With No Refuge, Children from Central America on the Run in Mexico Amy Stillman - IRIN
go to original January 22, 2016

Risking It All: Children at the Border - Maria Elena Salinas travels to Central America and the U.S./Mexico border to find out why children are risking it all to cross the border. Aired 8/21/2014 on Fusion Network. (Maria Elena Salinas)

Behind an unmarked brown door sandwiched between a rundown motel and a fried chicken joint in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, lunch is being prepared on an outdoor stove, while children sit around dusty picnic tables scrawling in school notebooks.

“If they don’t study, they can’t stay here,” said José Ramón Verdugo Sánchez.

Verdugo, a member of the Evangelical Church, founded Todos por Ellos (“All for Them”), a children’s shelter, in 2009 in response to the growing number of Central American minors arriving in Tapachula – a sleepy, tropical city about 40 kilometres from Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

In a bid to keep them off the streets, he struck a deal with a local primary school to allow the children staying at the shelter to attend classes. “Kids in school are less likely to be recruited by gangs,” he reasoned.

Six years ago, most of these forgotten youths were Guatemalan. But as gang violence has spread across the so-called “Northern Triangle” region, many more children from El Salvador and Honduras are also crossing Mexico’s southern border.

In recent years, these tiny Central American nations have competed for the unwanted title of global murder capital. Last year, violent deaths in El Salvador shot up by 70 percent, putting the country ahead of Honduras as the most dangerous place in the world outside of warzones. In 2015, there were 6,657 murders, a level of violence not seen since the country’s bloody civil war three decades ago.

Read the rest at IRIN

Related: US Failing Kids Fleeing Central America (IRIN)

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