They. Are. Refugees.
Jan. 11th, 2018 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2CR0l0p:
chamerionwrites:
In light of the Trump administration’s recent decision to rescind TPS for hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, have a boatload of links demonstrating that while John Kelly and Jeff Sessions can remain as willfully blind as they like, Central America’s Northern Triangle is one of the single most dangerous regions in the world and a great many Central American immigrants are refugees deserving of asylum (blanket warning for murder, torture, rape, violence against children, etc):
The Awful Reason Tens of Thousands of Children are Seeking Refuge in the United States (Vox, June 2014)
Recent studies suggest that most of these unaccompanied children aren’t economic migrants, as many Americans might assume — they’re fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries, where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north. They’re not here to take advantage of American social services — they’re refugees from conflict. Understanding the nature of the violence pushing them north is crucial for figuring out what to do about the child refugee crisis on our southern border.
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three countries that make up Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” are experiencing a terrifying level of violence that’s been rising rapidly since the late 2000s. State weakness and corruption have allowed a number of different armed groups — including transnational street gangs, drug cartels, and other organized crime syndicates — to flourish, checked by little but their competition with one another.
Today, those groups battle for control of drug trafficking routes, residential neighborhoods, bus systems, human-smuggling operations, and more or less anything else that allows them to leverage their skills in violence to extract a profit…the murder rate in Honduras in 2012 was a whopping 30 percent higher than UN estimates of the civilian casualty rate at the height of the Iraq war. In other words, all three Central American countries were, statistically speaking, twice as dangerous for civilians as Iraq was.
Fleeing Gangs, Children Head to U.S. Border (New York Times, July 2014)
Anthony O. Castellanos disappeared from his gang-ridden neighborhood on the eastern edge of Honduras’s most dangerous city, so his younger brother, Kenneth, hopped on his green bicycle to search for him, starting his hunt at a notorious gang hangout known as the “crazy house.”
They were found within days of each other, both dead. Anthony, 13, and a friend had been shot in the head; Kenneth, 7, had been tortured and beaten with sticks and rocks. They were among seven children murdered in the La Pradera neighborhood of San Pedro Sula in April alone, part of a surge in gang violence that is claiming younger and younger victims.
The killings are a major factor driving the recent wave of migration of Central American children to the United States, which has sent an unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors across the Texas border. Many children and parents say the rush of new migrants stems from a belief that United States immigration policy offers preferential treatment to minors, but in addition, studies of Border Patrol statistics show a strong correlation between cities like San Pedro Sula with high homicide rates and swarms of youngsters taking off for the United States.
Global Burden of Armed Violence 2015 (Geneva Declaration On Armed Violence and Development, May 2015)
A comparison of data available for the periods 2004–09 and 2007–12 indicates that, globally, deaths due to intentional homicide declined by almost 5 per cent, with the Americas being the only region to witness a significant increase in homicide (nearly 10 per cent).
The comparison also shows that direct conflict deaths surged by 34 per cent between the two periods—while violent deaths in all other categories declined. A large portion of these direct conflict deaths resulted from armed conflict in Libya and Syria. Meanwhile, lethal violence rates in some countries that are not experiencing armed conflict—such as Honduras and Venezuela—have been rising, reaching levels characteristic of countries at war.
The Other Refugee Crisis: Women On the Run from Central America (The Guardian, January 2016)
As the world’s attention has focused on the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, another crisis has been unfolding, to far less attention, in the heart of the Americas. The violence in Central America’s “northern triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and parts of Mexico, has reached war zone levels. Central authority has effectively collapsed in some areas, and transnational gangs have taken over, ruling their territories with terrifying violence.
Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world. El Salvador and Guatemala come in fourth and fifth. And women are under particular threat, being raped, beaten, extorted, abducted and murdered almost every day. El Salvador and Guatemala now have the first and third highest female homicide rate on the planet.
