I am grateful to Alfredo Corchado for doing an important piece of journalism for the Dallas Morning News. He went down to Mexico and followed the path of the Central American migrants who are trying to move north and enter the United States of America.
In the process, he managed to bring something hidden to light and to humanize the people who are making this journey. I don’t have any easy answers for how to deal with this crisis. These people appear to be making rational decisions based on how bad things are at home, particularly in Honduras. What can we do to make Honduras less miserable? I think that has to be part of the solution here. We can welcome some of these people, but a better solution is to change the logic of the situation. Making it harder to get here is part of changing the logic, but it doesn’t seem like it will do much but increase the hardship these people experience. Things have to be unimaginably bad for parents to send their kids unaccompanied to a foreign country, but even the adults face grave dangers and exploitation along the way.
So, what is it that is making Honduras such a miserable place to live right now? Is it mainly gang-violence and a lack of law and order? Is it joblessness? Is it political in nature? I want to know more about how things broke down so badly.
