‘Gangs Don’t Forgive’: The Family Casualties of Central America’s Drug Wars

They have been raped and beaten with baseball bats, and they are fleeing criminal gangs, drug cartels, and violent police. But with the world’s eyes on the Syrian refugee crisis, women and children running from conflict in another of the world’s most dangerous regions have often been left to fend for themselves or are treated like criminals.

In 2014 alone, more than 66,000 unaccompanied children arrived in the United States after fleeing their homes in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and parts of Mexico. In addition to minors who traveled alone, more than 66,000 mothers arrived with their children, and a new United Nations report released Wednesday documents the dangers they fled at home and the ones they encountered en route to the United States.

Many who should qualify for asylum are instead detained, and they fear deportation back to the dangerous situations they risked their lives to escape. Of the more than 160 women interviewed for Wednesday’s report, every single one claimed she had fled to seek the protection her government was unable to provide. But they are not staying in refugee camps or makeshift shelters. Instead, 94 percent of those interviewed were in American detention centers when they met with U.N. officials, and more than 40 percent had been detained for more than three months.

The region most of them left behind is known as the Northern Triangle of Central America, where the drug trade, gangs, and a lack of government oversight have created a deadly cocktail of persistent violence and near-total impunity. In many areas, criminal gangs have more control than the government; in others, police and government officials work alongside the gangs to extort local populations out of what little they have. Increasingly desperate, and often suffering from rampant gender-based violence, many women and children are forced to flee north to the United States, where they expect to qualify for asylum. But a backlog of asylum applications has dampened their chances for freedom and protection: There were less than 25,000 asylum applications from the Northern Triangle and Mexico in 2013 and at least 40,000 the following year.

The U.N. says countries overwhelmed by those asylum-seekers are too focused on border security, rather than on protecting refugees. In Wednesday’s report, the refugee agency called on governments to protect the legal right to asylum and refrain from using detention centers as holding pens for those who have already escaped unspeakable violence at home. In the United States, a hard-line stance on immigration has become almost a default setting in the Republican Party during the preliminary months of the presidential campaign. But the women huddled in American detention centers aren’t seeking to steal anyone’s job but rather to reclaim their own lives.

The violence these women fled at home often followed them as they sought safety further north. A number of women told U.N. officials that they preemptively took contraceptives before setting out because they expected they could be raped en route. Sure enough, many were raped or otherwise physically abused by the very men they paid to take them to safety.

One woman, identified by the U.N. only as Norma, who was being held in a detention center in the United States, said that she had no choice but to flee after she was repeatedly targeted by a local gang. Her husband is a police officer, and in 2014, four local gang members kidnapped her and brought her to a cemetery, where three of them raped her. “They took their turns.… They tied me by the hands,” she said. “They stuffed my mouth so I would not scream.” When they were done, she was thrown in the trash.

Fearing for her life, Norma moved to another town in El Salvador, but threats against her family did not let up. She decided to forget about the criminal complaint and instead paid a coyote, or human smuggler, to help her get to the United States by way of Mexico.

Her story is not exceptional.

Nearly 70 percent of the interviewees came to the United States as a last resort after they sought refuge in new towns or cities back home and still felt their lives were under threat. The vast majority fled neighborhoods that were completely controlled by criminal gangs, and 100 percent who reported rapes and other attacks said police and government officials in their home countries failed to respond with adequate protection.

Despite increased border control, the women and children most at risk continue to flee toward the United States, and the number who arrived in fiscal year 2015 marked the second-largest number of family arrivals in American history. They aren’t just fleeing north: Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua have seen asylum applications increase more than 13-fold since 2008.

And arrival isn’t the end of the journey. Victims who remain in detention, like Norma, still fear they will be sent back to relive the very nightmares they ran from.

“Gangs don’t forgive,” she said. “Sometimes, I wake up and think it was just a nightmare, but then I feel the pain and remember it was not.”

Photo credit: UNHCR