As deadly as armed conflict? Gang violence and forced displacement in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Agenda Internacional, 2016)
In the decade between 2003 and 2012, Central America came to hold the dubious distinction of having one of the highest homicide rates of any part of the world. Of course, within Central America, there are countries where the homicide rate has been relatively low, as is the case for example in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. However, the comparative calm of these countries is off-set statistically by the extremely high homicide rates in other countries in this sub-region. Indeed, the murder epidemic affecting Central America is concentrated largely in the three countries of the Northern Triangle and, to a lesser extent, Belize. The situation of violence is particularly acute in El Salvador and Honduras, where homicide rates spiralled over the decade between 2003 and 2012 and have reached astronomical levels in the past few years…
Even if we factor in direct conflict deaths, we see that the levels of violent death in the Northern Triangle countries – particularly Honduras in 2012 (and almost certainly also El Salvador in 2015) – remain among the highest in the world. Indeed, such data as are publicly available suggest that in recent years these countries have been second only to Syria in the overall rates of annual violent deaths of any country in the world. As such, the rate of violent death in these Northern Triangle countries exceeds that reported in 2012 for countries experiencing well-known and brutal conflicts, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, etc. Indeed, the average rate of approximately 18 violent deaths per day in El Salvador in 2015 exceeds the average rate of 16 violent deaths per day in that country during the bloody civil war of the 1980s. On the basis of these rates of violent deaths, therefore, Central America was the most violent sub-region in the world in the period between 2007 and 2012, even when direct conflict deaths are incorporated into the analysis.
Easy Prey: Criminal Violence and Central American Migration (International Crisis Group, July 2016)
Migrants from both Mexico and the northern triangle of Central America (NTCA) region have long fled poverty to seek a better life abroad, sending home remittances that are a major source of foreign exchange and a crucial prop for their home countries’ economies. However, Mexico and the U.S. treat what is now in large part a violence-driven refugee crisis as if it were still solely an economic migration problem. Many victimised today by economic deprivation and social exclusion also face persecution by organised criminal groups, from neighbourhood gangs to transnational drug traffickers. Forced displacement is increasingly widespread, as violence reaches civil-war levels. About 150,000 people have been killed in the NTCA since 2006, an average of more than 50 homicides per 100,000, more than triple the rate in Mexico (where killings have soared since 2007) and more than ten times the U.S. average.
El Salvador became the most violent country in the western hemisphere in 2015 with a staggering murder rate of 103 per 100,000 people, while Honduras suffered 57 per 100,000 and Guatemala 30 per 100,000. Young people are the most vulnerable to violence, as both perpetrators and victims. The proportion of homicide victims under age twenty in El Salvador and Guatemala is higher than anywhere else in the world. No wonder that 35,000 children and adolescent migrants were detained in Mexico in 2015, nine times more than in 2011.
Not a National Security Crisis: The U.S.-Mexico Border and Humanitarian Concerns (Washington Office on Latin America, October 2016)
Of the migrants arriving at the border, many are children and families from Central America who could qualify as refugees in need of protection. A United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) analysis of credible fear screenings carried out by U.S. asylum officers revealed that in 2015, 82 percent of women from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, as well as Mexico, who were screened on arrival at the U.S. border “were found to have a significant possibility of establishing eligibility for asylum or protection under the Convention against Torture.“ This phenomenon is not a threat to the security of the United States. Nor is it illegal to flee one’s country if one’s life is at risk. Most Central American families and children do not try to evade U.S. authorities when they cross: they seek them out, requesting international protection out of fear to return to their countries.
Central America’s Rampant Violence Fuels An Invisible Refugee Crisis (The Guardian, October 2016)
“They took down my address from my identity card, and threatened to kill my whole family if they ever saw me again. We left El Salvador five days later,” said Hernández, now living with his wife and two children in a sparsely furnished room in Tapachula, in southern Mexico, where they are seeking asylum.
The Hernández family are part of an alarming exodus of entire families forced to flee widespread violence in Central America’s northern triangle, the world’s most dangerous region outside an official war zone.
As huge numbers of Syrian and African refugees risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea to escape war-torn states, advocates say a parallel refugee crisis has unfolded on America’s doorstep amid an undeclared but increasingly brutal war between criminal groups and security forces.
An estimated 80,000 people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, mostly families and unaccompanied children, are expected to apply for asylum overseas this year – a 658% increase since 2011, according to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). Tens of thousands more will be forcibly displaced, but not seek international help.
During the 1980s, the three countries known as the northern triangle were blighted by vicious civil wars between US-backed military dictatorships and leftist guerrilla groups. But even after ceasefires were agreed, peace never came to the region as unresolved inequalities and amnesties which let war criminals escape justice fuelled a new wave of violence and corruption.
