Tuesday, October 23, 2018

A Caravan of Broken Dreams

“This is the caravan of Hondurans with broken dreams,” said Berlin Sánchez, 22, who fled his home country with his wife, Melida Núñez, 24, to escape extortion by gang members.
“If we can’t enter the US, we’ll stay in Mexico. We can’t return to Honduras. The day I get back, I become another crime statistic,” he said. Sánchez said that the couple had eked out a living from a small food stand, but had to flee after tattooed gangsters demanded a payment of 50,000 lempiras ($2,000) – more than twice what they earned in a month. The gang members told them to pay up within a week on pain of death. “You can’t deal with them,” Sánchez said.
One of the caravan’s organisers, Denis Omar Contreras, from the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) said Trump should stop accusing the caravan of harbouring terrorists.
“There isn’t a single terrorist here,” he said. “We are all people from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. And as far as I know there are no terrorists in these four countries, at least beyond the corrupt governments.”

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