Taken by Mother Jones
Department of Homeland Security
Map: These Are the Places Central American Child
Migrants Are Fleeing
By Ian Gordon
A recently produced infographic from the
Department of Homeland Security shows that the majority of unaccompanied
children coming to the United States are from some of the most violent and
impoverished parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
The map documents the origins of child
migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol from January 1 to May 14. It was made
public by Adam Isaacson of the
Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, and it
includes the following analysis about the surge in child migrants:
…Many Guatemalan children come from rural
areas, indicating that they are probably seeking economic opportunities in the
US. Salvadoran and Honduran children, on the other hand, come from extremely
violent regions where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the
US preferable to remaining at home.
This echoes what I found in my yearlong investigation into the explosion of unaccompanied
child migrants arriving to the United States. As I wrote in the July/August
issue of Mother Jones:
Although some have traveled from as far away as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, the bulk are
minors from Mexico and from Central America's so-called Northern
Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which together account
for 74 percent of the surge. Long plagued by instability and unrest,
these countries have grown especially dangerous in recent years: Honduras
imploded following a military coup in 2009 and now has the world's highest murder rate. El Salvador has the
second-highest, despite the 2012 gang truce between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio
18. Guatemala, new territory for the Zetas cartel, has the fifth-highest murder
rate; meanwhile, the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to
increased American ethanol production (Guatemala imports half of its corn) and
the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel.
Below is a more granular look at where
kids are coming from, also produced by DHS. San Pedro Sula, the world's most violent city, was home to the largest
number of child migrants caught by the Border Patrol (more than 2,500).
Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa, sent the second-most kids, fewer than 1,000.
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