Fleeing Gangs, Central American Families Surge Toward U.S. (New York Times, November 2016)
Leaving El Salvador had never been in Alberto’s plans. He and his wife had stable jobs and supportive friends and relatives, and their five children were happy.
But a local gang tried to recruit one of Alberto’s sons as a drug mule and beat him up when he resisted, the family said. A gang leader approached his daughter, then 10 years old, and told her that he was going to make her his girlfriend. Then Alberto and his family received a phone call threatening to kill them if they did not turn over the children for the gang’s use. The corpse of a boy even appeared on the street in front of their house.
The family fled north, taking only what it could carry.
“We can’t just hand them over to the gang,” Alberto said of his children, sitting with his family in a shelter in Tapachula, a small Mexican city near the Guatemalan border. (Like other migrants interviewed, Alberto and his family asked that their last name not be used, fearing their persecutors could find them.)
Gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has conspired with economic desperation to drive an unrelenting exodus of migrants, including entire families, seeking safety in other countries, mainly the United States.
Despite American-backed efforts to tighten regional borders and address the root causes of the exodus, American and international officials say the migration numbers have soared in the past year.
“It’s really a refugee crisis,” said Perrine Leclerc, the head of the field office for the United Nations refugee agency in Tapachula.
Thousands of Young Central Americans at Risk as Refugee Ban Halts Key Program (The Guardian, February 2017)
[The Central American Minors Program] was launched by the Obama administration at the end of 2014 amid growing concern that children fleeing escalating violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were being forced to risk the treacherous journey through Mexico in order to seek refuge at the US border.
Criminal gangs, corrupt security forces and widespread impunity have fuelled rampant violence in the region, known as the Northern Triangle, where 33,000 people have been murdered in the past two years.
After Syria, whose armed conflict has triggered the worst humanitarian crisis since the second world war, the three countries are now the most deadly in the world.
Those affected by last week’s executive order include teenagers threatened with death after witnessing gang killings and others fleeing forced recruitment by crime factions. Most are virtual prisoners inside their homes, having abandoned school and work as a result of the threats and beatings.
Forced to Flee Central America’s Northern Triangle: A Neglected Humanitarian Crisis (Doctors Without Borders, May 2017)
The violence experienced by the population of the NTCA is not unlike that of individuals living through war. Citizens are murdered with impunity, kidnappings and extortion are daily occurrences. Non-state actors perpetuate insecurity and forcibly recruit individuals into their ranks, and use sexual violence as a tool of intimidation and control. This generalized and pervasive threat of violence contributes to an increasingly dire reality for the citizens of these countries. It occurs against a backdrop of government institutions that are incapable of meeting the basic needs of the population.
The global study on homicide carried out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2013, placed Honduras and El Salvador first and fourth respectively on the list of countries with the highest murder rates in the world. In the last ten years, approximate 150,000 people have been killed in the NTCA. Since then, the situation has only worsened, with a particularly worrying situation in El Salvador, where 6,650 intentional homicides were reported in 2015, reaching a staggering murder rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, while Honduras suffered 57 per 100,000 (8,035 homicides) and Guatemala 30 per 100,000 (4,778 homicides).
Data from the UNODC report shows that homicidal violence in the NTCA resulted in considerably more civilian casualties than in any other countries, including those with armed conflicts or war. Rates of violent death in El Salvador have lately been higher than all countries suffering armed conflict except for Syria.
Fact Sheet: U.S. Immigration and Central American Asylum Seekers (WOLA, January 2018)
The Trump administration has frequently argued that the increase in the number of families and children fleeing violence in their countries of origin and seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border is a result of “loopholes” in U.S. immigration laws. This is a distortion of the reasons why an increased numbers of families and children are seeking protection in the United States, and is not an accurate characterization of the U.S. asylum process.
There has indeed been a sharp rise in asylum seekers from Central America’s Northern Triangle region (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador). U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reports that more individuals from the Northern Triangle region sought affirmative asylum in the United States between 2013 to 2015 than in the previous 15 years combined…
Central Americans who cite fear of generalized violence in their asylum applications are not making a baseless claim—courts have found that, under the very terms of U.S. asylum law, applicants fleeing gang violence and other threats qualify for protection.
