COMITANSILLO, Guatemala (AP) – Every night for nearly two years, Glendy Aracely Ramirez has prayed at the altar in her parents’ adobe bedroom. There, beneath a large cross, is a photo of her sister Blanca. The 23-year-old died along with 50 other migrants in a smuggler’s trailer in Texas.
“I ask God for my family’s health and for me to be able to go to the United States someday. My mother prays to God that she will never have another accident,” she said, already packing her belongings in a small backpack. said Glendy, 17. She made the journey herself from her family’s 2,700 meter (8,900 ft) home in the Guatemalan highlands.
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Although her “Coyote” was postponed for several days due to escalating violence between Mexican drug cartels that control immigration routes into the United States, she is undaunted.
Olivia Orozco López cries while holding a portrait of her late daughter Celestina Carolina during an interview in the village of Curvilla, Tejutla, Guatemala, on Tuesday, March 19, 2024. Carolina suffocated to death along with 50 other migrants in a smuggler’s trailer truck in San Antonio. , Texas in June 2022. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
Tens of thousands of young people in the region would rather take a deadly risk, even once, than remain in a place with no future in sight.Blanca’s deadly journey was her third attempt to reach the United States.
“I want to go there, because there are no opportunities here, even though my mother told me to do what Blanca did,” Glendy said, sitting with his mother, Filomena Crisostomo, in a tidy dirt-floored courtyard. Told. She said, “I want to own a house, help my girlfriend’s family, and get promoted.”
Immigration has become a top concern in a U.S. presidential election year, with the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally reaching a record high. Among these migrants, the largest group of unaccompanied minors is from Guatemala, accounting for nearly 50,000 of the 137,000 encounters recorded by border authorities last year.
Most are from small communities in the Western Highlands, where indigenous peoples are the majority. The maximum daily wage is the equivalent of about $9, far below the expected legal minimum wage. Many families grow edible corn and beans on small plots of fragile clay soil, the only collateral for loans to pay smugglers’ fees that can reach $20,000.
Little else sprouts from the steep mountainsides except lavishly decorated concrete high-rises built with remittances from loved ones in the United States. A constant reminder of what is possible if you go “north.”
In the small town of Comitancillo, two murals serve as another reminder. These are memorials to his nearly 20 local immigrants who died in recent mass tragedies. They were either suffocated to death in a trailer in San Antonio, Texas, in June 2022, or shot and set on fire by violent police officers in Camargo, Mexico, in January 2021.
It took less than a week after the remains of the Camargo massacre were returned to Comitancillo for burial before the first surviving families departed for the United States.
Along with the 17-year-old boy who arrived in Florida this winter, nearly every family has had at least one relative emigrate since the massacre, said the Rev. Jose Luis González, a priest with the Jesuit Migration Network. The only exceptions were older men whose families already lived north of the border. Gonzalez said he died while trying to return home after being deported.
“This is a clear sign that the fear of remaining is greater than the fear of returning,” González said. He began ministering to his affected family members, who traveled about six hours to Guatemala’s capital for DNA testing to identify the remains.
Many families believe that the Jesuit group is the only institution that will accompany them, and they regularly visit the comitancillo to provide legal updates, provide spiritual, In addition to providing humanitarian and pastoral assistance, more than a dozen police officers were convicted in the Camargo case last fall.
On a recent morning, about 50 relatives of those who died in Camargo or San Antonio gathered for a meeting with a Jesuit group that also included workshops on overcoming depression and grief. Most of them were women and children who spoke Mam, one of Guatemala’s 20 or so Mayan languages.
One of the few fathers present at the meeting was Virgilio Ambrosio. Celestina Carolina, the eldest of eight children, earned less than $90 a month as a housekeeper in Guatemala City, sending half of it back to her home country to support her siblings. So she decided to try her luck in America, and at the age of 23 she died in her trailer.
“The most difficult thing is who is going to help us now,” Ambrosio said as dust swirled around his home. Her wife, Olivia Orozco, wept quietly as she held a framed photo of Celestina smiling.
Ursula Roldan, a researcher at Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City, said the main driver of migration over the past decade has been the lack of access to jobs that provide for the most basic necessities. The situation is further exacerbated by the debts families incur to pay smugglers, which will take the equivalent of 10 years of domestic wages to repay, forcing them to go to the United States and remit money from much higher wages. has become important.
Escalating violence in Mexico’s border with Guatemala is also encouraging migrants to flee seasonal agricultural jobs and head to the United States. Climate change is even affecting subsistence agriculture.
In her one-room home near Comitancillo, Reyna Coronado tried to convince her eight children, whom she has had since getting married at 16, that there was no need to risk their lives.
Still, some people headed north. Aracely Florentina Marroquín, 21, graduated from the same high school as Blanca, but like her, she still cannot get a professional job and relies on her family’s support for her studies. She felt she had wasted her money.
The last thing she said to Coronado was to stay only four years and send money to build a kitchen so she wouldn’t have to cook tortillas over an open fire. The next call from Texas left Coronado crying for months. Currently, she finds some solace in caring for her two young daughters, who still live with her, and the animals she fosters.
“One has to keep fighting and try to keep going, even when it’s difficult,” Coronado said. “I go to work and the day and the difficult moments pass. Sometimes I go to work in tears, but I trust in the Lord our Father.”
Marcelina Tomás has also been praying for strength since her eldest son Anderson Pablo was killed in Camargo, and especially in recent months since her younger brother Emerson, 17, also left for the United States.
Anderson was in ninth grade when the pandemic hit and began working in the fields with his father. Their daily wage of about $6 was enough for a family of 11 to eat tortillas every day, but it was not very edible, Thomas said. So she and her husband agreed to help Anderson obtain a loan for the $16,000 smuggling fee.
News of the Camargo massacre came through social media 12 days after 16-year-old Anderson left his home near Comitancillo. Thomas, 37, who is pregnant with her 10th child, left her children with her family for the first time to undergo a DNA test in the capital that would allow Anderson’s partial remains to be identified and buried. I had to leave the house for the evening.
“Only God knows what happened, and it was all because he wanted to get ahead,” Thomas said. “I trusted him, and he treated his younger siblings very well.”
Mr. Anderson discouraged Mr. Emerson from accompanying him, telling him that he should stay at school a little longer. According to Thomas, Emerson was grieving after his brother’s death. He enrolled in high school, but he soon quit and worked in a potato field.
Around the third anniversary of Anderson’s death, Emerson said he wanted to emigrate, as many other young people had left as well. Thomas reminded him of Anderson’s fate, the tragedy in San Antonio, and the children in his neighborhood who died in desert or industrial accidents on the U.S. border.
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“He said to me, ‘No, I’m going,’ and he left,” Thomas said in a photo of Anderson standing next to a cross holding a lit candle and a vase of calla lilies. He spoke next to the altar where the three pieces were placed.
Anderson’s dream was to earn enough to move his family from a one-room adobe house to a concrete house with separate spaces for his parents, brothers, and sisters. They currently live in such a house, built with donations received after his death.
But no one sleeps in the room where the altar is. They keep it as Anderson’s room.
