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Desperation grows in battered Honduras

Published:Friday | February 12, 2021 | 12:20 AM
Maria Elena Vasquez stands inside what’s left of her home after last year’s hurricanes Eta and Iota in La Lima, on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where she returns every afternoon to remove the mud in hopes of returning to live here, Wednes
AP
Maria Elena Vasquez stands inside what’s left of her home after last year’s hurricanes Eta and Iota in La Lima, on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where she returns every afternoon to remove the mud in hopes of returning to live here, Wednesday, January 13, 2021. Twenty-two years before the 2020 storms, Hurricane Mitch destroyed Vasquez’s other home, which was replaced with this one, built by a Catholic charity from Canada.

SAN PEDRO SULA (AP):

Nory Yamileth Hernández and her three teenage children have been living in a battered tent under a bridge on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula since Hurricane Eta flooded their home in November.

They were there in the dust under the rumbling traffic, surrounded by other storm refugees, when Hurricane Iota hit barely two weeks later. And when the first migrant caravan of the year shuffled by in January, only fear and empty pockets kept them from joining Honduras’ growing exodus.

Dying to Leave

“I cried because I don’t want to be here anymore,” the 34-year-old Hernández said. She had joined the first big caravan in October 2018 but didn’t make it to Mexico before turning back. She is sure she will try again soon. “There’s a lot of suffering.”

In San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ economic engine and the departure gate for thousands of Honduran migrants in recent years, families like Hernández’s are caught in a cycle of migration. Poverty and gang violence push them out and increasingly aggressive measures to stop them, driven by the United States government, scuttle their efforts and send them back.

The economic damage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the devastation wrought by November’s hurricanes have only added to those driving forces. Word of a new administration in the US with a softer approach to migrants has raised hopes, too.