(Your picture was not posted)
chamerionwrites:
In light of the Trump administration’s recent decision to rescind TPS for hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, have a boatload of links demonstrating that while John Kelly and Jeff Sessions can remain as willfully blind as they like, Central America’s Northern Triangle is one of the single most dangerous regions in the world and a great many Central American immigrants are refugees deserving of asylum (blanket warning for murder, torture, rape, violence against children, etc):
The Awful Reason Tens of Thousands of Children are Seeking Refuge in the United States (Vox, June 2014)
Recent studies suggest that most of these unaccompanied children aren’t economic migrants, as many Americans might assume — they’re fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries, where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north. They’re not here to take advantage of American social services — they’re refugees from conflict. Understanding the nature of the violence pushing them north is crucial for figuring out what to do about the child refugee crisis on our southern border.
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three countries that make up Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” are experiencing a terrifying level of violence that’s been rising rapidly since the late 2000s. State weakness and corruption have allowed a number of different armed groups — including transnational street gangs, drug cartels, and other organized crime syndicates — to flourish, checked by little but their competition with one another.
Today, those groups battle for control of drug trafficking routes, residential neighborhoods, bus systems, human-smuggling operations, and more or less anything else that allows them to leverage their skills in violence to extract a profit…the murder rate in Honduras in 2012 was a whopping 30 percent higher than UN estimates of the civilian casualty rate at the height of the Iraq war. In other words, all three Central American countries were, statistically speaking, twice as dangerous for civilians as Iraq was.
Fleeing Gangs, Children Head to U.S. Border (New York Times, July 2014)
Anthony O. Castellanos disappeared from his gang-ridden neighborhood on the eastern edge of Honduras’s most dangerous city, so his younger brother, Kenneth, hopped on his green bicycle to search for him, starting his hunt at a notorious gang hangout known as the “crazy house.”
They were found within days of each other, both dead. Anthony, 13, and a friend had been shot in the head; Kenneth, 7, had been tortured and beaten with sticks and rocks. They were among seven children murdered in the La Pradera neighborhood of San Pedro Sula in April alone, part of a surge in gang violence that is claiming younger and younger victims.
The killings are a major factor driving the recent wave of migration of Central American children to the United States, which has sent an unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors across the Texas border. Many children and parents say the rush of new migrants stems from a belief that United States immigration policy offers preferential treatment to minors, but in addition, studies of Border Patrol statistics show a strong correlation between cities like San Pedro Sula with high homicide rates and swarms of youngsters taking off for the United States.
Global Burden of Armed Violence 2015 (Geneva Declaration On Armed Violence and Development, May 2015)
A comparison of data available for the periods 2004–09 and 2007–12 indicates that, globally, deaths due to intentional homicide declined by almost 5 per cent, with the Americas being the only region to witness a significant increase in homicide (nearly 10 per cent).
The comparison also shows that direct conflict deaths surged by 34 per cent between the two periods—while violent deaths in all other categories declined. A large portion of these direct conflict deaths resulted from armed conflict in Libya and Syria. Meanwhile, lethal violence rates in some countries that are not experiencing armed conflict—such as Honduras and Venezuela—have been rising, reaching levels characteristic of countries at war.
The Other Refugee Crisis: Women On the Run from Central America (The Guardian, January 2016)
As the world’s attention has focused on the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, another crisis has been unfolding, to far less attention, in the heart of the Americas. The violence in Central America’s “northern triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and parts of Mexico, has reached war zone levels. Central authority has effectively collapsed in some areas, and transnational gangs have taken over, ruling their territories with terrifying violence.
Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world. El Salvador and Guatemala come in fourth and fifth. And women are under particular threat, being raped, beaten, extorted, abducted and murdered almost every day. El Salvador and Guatemala now have the first and third highest female homicide rate on the planet.
