Refugee Crisis Grows in Latin America as Women 'Run for Their Lives' Reuters
go to original October 28, 2015

Spousal abuse has left millions of Mexican women single with children. Many move in with relatives to escape the aggression. Laws are in place to end domestic violence, but are rarely enforced. Correspondent Gerry Hadden reports from the Yucatan peninsula on the struggles of single motherhood and the efforts underway to empower women. (CCTV America)

Thousands of women flee their homes in parts of Central America and Mexico each year to escape armed gangs and domestic violence and seek refuge in the United States, a flow that is becoming a refugee crisis, the UN refugee agency says.

The number of women, some with children, fleeing rampant gang violence in parts of Mexico, and the Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, is rising, the UNHCR said in a report published on Wednesday.

More than 66,000 children travelled with their families or alone from the Northern Triangle region – which has the world’s highest murder rates – to the United States in 2014.

More unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle and Mexico reached the United States in August than in the same month last year, the US government said.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Gangs Do Not Forgive’: The Family Casualties of Central America’s Drug Wars (Foreign Policy)

Related: ‘Flee or Die’: Violence Drives Central America’s Child Migrants to US Border (The Guardian)

Related: One Woman’s Story of Surviving Domestic Violence as an Undocumented Immigrant (Yahoo)

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