U.S. president Barack Obama is set to urge the leaders of
Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to halt the surge of young, often
unaccompanied migrants arriving in the United States, while offering assistance
to address underlying factors
driving the emigration (WSJ).
Ahead of their Friday meeting at the White House, the leaders asked Congress for
economic assistance, and attributed the violence partly driving the flight of young people (WaPo) to
narco-trafficking to the United States. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is
weighing a proposal to screen youth in Honduras to determine whether they meet
refugee or humanitarian criteria for entering the United
States (NYT).
Analysis
"It is important to impose harsher penalties for 'coyotes' or
smugglers, since this has become a
very lucrative business for organized crime, according to recent reports by
Prensa Libre and Emisoras Unidas. It is also important to communicate
to Indigenous leaders in sending communities why crossing illegally into the
U.S. is a crime (both in Spanish and in different Mayan languages)," writes Juan
Carlos Zapata for Americas Quarterly.
"While the surge in unaccompanied children has received a lot
of media attention, the number of apprehensions of children who are accompanied by a parent or
guardian has increased at a far
faster clip, nearly tripling (160% increase) in less than a year," writes the
Pew Research Center.
"None of these is more important than pervasive weaknesses in the basic institutions of the rule
of law [in Latin America]—the police,
the prosecutors, the courts and the prisons. Trust in the criminal-justice
system remains low: majorities of the population in almost every country in the
region have little or no faith in it," writes the Economist.
