Migrant kids highlight legacy of violence and inequality toward Maya

Editor's note: This is the second of a three-part series on Guatemalan migrant children who are returned to their country after unsuccessfully trying to reach the United States. Part one focuses on the guilt and shame migrant children carry with them. Part three looks at children who are apprehended in Mexico before reaching the U.S. border. 

XEO, Guatemala — Juan wears the same Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie he wore when he arrived in Guatemala City three days before. It was given to him in the United States. He keeps his other mementos from his northward journey, including a stack of CDs he has no way of playing, in the two-room structure his family once called home in Guatemala’s western highlands.

Juan, 14, is the only person still sleeping in the wooden house. The rest of his family — his mother, father and three younger siblings — have all moved in with his maternal grandmother. They say it is because the grandmother was lonely after her husband died. But her husband died over a year ago, and their move was relatively recent.

The home isn’t much: an uneven dirt floor, wood-plank walls with large gaps, a tin roof. There is no electricity or indoor plumbing. A concrete sink stands outside, an outhouse down the hill. The family used the house and the land it occupies as collateral to borrow 50,000 quetzales ($6,540) to pay a coyote to smuggle Juan to the U.S. to find work. He left so his father, Sebastian Matón Chavez, would not have to leave every year to work in the sugar cane fields on Guatemala’s Pacific coast. Chavez makes 30 quetzales ($4) a day cleaning his neighbors’ cornfields and 1,400 quetzales ($180) a month when he works in the sugar cane fields.

Juan was apprehended near the Mexico-U.S. border and sent to a shelter in Arizona. Now he is back in Xeo, a mountain community of about 300 people in the Guatemalan department of Quiché in the western highlands. He has nothing to show for the six months he was away but a bag full of braided bracelets he learned to make at the Arizona shelter, a baseball he doesn’t know how to throw and a debt he has no way of repaying.

Child migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — made headlines last year when more than 50,000 were apprehended in the U.S. In El Salvador and Honduras, gang and drug trafficking violence is largely blamed for the exodus of children. In Guatemala, extreme poverty is the leading culprit.

And it’s a poverty that disproportionately affects the country’s long-persecuted indigenous population, of which the majority of the children migrating to the U.S. are a part.

It is a little after 6 a.m., and Juan’s family is gathered around a fire in his grandmother’s kitchen. The house is smoky, dark and as simple as the one in which Juan sleeps 50 feet away. He is awake now but not at breakfast. He hasn’t been at breakfast with the family since he returned. 

His two youngest siblings — Pedro, 7, and Magdalena, 10 — grab a few meatless tamales and head to school. Petrona, 13, stays behind. She has finished sixth grade. The community school doesn’t go any higher. The closest seventh grade is a two-hour walk each way, something Juan did before he headed north. He hoped to work and live in Miami with his mother’s cousins. Unlike the rest of his family, Juan speaks some English now, and his Spanish is much improved — something that is not lost on his mother, Jacinta Santiago Brito.

“He changed. Now he doesn’t seem like my son. He seems like he’s Guatemalan,” she said. 

They may live in Guatemala, but the family identify as Ixil, one of the many indigenous peoples accounting for about 40 percent of Guatemala’s population.

In the early 1980s the Guatemalan army, under the pretext that the Ixil were collaborating with the rebel guerrillas, burned Ixil villages and massacred residents. Guerrilla combatants did the same, although to a lesser extent. The massacres resulted in a third of the Ixil being exterminated, according to the prosecution in the 2013 genocide trial of retired Guatemalan army Gen. Efrain Rios Montt.

Juan’s grandfather, after whom Juan was named, survived the massacres by hiding in the forests but died of fever at the age of 40. His widow, Petrona Chavez Ijom, is now in her 60s or 70s — no one is quite sure. She has outlived two husbands and two of her children. The first time the army destroyed her home was in 1982. They cut the cornfields, shot the family cow and burned everything else. The family fled to the mountains. They built another house. The army burned it. They moved on. 

“For two years we didn’t have food or clothes or anything,” said Ijom.

