Transmigrant Death: To Migrate or Die in the Homeland
While Ciudad Juarez is no longer a major hub, it is still popular for trafficking and one of numerous crossing points into the USA for transmigrants. The alleged suicide of Jocelyn Noemi Alvarez Quillay, the indigenous 12-year-old Ecuadoran girl mentioned earlier who died at a Ciudad Juarez shelter (Patterson 2014b), is another reminder of the violence youth experience.
Immediate investigations claimed there was no sexual assault of the girl, but a year later, a more detailed investigation confirmed that she had been sexually abused days before her death (Ortiz Uribe 2015). She had been traveling for four months during a first failed smuggling attempt to rejoin her parents in New York City. The family paid coyotes (human smugglers) to bring her to the USA a second time, a desperate decision for parents without proper documentation in the USA. The US government claimed that border security measures have successfully limited transmigrants from entering the country (Flores 2014). However, these measures yield deadly outcomes when parents take desperate measures to reunite their families and protect their children from the destitute and dangerous conditions in their homelands.Much has been written about La Bestia (the Beast), the train that runs from Southern Mexico's state of Chiapas northward to border cities (Flores 2014). A significant amount has also been written about the Central American women and children that have attempted to enter the USA through South Texas and at times have relied on La Bestia for their travels (Flores 2014). Others risk their lives attempting to cross the barren Sonoran or Chihuahua deserts adding to the thousands of migrants who have died since the early 1990s. The US Customs and Border Protection agency claims that during the 2013 fiscal year, the US Border Patrol apprehended 38,833 unaccompanied minors, 28,352 in Texas alone (Flores 2014).
Some accounts have these migration numbers reaching as high as 52,000 children and youth in the first nine months of 2014 (Martinez 2014). Migrants trekking from Central America through Mexico into the USA speak of horrifying atrocities, including the maiming of people by the train, thieves that prey on migrants, corrupt authorities that rob and beat them, and the rape, kidnapping, and murder of migrants by marauders. “Recent reports also indicate that Mara Salvatrucha and other gangs prey upon Central American migrants on their way to the U.S. through Mexico through kidnapping, extortion or by providing information on the migrants to larger criminal organizations. There are also reports that Los Zetas are heavily involved in human trafficking along these routes, providing circumstantial evidence of ad hoc cooperation on these shared profit schemes” (Jones 2013, p. 9).The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, a civil society organization, states that 70% of the migrants entering the Mexican state of Tabasco indicate that they have experienced death threats, extortion, or the death of at least one family by gang members or by narcos in their country of origin (Patterson 2014a). This violence is also transnational in origin. The US-inspired 18th Street Gang and the Mara Salvatrucha gangs originated in part in Los Angeles, California, and proliferated in El Salvador when 4,000 gang members were deported from the USA back to El Salvador (Martinez 2014). The Salvadoran National Public Security Council further states that gangs control neighborhoods, demand extortion fees from residents and businesses, and control schools by recruiting children as young as eight (Martinez 2014). Several Central American accounts claim that gangs call this extortion a “war tax” (Musalo and Ceriani Cernadas 2015).
When transmigrant youth arrive in the USA-Mexico border zone, they likely suffer from paralyzing border stagnation (Bejarano et al. 2012). Stranded in an unknown place, often with little money, resources, or identification, they are a perfect target for predators.
In Mexican cities like Ciudad Juarez, economic refugees deported from the USA have no resources to return home. Migrant youth remain in these Northern Mexican border towns waiting to cross into the USA again. The downtrodden in border cities find themselves trapped with few resources to leave the city and can succumb to illicit work for their own survival. This happened to “Meny,” a 16-year-old Honduran who fled his homeland to avoid repeated recruitment attempts by gangs, only to be forcefully recruited to work as a lookout for the Barrio Azteca gang located in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas (Chaparro 2014).In cities such as Monterrey, Mexico, drug cartel representatives - narcos - also force youth to participate in some aspect of a drug operations network. Historian, Hector Aguilar Camin has argued that “the narco is part of the landscape, and having become part of the daily life in these communities is the true force of the Narco” (Wilkinson 2009, p. 2). In such situations, it is difficult for youth to resist the temptations of cash and luxury items offered to them. Alternately, when cartel leaders threaten the family members of teenage boys, most of these youth agree to assist the cartels to protect their loved ones. As drug cartels create impossible situations for youths, the US immigration system stops migrants and refugees at the border, while it concurrently forces undocumented migrants already in the USA further into the shadows of an illegal economy. Through such policies, the USA produces what it calls “illegal aliens” within its national borders and constructs “trapped populations” inside and outside of its borders.
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