SAN
PEDRO SULA, Honduras — Anthony O. Castellanos disappeared from his
gang-ridden neighborhood on the eastern edge of Honduras’s most
dangerous city, so his younger brother, Kenneth, hopped on his green
bicycle to search for him, starting his hunt at a notorious gang hangout
known as the “crazy house.”
They
were found within days of each other, both dead. Anthony, 13, and a
friend had been shot in the head; Kenneth, 7, had been tortured and
beaten with sticks and rocks. They were among seven children murdered in
the La Pradera neighborhood of San Pedro Sula in April alone, part of a
surge in gang violence that is claiming younger and younger victims.
The
killings are a major factor driving the recent wave of migration of
Central American children to the United States, which has sent an
unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors across the Texas border.
Many children and parents say the rush of new migrants stems from a
belief that United States immigration policy offers preferential
treatment to minors, but in addition, studies of Border Patrol
statistics show a strong correlation between cities like San Pedro Sula
with high homicide rates and swarms of youngsters taking off for the
United States.
“The
first thing we can think of is to send our children to the United
States,” said a mother of two in La Pradera, who declined to give her
name because she feared gang reprisals. “That’s the idea, to leave.”
Honduran
children are increasingly on the front lines of gang violence. In June,
32 children were murdered in Honduras, bringing the number of youths
under 18 killed since January of last year to 409, according to data
compiled by Covenant House, a youth shelter in Tegucigalpa, the capital.
With
two major youth gangs and more organized crime syndicates operating
with impunity in Central America, analysts say immigration authorities
will have a difficult time keeping children at home unless the root
causes of violence are addressed.
In
2012, the number of murder victims ages 10 to 14 had doubled to 81 from
40 in 2008, according to the Violence Observatory at the National
Autonomous University of Honduras. Last year, 1,013 people under 23 were
murdered in a nation of eight million.
Although
homicides dropped sharply in 2012 after a gang truce in neighboring El
Salvador, so far this year murders of children 17 and under are up 77
percent from the same time period a year ago, the police said.
Nowhere
is the flow of departures more acute than in San Pedro Sula, a city in
northwestern Honduras that has the world’s highest homicide rate,
according to United Nations figures.
Between
January and May of this year, more than 2,200 children from the city
arrived in the United States, according to Department of Homeland
Security statistics, far more than from any other city in Central America.
More
than half of the top 50 Central American cities from which children are
leaving for the United States are in Honduras. Virtually none of the
children have come from Nicaragua, a bordering country that has
staggering poverty, but not a pervasive gang culture or a
record-breaking murder rate. “Everyone has left,” Alan Castellanos, 27,
the uncle of Anthony and Kenneth, said in an interview in late May. “How
is it that an entire country is being brought to its knees?”
He
said the gangs operated with total impunity. “They killed all those
kids and nobody did anything about it,” Mr. Castellanos said. “When
prosecutors wanted to discuss the case, they asked us to meet at their
office, because they were afraid to come here. If they were afraid,
imagine us.”
The
factors pushing children to migrate vary, according to an analysis of
their home cities by the Department of Homeland Security.
The
Guatemalan children who arrive in the United States are more often from
rural areas, suggesting their motives are largely economic. The minors
from El Salvador and Honduras tend to come from extremely violent
regions “where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the
U.S. preferable to remaining at home,” the analysis said.
“Basically,
the places these people are coming from are the places with the highest
homicide rates,” said Manuel Orozco, a senior fellow at the
Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based research group. “The parents
see gang membership around the corner. Once your child is forced to
join, the chances of being killed or going to prison is pretty high. Why
wait until that happens?”
A
confluence of factors, including discounted rates charged by smugglers
for families, helped ignite the boom, he said. Children are killed for
refusing to join gangs, over vendettas against their parents, or because
they are caught up in gang disputes. Many activists here suggest they
are also murdered by police officers willing to clean up the streets by
any means possible.
In
the case of the Castellanos family, the police said the older boy was a
lookout for the gang and had decided to quit. The order to kill him,
the police said, came from prison.
Several
arrests have been made. Héctor A. Medina, 47, who the police said lived
at an abandoned house controlled by the 18th Street gang, where Kenneth
was killed, was charged in the boys’ deaths. “It’s a serious social
problem: any children born in this neighborhood are going to get
involved in a gang,” said Elvin Flores, a police inspector in charge of
La Pradera. “Our idea is to lower crime every day. We need a state
policy to involve kids from when they are little to go to school.”
But gangs, which rob, sell drugs locally, kidnap people and extort money from businesses, often recruit new members at schools.
In
some cities, blocks are empty because gangs demanding extortion
payments have forced out homeowners. Many people have had to move within
the country in a displacement pattern that experts liken to the one
seen in Colombia’s civil war.
The
office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that
from 2008 to 2013, the number of asylum claims filed in Mexico, Panama,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize increased sevenfold.
Most
were from people of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the three
nations with large numbers of migrants now arriving at the United States
border.
Refugee
advocacy organizations have urged the State Department to treat the
children arriving at the United States border as refugees, and proposed a
processing system where asylum claims could be reviewed in Central
America and those accepted could move safely to the United States or
countries willing to accept them, as was done in countries such as Haiti
and Iraq. They have not yet received a response, the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops said.
Mr.
Obama urged Congress on Wednesday night to pass a $3.7 billion budget
supplement that would, among other things, beef up border security,
hasten deportations and help Central American nations address security
problems. “The best thing we can do is make sure the children can live
in their own countries, safely,” he said.
During
a recent late-night visit to the San Pedro Sula morgue, more than 60
bodies, all victims of violence, were seen piled in a heap, each wrapped
in a brown plastic bag. While picking bullets out of a 15-year-old boy
shot 15 times, technicians discussed how they regularly received corpses
of children under 10, and sometimes as young as 2.
Last
week, in nearby Santa Barbara, an 11-year-old had his throat slit by
other children, because he did not pay a 50-cent extortion fee.
“At
first we saw a lot of kids who were being killed because when the gang
came for their parents, they happened to be in the car or at the
location with them,” said Dr. Darwin Armas Cruz, a medical examiner who
works the overnight shift. “Now we see kids killing kids. They kill with
guns, knives and even grenades.”
Dr. Armas said his family was thinking of migrating, too.
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