Migrants, mostly Honduran hurricane victims and economic victims of the pandemic, walk more than 500 kilometers through southern Mexico, crossing three states. The Mayan Train, an economic development project in the region, has paralyzed normal train traffic, and the migrants are forced to walk along the tracks to Veracruz, where the trains are running again.
The economic impact of the pandemic has been devastating in Honduras, where the economy is expected to shrink by more than 7 percent. In addition, Hurricanes Eta and Iota arrived in November, affecting more than four million people and leaving hundreds of thousands in need of immediate aid.
Without work, without homes, and with no expectation that the government can or will help them, many Hondurans see migration as the only viable solution.
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When Hurricane Eta arrived, Carolina Castro Alison’s house was badly affected. But after Iota came, she lost her home completely. Alison, along with Brigitte, her four-year-old daughter, decided to try to get to the United States, where her brother lives.
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In Palenque, a city in Chiapas, Mexico, Francisco Hernán was robbed and pistol-whipped by members of a local gang. Hernán, who is from Comayagua, Honduras, used to work on coffee plantations. After the country’s economic downturn, he could no longer support his wife and two young children.
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Victor Velázquez Ortiz is from San Manuel, a town in eastern Honduras that was flooded during the hurricanes. The banana cooperative where Velázquez Ortiz used to work no longer exists. “I was left without work, without a refrigerator, without a bed, without clothes,” he says. “We are suffering from hunger, day in, day out.”
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José Elías Román lives in Ocotepeque, near the border between Honduras and El Salvador. The district was heavily impacted by mudslides caused by excessive rain from the hurricanes. It took Román, a farmer, three years to build his home, which was destroyed. Now, he sees migration as his only opportunity to save money and rebuild his life.
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Marlon de La Lima Cortés, twenty-five, used to work in a maquila, but lost his job due to the pandemic. In Honduras, after losing his home during the hurricanes, de La Lima Cortés lived under a bridge and in an improvised shelter. “It is hard to work in Honduras, more with this corruption, it is hard,” he says.