kids in his neighborhood when he heard two of their names called out, seemingly out of nowhere. He looked up and saw two men in a car holding guns fitted with silencers. Four silent shots and the two named boys dropped to the ground in front of him. “It’s not just MS (Mara Salvatrucha). It’s Barrio 18, Vatos Locos, they are all there.” For Elio, violence was woven into the fabric of everyday life. He once told me, “Being in my country takes your smile away.”
Soon after witnessing the murders of his friends. Elio’s stepfather told the family he was going north. Elio begged to go along. They traveled across Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala by raft in the broad daylight and survived the notorious stretch of land called La Arrocera in Chiapas where rape, robbery and abuse are the norm. After being extorted by armed gunmen, they decided not to continue north on La Bestia, the deadly freight train that carries unauthorized migrants across Mexico, and instead settle in the picturesque seaside town of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca to make some money. Yet a few months after their arrival, Elio’s stepfather disappeared and Elio was left alone. He rented a small room and found intermittent work at the port. Two years passed. He was lonely.
I met Elio in the summer of 2013 at a migrant shelter located in the state of Oaxaca, where I previously worked for a year as a volunteer and researcher. A network of over 50 shelters provides humanitarian aid to transit migrants and serve as the base for Mexico’s migrant rights and solidarity movement. Elio had come to the shelter looking for assistance in trying to find his mother and return to Honduras, which after several weeks, he eventually did.
I found myself returning to my conversations with Elio and thinking about his life back in Honduras as the media frenzy surrounding unaccompanied minors from Central America unfolded in 2014. And while much of this coverage was fueled by moral panics over an uncontrollable surge of migrants and children as vectors of disease, including Ebola, for the first time, US media and politicians began paying attention to a humanitarian crisis that has silently raged for years. As aid workers and activists in Mexico will tell you, the plight of Central Americans is not new.
During and since the end of the Central American civil wars, people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—children and adults—have fled conditions of unimaginable violence, systematic extortion and impunity in their home communities and in their journeys north. To be sure, the root causes of violence, poverty and impunity in Central America are complex, but at the very least, any analysis must include the devastating social consequences of US involvement in the region over the past half-century. From the supporting role of the US in state-sponsored repression across Central America during the civil wars to the continued dispossession of the poor through neoliberal economic policies that displace people from their livelihoods.
Under the auspices of the wars on drugs, trafficking and organized crime, US initiatives to militarize Latin America have continued to destabilize the region.
Under Plan Colombia, military aid to Colombia did not stop the flow of drugs to street corners, suburban living rooms and college parties in the United States, but simply redirected them through land routes in Central America and Mexico, empowering a new network of cartels. In turn, the drug war has shifted to Mexico and Central America, where a multi-billion dollar security-industry continues to expand through the Mérida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) to train, fund, and equip military and police units. Despite the discourse of citizen security, such programs have fueled new markets for the profitable movement of illicit drugs, weapons and people across the Americas. In Mexico, security regimes funnel migrants deeper into the grips drug cartels who control clandestine migration routes and profit from the movement of unauthorized Central American migrants.
Attention to Central America has dramatically diminished as the numbers of unaccompanied children apprehended at the US-Mexico border has dropped in the last few months. And yet, the violence of Central America continues to permeate everyday life for families and communities across the Americas. I recently attended an event in Indianapolis where I met a mother from Honduras desperate to seek help and resources for her two adolescent stepchildren. Threatened by local gangs that control their neighborhood, the children’s grandparents put them in a temporary and undisclosed location in hopes that their mother might find a way to bring them safely to US. “We don’t even know where our own children are right now,” she lamented.
The Obama administration recently announced plans to develop in-country refugee processing programs for children like Elio fleeing violence in Central America. The parameters of the program and of the circumstances children will need to document are not yet clear. While this may be considered a positive step forward, it does not address the root causes of violence in Central America, nor does it recognize the fact that many adults are also fleeing the same conditions of fear, extortion and violence. At the peak of the crisis in the fiscal year 2014, unaccompanied children made up just about 20% of all Central Americans apprehended at the US-Mexico border. And while these numbers are significant, it still means that 80% of people fleeing Central America are adults who also face extreme forms of violence at home and during their journeys north. A more comprehensive humanitarian response would recognize refugee status for all.
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Wendy Vogt is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her long-term research with Central American migrants and humanitarian aid workers in Mexico.
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