Blog Post 10

In his article, “THE CHILDREN WILL KEEP COMING” published by Nation Company, author Oscar Martinez talks about how the violence in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico is causing the children to flee their countries into the United Sates. David was 11 years old. He walked home from school, and he didn’t come home. His family couldn’t find him and the next day he was found dead. He was stabbed several times. The police later made a decision that his cause of death was because of David’s refusal to join a gang. So many kids die from gang related violence and that’s why kids flee to the U.S.A. “The Obama administration initially sought to change the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to allow the 52,000 or so child migrants who have arrived on US soil in the last nine months to be deported without going before an immigration judge.” In 2008, El Salvador had a murder to people rate of fifty-two murders for every 100,000 people. Also, thirty-eight percent of the people who were murdered every year were somewhere between the ages of 15 and 24. The 18^th street gang and the Mara Salvatrucha gang have over 60,000 people in their groups. The problem is, these gangs were made in the US and when the US started to deport as many as 4000 gang members back to their countries. They made gangs there. Kids who enter gangs re now at an age as low as 12. Many kids have plastic backpacks that you can see through to show the police that they aren’t carrying any weapons. The parents don’t see an end to the violence in these three countries so the only way to help their children is to buy a coyote. The US says that Coyotes are criminals Jose is an anonym’s coyote because Jose is not his real name. He used his own ads and put them in the newspaper to help the kids find out how they would get to the US. Jose brought children north using his connections with the people he knows and he coordinated it by phone. He used busses and bribed police officers. He thought this was safer instead of hopping on the trains. The US is not going to stop deporting immigrants, but the children are going to keep coming.

I was shocked after reading this article. I didn’t know that gangs were such a big problem in all these countries other than Mexico, and Mexico isn’t the worst one. I feel so bad for the kids because they were born in a bad place. It’s not fair to them to have no choice but to either join a gang or die trying to get to the US. Something that surprised me was that if a kid said no to join a gang, they would probably get killed. If I was in that situation I would probably say yes so I wouldn’t be killed. Then I would try to somehow escape. One question I have is will there ever be an end to the gangs in these countries? I think so, but the US doesn’t seem to care to stop it.