Nina Lakhani - Central America's rampant violence fuels an invisible refugee crisis
The numbers are staggering, and governments
are doing little to protect people from warring gangs and corrupt security
forces. Yet entire families who are now seeking asylum are being sent back and
told to simply live elsewhere
Until a few months ago,
Carlos Hernández was a government health promoter in central El Salvador. His job
was to visit poor families and ensure their children attended school and
received health checks, in exchange for modest cash benefits. One day in March, on
his way to visit a family in a neighbourhood controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha
(MS13) gang, Hernández witnessed a beating by gang members. Too scared to
intervene, he hurried past, completed his visit and started his long walk home. The four assailants
were waiting for him.
“I pleaded with them
to let me live. I said I had children, that I’d say nothing,” said Hernández,
31. “They agreed to spare my life but told me never to return.” The victim was found
dead three days later – one of 611 homicides in the tiny Central American
nation that month.
Hernández was scared,
but couldn’t find another job. So when he returned to visit the same family a
month later, he took a different route and left his uniform at home in hope of
going unnoticed.
But he was spotted by
gang informants, and the same four youngsters confronted Hernández with
baseball bats, accusing him of spying for a rival group. “They took down my
address from my identity card, and threatened to kill my whole family if they
ever saw me again. We left El Salvador five days later,” said Hernández, now
living with his wife and two children in a sparsely furnished room in
Tapachula, in southern Mexico,
where they are seeking asylum.
The Hernández family
are part of an alarming exodus of entire families forced to flee widespread
violence in Central America’s northern triangle, the world’s most dangerous
region outside an official war zone. As huge numbers of
Syrian and African refugees risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea to
escape war-torn states, advocates say a parallel refugee crisis has unfolded on
America’s doorstep amid an undeclared but increasingly brutal war between
criminal groups and security forces.
An estimated 80,000
people from El Salvador, Guatemala and
Honduras, mostly families and unaccompanied children, are expected to apply for
asylum overseas this year – a 658% increase since 2011, according to the UN
refugee agency (UNHCR). Tens of thousands more will be forcibly displaced, but
not seek international help.
During the 1980s, the
three countries known as the northern triangle were blighted by vicious civil
wars between US-backed military dictatorships and leftist guerrilla groups. But
even after ceasefires were agreed, peace never came to the region as unresolved
inequalities and amnesties which let war criminals escape justice fuelled a new
wave of violence and corruption.
This toxic mix of
warring gangs and corrupt security forces is driving one of the world’s least
visible refugee crises, Amnesty International will say in a new report on
Friday. “What is shocking is
the absolute lack of protection their governments are providing their own
people,” Salil Shetty, Amnesty’s general secretary told the Guardian... Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/13/central-america-violence-refugee-crisis-gangs-murder
