Leaving El Salvador had never been in Alberto’s plans. He and his wife had stable jobs and supportive friends and relatives, and their five children were happy.
However, a local gang tried to recruit one of Alberto’s sons as a drug mule and beat him up when he resisted, the family said.
A gang leader approached his daughter — then 10 years old — and told her that he was going to make her his girlfriend. Then Alberto and his family received a telephone call threatening to kill them if they did not turn over the children for the gang’s use. The corpse of a boy even appeared on the street in front of their house.
Illustration: Mountain People
The family fled north, taking only what it could carry.
“We can’t just hand them over to the gang,” Alberto said of his children, sitting with his family in a shelter in Tapachula, a small Mexican city near the Guatemalan border.
Like other refugees interviewed, Alberto and his family asked that their last name not be used, fearing their persecutors could find them.
Gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has conspired with economic desperation to drive an unrelenting exodus of refugees, including entire families, seeking safety in other countries, mainly the US.
Despite US-backed efforts to tighten regional borders and address the root causes of the exodus, US and international officials say the refugee numbers have soared in the past year.
“It’s really a refugee crisis,” said Perrine Leclerc, head of the field office for the UN refugee agency in Tapachula.
In the 2016 fiscal year, which ended in September, about 409,000 refugees were caught trying to cross the southwestern border of the US illegally, a 23 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, according to statistics released by US President Barack Obama’s administration.
Officials said the increase reflected the growing number of people heading north, not any sweeping changes in enforcement.
The trend continued through last month, according to figures released on Thursday last week by US immigration officials: More than 46,000 people were caught last month on the southwestern border, up from about 39,500 in September.
The recent flow has been particularly notable for the unusual number of Central American refugees traveling in family groups.
In the most recent fiscal year, about 77,700 refugees caught on the southwestern US border were traveling in families, about twice as many as were detained in families the previous year. About 91 percent of all those refugees were from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, a region known as the “Northern Triangle.”
As part of his presidential campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump promised an unforgiving approach to illegal immigration, including building a wall along the border with Mexico and stepping up deportations beyond even Obama’s record removal rates. Now, among the array of immigration challenges he will face upon taking office, Trump will have to contend with this surge of refugees, an issue that has overwhelmed not only US border officials, but also governments throughout the region.
Some US officials have floated the theory that families might be migrating together in the hope that adults will have a better chance of avoiding detention in the US if they try to enter with children.
However, interviews with refugees and their advocates suggest that families are fleeing — sometimes in groups of as many as 15 people — because they have no alternative.
Gangs in certain communities in the Northern Triangle have become so merciless, and their control so widespread, that a family is often left with a stark choice: Comply, flee or die.
“Today the violence is widespread, and because it’s widespread, it’s affecting the whole family,” said Diego Lorente, director of the Fray Matias de Cordova Human Rights Center in Tapachula.
Almost all of the refugees said they had had no intention of ever leaving their countries.
Alberto said he had a thriving business breeding livestock and dogs, adding that his wife ran a food stand.
Their youngest children were on track to attend college, he said, adding that they were active members of their church.
The family first fled in 2013 to northern El Salvador, where Alberto rebuilt his business and the children returned to school.
However, the gang members tracked them down, forcing them to move two more times, he said.
They finally fled the country in March.
While staying at a refugee shelter run by the Catholic Church in southern Mexico, a nun told them about Mexico’s asylum program.
They applied and are now waiting for their claim to be adjudicated.
“What can I say?” Alberto said with a sigh. “This is the horrible reality that our country is living now.”
As the violence and impunity have soared in the Northern Triangle, so has the number of asylum claims from those countries, according to the UN.
Nearly half of those asylum seekers this year have sought sanctuary in the US.
However, refugees are increasingly viewing other countries in the region, including Belize, Costa Rica and especially Mexico, as asylum destinations.
Under international pressure, the Mexican government has been expanding its capacity to receive refugees. Its acceptance rate for completed applications increased to about 62 percent in the first six months of this year, from about 45 percent last year.
UN officials and refugees’ advocates there believe that of the hundreds of thousands of Central American people who crossed into Mexico last year, as many as half might have qualified for refugee protection.
However, only about 3,400 people applied for asylum in Mexico, according to government figures.
By comparison, about 177,000 Central Americans were deported by Mexican immigration authorities last year.
The refugee shelters in Tapachula are full and advocates are struggling to accommodate the growing number of families that find their way there, either as a pit stop on their journey to the US or as a place to file for asylum.
“Tapachula is the first place that they arrive where they have a perception of security,” Lorente said.
The refugees tell of grisly murders, of how gangs have recruited boys as lookouts and drug runners and forced girls into becoming their brides.
They speak of “war taxes,” sometimes amounting to half of their earnings. Noncompliance is met with death.
“It’s butchery,” Leclerc said.
Entire neighborhoods have fallen under the control of gangs, which are abetted by corrupt officials on their payrolls.
Several refugees said they had not reported crimes to the police, fearing that the police would inform the gangs.
Most said they had left their homes with no understanding, or even awareness, of asylum protections in other countries, only a determination to find a safer place to live.
Fatima, 19, said she had fled El Salvador after gang members killed her husband, an apprentice auto mechanic, and threatened her, too.
Traveling with her two-year-old son and two close relatives, she said was hoping to reach the home of her late husband’s parents in Mexico’s Puebla State.
The women knew nothing about asylum protections in the region. So when immigration officials caught them, they did not know they could present their case, they said, and the immigration officials never asked why they were migrating.
The women said they and their children had been deported back to El Salvador, but immediately headed back to Mexico. They were captured again.
However this time, Fatima said, she spotted UN posters on the wall advertising the Mexican asylum program.
“It was never in my thinking to leave my country,” she said at a refugee shelter in Mexico City.
Fatima said she hoped to remain in Mexico and had not considered trying to move to the US.
However, according to some advocates, the goal for most Central American refugees is to eventually make it “farther north,” a phrase common among migrants.
Even many of those applying for asylum in Mexico view refugee status as a stopgap allowing them to travel to the northern border without harassment by the Mexican authorities.
“It’s the super-best country,” Juan, a Honduran migrant, said of the US.
He has applied for refugee status in Mexico, along with his wife and two young daughters, but he hopes to reach the US.
He said they had fled Honduras after gang members threatened to kill him if he did not join their operation.
“You don’t migrate now in search of the American dream,” he said. “You go for your life.”
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