Source: NACLA Report on the Americas
A new refugee crisis takes shape in Mexico and Central America.
This article is the first in a multi-part NACLA series on migration in the Americas.
The first one left at 17, with her blessing. The second didn’t ask if he could go, he just went.
Both went missing, lost in transit, somewhere in Mexico, as they made their way to the United States from Honduras.
On a cold December morning, Clementina Murcia González walked the streets of Coatzacoalcos, a port city in the southern part of the Mexican state of Veracruz, searching for her two sons, Jorge and Mauro, their pictures on her chest, her hands trembling.
“We are worth nothing,” she said. “For many people, we are worth nothing.”
She was one of some 40 Central American mothers that took part in a caravan travelling through southern Mexico, visiting prisons, shelters, as well as other spots along the migrant route, looking for missing sons and daughters.
Priscila Rodríguez Cartagena, a grandmother from Honduras, searched for her daughter, Yesenia Marleni, who disappeared in 2008, when she was 19.
“She lives in my heart,” she told me. “If she can hear me, I want her to know that I love her, that I miss her, that I will not have peace until I find her. When I look after my family, I think of her. I wonder, is she eating, or not eating? Is she alive?”