As deadly as armed conflict? Gang violence and forced displacement in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Agenda Internacional, 2016)
In the decade between 2003 and 2012, Central America came to hold the dubious distinction of having one of the highest homicide rates of any part of the world. Of course, within Central America, there are countries where the homicide rate has been relatively low, as is the case for example in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. However, the comparative calm of these countries is off-set statistically by the extremely high homicide rates in other countries in this sub-region. Indeed, the murder epidemic affecting Central America is concentrated largely in the three countries of the Northern Triangle and, to a lesser extent, Belize. The situation of violence is particularly acute in El Salvador and Honduras, where homicide rates spiralled over the decade between 2003 and 2012 and have reached astronomical levels in the past few years…
Even if we factor in direct conflict deaths, we see that the levels of violent death in the Northern Triangle countries – particularly Honduras in 2012 (and almost certainly also El Salvador in 2015) – remain among the highest in the world. Indeed, such data as are publicly available suggest that in recent years these countries have been second only to Syria in the overall rates of annual violent deaths of any country in the world. As such, the rate of violent death in these Northern Triangle countries exceeds that reported in 2012 for countries experiencing well-known and brutal conflicts, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, etc. Indeed, the average rate of approximately 18 violent deaths per day in El Salvador in 2015 exceeds the average rate of 16 violent deaths per day in that country during the bloody civil war of the 1980s. On the basis of these rates of violent deaths, therefore, Central America was the most violent sub-region in the world in the period between 2007 and 2012, even when direct conflict deaths are incorporated into the analysis.
Easy Prey: Criminal Violence and Central American Migration (International Crisis Group, July 2016)
Migrants from both Mexico and the northern triangle of Central America (NTCA) region have long fled poverty to seek a better life abroad, sending home remittances that are a major source of foreign exchange and a crucial prop for their home countries’ economies. However, Mexico and the U.S. treat what is now in large part a violence-driven refugee crisis as if it were still solely an economic migration problem. Many victimised today by economic deprivation and social exclusion also face persecution by organised criminal groups, from neighbourhood gangs to transnational drug traffickers. Forced displacement is increasingly widespread, as violence reaches civil-war levels. About 150,000 people have been killed in the NTCA since 2006, an average of more than 50 homicides per 100,000, more than triple the rate in Mexico (where killings have soared since 2007) and more than ten times the U.S. average.
El Salvador became the most violent country in the western hemisphere in 2015 with a staggering murder rate of 103 per 100,000 people, while Honduras suffered 57 per 100,000 and Guatemala 30 per 100,000. Young people are the most vulnerable to violence, as both perpetrators and victims. The proportion of homicide victims under age twenty in El Salvador and Guatemala is higher than anywhere else in the world. No wonder that 35,000 children and adolescent migrants were detained in Mexico in 2015, nine times more than in 2011.
Not a National Security Crisis: The U.S.-Mexico Border and Humanitarian Concerns (Washington Office on Latin America, October 2016)
Of the migrants arriving at the border, many are children and families from Central America who could qualify as refugees in need of protection. A United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) analysis of credible fear screenings carried out by U.S. asylum officers revealed that in 2015, 82 percent of women from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, as well as Mexico, who were screened on arrival at the U.S. border “were found to have a significant possibility of establishing eligibility for asylum or protection under the Convention against Torture.“ This phenomenon is not a threat to the security of the United States. Nor is it illegal to flee one’s country if one’s life is at risk. Most Central American families and children do not try to evade U.S. authorities when they cross: they seek them out, requesting international protection out of fear to return to their countries.
Central America’s Rampant Violence Fuels An Invisible Refugee Crisis (The Guardian, October 2016)
“They took down my address from my identity card, and threatened to kill my whole family if they ever saw me again. We left El Salvador five days later,” said Hernández, now living with his wife and two children in a sparsely furnished room in Tapachula, in southern Mexico, where they are seeking asylum.
The Hernández family are part of an alarming exodus of entire families forced to flee widespread violence in Central America’s northern triangle, the world’s most dangerous region outside an official war zone.
As huge numbers of Syrian and African refugees risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea to escape war-torn states, advocates say a parallel refugee crisis has unfolded on America’s doorstep amid an undeclared but increasingly brutal war between criminal groups and security forces.
An estimated 80,000 people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, mostly families and unaccompanied children, are expected to apply for asylum overseas this year – a 658% increase since 2011, according to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). Tens of thousands more will be forcibly displaced, but not seek international help.
During the 1980s, the three countries known as the northern triangle were blighted by vicious civil wars between US-backed military dictatorships and leftist guerrilla groups. But even after ceasefires were agreed, peace never came to the region as unresolved inequalities and amnesties which let war criminals escape justice fuelled a new wave of violence and corruption.