In recent years, the majority of U.S. government assistance to the region has come through the Central American Regional Security Initiative, mostly funding the strengthening of law enforcement and judicial capabilities, according to a report co-written by Stinchcomb.

A $1 billion proposed plan, the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle, included in President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget request, has been criticized for catering to large businesses, local elites and U.S.-owned corporations. There have been smaller, more focused funding efforts: The U.S. Agency for International Development has helped fund a violence prevention program and work done by the International Organization for Migration and World Vision at Guatemalan shelters. There is also a new refugee-processing program for minors in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Other organizations have tried to fill the gap, including Asociación Pop No’j and Cafe RED, which focus on empowering returning migrants and potential migrants by providing them with platforms to voice their concerns, and Cafe RED also offers culinary training.

Technical training was the inspiration behind four planned government centers devoted to returning child migrants. The first, in the department of Solola, opened in February. The program is under Guatemala’s Secretariat of Social Welfare. With the recent resignation of the president and a runoff election to replace him scheduled for Oct. 25, the program’s future is unclear.

Even now, government support is fickle. The center in Solola, Centro de Formacion “Quedate” (“Stay” Training Center), offers classes on subjects like jewelry making, computer literacy and how to be a tour guide. But the government has not funded supplies. So the English classes are conducted without books, and the children are told to buy their own materials for jewelry making, said Lesvi Manchame, a psychologist at the center. Nor did the government fund transportation for the children, making it extremely difficult for many to reach the center.

“There is a specific budget for this on paper, but we don’t have funds to execute it,” said Manchame.

In five months, 185 children have visited the center, but many do so irregularly because of transportation issues and lack of support from family members who would prefer they spend their time generating immediate income, said Manchame.

The majority of those children, about 70 percent, are at risk of migrating, not those who have migrated and returned, said Timoteo Perez, a social worker at the center. Returnees are harder to reach. “For example, I went to visit a boy today who came before, but he had already gone to the U.S.,” he said.

Adan returned to Guatemala on the same airplane as Juan and is already planning to go back to the United States. Juan is more tentative.

In the evening, standing underneath the orange tree in which the family chickens sleep, Juan mentions having to carry a box of eggs across Mexico for five days. The men who gave him the eggs had large guns. He later learned he was actually carrying marijuana.

“I was scared. I almost cried because I didn’t want to carry it,” he said. “I refused, but they made me.”

He didn’t tell his social worker in the U.S. or the psychologist at the Guatemala City shelter.

“They don’t ask nothing, so I don’t say it,” he explained.

Intimate things that are difficult to talk about happen on the journey, said Solórzano of the Pastoral Care of Migrants. To get the children to open up, you need to spend time with them and develop trust, she said, something that isn’t possible during the rapid reception process. Although the Secretariat of Social Welfare has 16 suboffices throughout the country, its head, Raquel Vielman de Alcazar, admits that it cannot follow up with everyone.

In addition to being vulnerable to human trafficking, gang recruitment, extortion and other forms of violence, these youths are often ostracized. There is a common belief that those who are sent back are criminals and must have done something wrong aside from simply entering a country without authorization, said Alejandra Pamela Argueta, one of the authors of a Wilson Center report on repatriated youth. “The people in the Guatemalan community are very skeptical as to why you returned, like ‘What happened?’” she said.

For women and girls, it can be even worse. Rape and assault are commonplace on the journey. Mateo Lucas Alonzo, a migration expert with Asociación Pop No’j, said that through research conducted in one area, they found there was an issue of “rejection of women because they already know she has probably been raped.”

A week after Ana returned home to the department of Huehuetenango in the western highlands, she had yet to leave the house for more than a few minutes. (Ana’s name has been changed at her mother’s request.) “There are many neighbors that gather now and look for me,” she said.

So she stays in the one-room home above a cemetery that she shares with a mute father and a frightened mother in San Mateo Ixtatán. The family belongs to the Maya Chuj group, and her mother wears a traditional skirt and top. Ana wears jeans. Her mother sold Ana’s traditional outfit before Ana left in order to buy her modern clothes for the journey. Migrants are advised to hide their indigenous background and are coached to speak Spanish with a Mexican accent. Her coyote cut Ana’s hair.