Up to 150,000 more people a year try the northern adventure. Thousands disappear, leaving families at home waiting for news or requests from the kidnappers.
Twenty-three days after her daughter and granddaughter left their home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Sandra Lopez* won a call telling her they had been kidnapped and that she would have to pay if she wanted to see them alive again.
His daughter, Rosa*, on the perilous overland adventure to the United States in search of paintings when she was kidnapped in Mexico. At that time, on the morning of November 23, 2021, she and her six-year-old daughter joined the thousands of missing other people along the migratory routes northward.
“When they gave me the call, I was scared,” says Rosa’s mother. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I was distraught.
Rosa had been unemployed for more than a year after wasting her work in a textile factory when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. Her plan was to sign her son’s father in the United States and frame his mother, who is disabled.
After Lopez discovered that the couple were hostages, he felt helpless. Harassed several times a day via WhatsApp through the hijackers, it wasn’t easy $10,000 (£8,200) in ransom. “I told them I was a single mother, that I lived in a space that is not mine, that I disabled and that I used a wheelchair. Where did he intend to get money?
“They said, ‘If you can’t pay, do something. ‘ Sell your organs to pay your family. If you don’t, they probably wouldn’t exist in this world. “
The number of other people leaving Honduras is emerging as the country grapples with the economic fallout from the pandemic, the fallout from russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis, as well as the more entrenched disruptions of gang violence, poverty and climate change.
The road to the United States is fraught with risks and migrants are “extremely vulnerable. “Some perish due to exposure to the elements of the desert found along the U. S. -Mexico border; others die in traffic accidents or die a horrible death in “la bestia,” a cargo exercise that crosses Mexico; some are in the custody of the authorities; and some, like Rosa and her daughter, are victims of criminal gangs in Mexico, who see migrants as a business opportunity.
“There are points here in Honduras that force other people to migrate,” says Rolando Sierra, director of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. “Honduras has a high percentage of the population in poverty and without employment opportunities. And if the degrees of violence, corruption and impunity do not decrease, neither does migration.
It’s knowing how many other people are leaving Honduras. Sierra estimates that, each year, between 130,000 and 150,000 more people try to succeed in the United States. Government figures show that from early 2022 through June, the United States sent 34,278 Hondurans home, more than a portion of the total (52,968) of those who were sent home in 2021.
The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project documented that between January 2014 and March 2022, at least 6141 other people died or disappeared along the migration routes of the Americas. Between 2007 and 2021, the Jesuit Migrant Service treated 1280 cases of missing migrants in Mexico, 71% of whom were Central Americans.
In Honduras alone, another 3,500 people are missing, according to the country’s five committees that have been established to locate other missing persons.
Lopez, like many missing relatives, didn’t know where to turn for help and had to fend for himself. Sierra adds: “In Honduras, there are no policies in place to deal with abnormal migration. There are no specialized facilities to investigate what happened to other people who disappear or to their loved ones.
There is no central database of missing persons, which “makes the phenomenon invisible, for Jérémy Renaux, coordinator of the missing persons programme of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Families face barriers in reporting instances and then don’t get help.
There is also a lack of coordination between countries, he adds. In Mexico, where many other people are missing, there is a medico-legal crisis, with more than 52,000 unidentified bodies mendacised in mass graves, forensic services, universities and forensic garages. centres.
People like Eva Ramirez, who founded the Committee of Relatives of Missing Migrants Amor y Fe, an organization of others whose relatives have disappeared, are stepping in to fill the void. In 23 years, he has built a network of paintings of activists, hounds and civil society organizations in Central America looking for people in need. Committees like yours also work for families and have psychologists to provide mental health support.
His paintings are unpaid and difficult, but he says, “[Missing migrants] have each and every right to be sought because they are human beings. We want to know what happened to them, where they are, why they disappeared. We will. ” You have to know the fact and discharge justice.
“People don’t leave the country because they have to. He leaves because he has to. We live in a country that evicts other people because of excessive poverty, lack of opportunities and violence, among many other factors.
Ramirez has been involved in negotiations with kidnappers on behalf of the victims’ families in Honduras. Their involvement proved invaluable when Lopez got in touch. She begged Lopez and her son-in-law in the United States to ask for evidence of the kidnappers’ lives. Then, when the couple managed to raise the ransom by borrowing money from friends and neighbors, Ramirez told them to ask the kidnappers to leave Rosa and her daughter with the migration to the U. S. -Mexico border.
Lopez and his son-in-law sent the movement through the bank and waited impatiently.
“I would call them all the time, asking them to release my daughter and granddaughter,” Lopez says. “I begged them to hand them over to migration. I was crying. I knew they weren’t doing well, they weren’t getting food, and they were forced to sleep on the floor in sub-zero temperatures.
Three days later, on December 8, he told them they were free. On December 15, they were deported to Honduras.
Rosa is now safe. Her mom cries when she remembers everything they went through. He hasn’t gone to pay the other people he borrowed money from. “I need to pay to get back to the United States,” Rosa says. I know it’s harmful, but I looked for a task and didn’t find it. “
* Names have been replaced by identities
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