Fleeing Gangs, Central American Families Surge Toward U.S. (New York Times, November 2016)
Leaving El Salvador had never been in Alberto’s plans. He and his wife had stable jobs and supportive friends and relatives, and their five children were happy.
But a local gang tried to recruit one of Alberto’s sons as a drug mule and beat him up when he resisted, the family said. A gang leader approached his daughter, then 10 years old, and told her that he was going to make her his girlfriend. Then Alberto and his family received a phone call threatening to kill them if they did not turn over the children for the gang’s use. The corpse of a boy even appeared on the street in front of their house.
The family fled north, taking only what it could carry.
“We can’t just hand them over to the gang,” Alberto said of his children, sitting with his family in a shelter in Tapachula, a small Mexican city near the Guatemalan border. (Like other migrants interviewed, Alberto and his family asked that their last name not be used, fearing their persecutors could find them.)
Gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has conspired with economic desperation to drive an unrelenting exodus of migrants, including entire families, seeking safety in other countries, mainly the United States.
Despite American-backed efforts to tighten regional borders and address the root causes of the exodus, American and international officials say the migration numbers have soared in the past year.
“It’s really a refugee crisis,” said Perrine Leclerc, the head of the field office for the United Nations refugee agency in Tapachula.
Thousands of Young Central Americans at Risk as Refugee Ban Halts Key Program (The Guardian, February 2017)
[The Central American Minors Program] was launched by the Obama administration at the end of 2014 amid growing concern that children fleeing escalating violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were being forced to risk the treacherous journey through Mexico in order to seek refuge at the US border.
Criminal gangs, corrupt security forces and widespread impunity have fuelled rampant violence in the region, known as the Northern Triangle, where 33,000 people have been murdered in the past two years.
After Syria, whose armed conflict has triggered the worst humanitarian crisis since the second world war, the three countries are now the most deadly in the world.
Those affected by last week’s executive order include teenagers threatened with death after witnessing gang killings and others fleeing forced recruitment by crime factions. Most are virtual prisoners inside their homes, having abandoned school and work as a result of the threats and beatings.
Forced to Flee Central America’s Northern Triangle: A Neglected Humanitarian Crisis (Doctors Without Borders, May 2017)
The violence experienced by the population of the NTCA is not unlike that of individuals living through war. Citizens are murdered with impunity, kidnappings and extortion are daily occurrences. Non-state actors perpetuate insecurity and forcibly recruit individuals into their ranks, and use sexual violence as a tool of intimidation and control. This generalized and pervasive threat of violence contributes to an increasingly dire reality for the citizens of these countries. It occurs against a backdrop of government institutions that are incapable of meeting the basic needs of the population.
The global study on homicide carried out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2013, placed Honduras and El Salvador first and fourth respectively on the list of countries with the highest murder rates in the world. In the last ten years, approximate 150,000 people have been killed in the NTCA. Since then, the situation has only worsened, with a particularly worrying situation in El Salvador, where 6,650 intentional homicides were reported in 2015, reaching a staggering murder rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, while Honduras suffered 57 per 100,000 (8,035 homicides) and Guatemala 30 per 100,000 (4,778 homicides).
Data from the UNODC report shows that homicidal violence in the NTCA resulted in considerably more civilian casualties than in any other countries, including those with armed conflicts or war. Rates of violent death in El Salvador have lately been higher than all countries suffering armed conflict except for Syria.
Fact Sheet: U.S. Immigration and Central American Asylum Seekers (WOLA, January 2018)
The Trump administration has frequently argued that the increase in the number of families and children fleeing violence in their countries of origin and seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border is a result of “loopholes” in U.S. immigration laws. This is a distortion of the reasons why an increased numbers of families and children are seeking protection in the United States, and is not an accurate characterization of the U.S. asylum process.
There has indeed been a sharp rise in asylum seekers from Central America’s Northern Triangle region (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador). U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reports that more individuals from the Northern Triangle region sought affirmative asylum in the United States between 2013 to 2015 than in the previous 15 years combined…
Central Americans who cite fear of generalized violence in their asylum applications are not making a baseless claim—courts have found that, under the very terms of U.S. asylum law, applicants fleeing gang violence and other threats qualify for protection.
(Your picture was not posted)
