After Five Honduran Children Deported from Mexico City, A Human Rights Observer Offers her Observations

SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS-We take a look at the humanitarian crisis involving child migrants fleeing their home countries.

KGNU has spent a great deal of coverage on the human rights crisis in Honduras and also an amount on the massacres, violent deaths, rapes, and violent evictions of rural residents of Guatemala.  We have reported as well on some of the mining issues in both countries and in El Salvador.   KGNU listeners heard coverage of the recent presidential elections in El Salvador where one longtime voter said that the country is still recovering from the US backed violent repression during the war of the 1980’s. He told KGNU that much has never been reported.

The child migrant surge into the US was a hot topic this summer.  We have talked about the murder of children in Honduras, both gang-related and politically motivated assassinations especially against the children of community organization leaders.

Danita Nelson is a theology graduate student in Texas and she joined an Agricultural Missions delegation that KGNU accompanied.  I met her at the San Pedro Sula airport where she said she had been seated next to children whom she suspected had just been deported from where she caught her flight in Mexico City.  She said that the children’s shoestrings and belts had been taken from them.  I accompanied Danita Nelson back to the International Arrivals gate, and the kids were done being processed through immigration and customs and were being accompanied by an Honduran immigration officer.  I asked the Honduran immigration officer if I could speak to the children, but she refused permission.  This is Danita Nelson’s account of what happened: