July 14, 2014

Drug wars force mass exodus of children from Honduras

located:	Honduras, USA
editor:	Vanessa Ellingham

New York Times reporter Sonia Nazario has written a shameful opinion piece decrying a mass exodus of children fleeing violence fed by drug wars in Honduras.

According to her report, up to 90,000 Central American children on the move are expected to be picked up and placed in US federal custody this year, a massive rise from the 6,800 detained just three years ago.

So what has caused this meteoric and deeply tragic rise? Nazario found that, rather than leaving their home countries for better opportunities in the US, the majority of the children leaving today are trying to escape violence.

And many of them are making the dangerous trip north completely alone, following parents who went ahead and never came back, or leaving behind family members who can no longer protect them from a culture of violence instilled by narcotic gangs.

"As a result, what the United States is seeing on its borders now is not an immigration crisis. It is a refugee crisis," she reports.

The increased violence is directly influenced by the movement of drug cartels across Central America.

"As the United States and Colombia spent billions of dollars to disrupt the movement of drugs up the Caribbean corridor, traffickers rerouted inland through Honduras, and 79 percent of cocaine-smuggling flights bound for the United States now pass through there."

Nazario's report tells of Honduran schools controlled by ringleader students wielding guns, threatening students who refuse to play along with the gangs.

Many students, still very much children, quit school either because of the immense pressure doled out by these all-powerful school-ruling bullies or because they cannot afford the fees imposed by the narco gangs. Parents pull their kids out of school for fear of having them kidnapped and enlisted.

"A majority of small businesses in Nueva Suyapa have shuttered because of extortion demands, while churches have doubled in number in the past decade, as people pray for salvation from what they see as the plague predicted in the Bible," writes Nazario. "Taxis and homes have signs on them asking God for mercy."

The damning report makes a series of recommendations for solving this crisis, beginning with stemming the demand for narcotics in the US which fuels this violence.