HONDURAS-CHILDREN: The thousand and one faces of exploitation

By Thelma Mejía Reprint | | Print |

Thelma Mejia

TEGUCIGALPA, Mar 27 1996 (IPS) - Honduran children are being used as decoys by smugglers desperate to get their clients illegally into the United States, according to reports here.

Fifty-three Honduran infants of both sexes, most of them between three and five months old, were discovered abandoned in Brownsville, Texas in mid-March after having been used to secure passage for migrants to the United States.

Traffickers in illegal migrants have discovered that they can fool U.S. immigration officials into admitting their clients legally by having children pose as family members.

Honduran Public Ministry child-crime prosecutor Teodolinda Pineda said that traffickers’ use of children “is the new method the coyotes (traffickers) have adopted to make their business more lucrative.”

Efforts are underway to repatriate the 53 Honduran babies in Brownsville. Pineda said there were indications that “some parents rented their children to the coyotes.”

“We’re seeing an indiscriminate form of child exploitation that horrifies any human being and requires the severest penalties to stop this dirty business,” she added.

Warnings about this trafficking were verified in the last two months when migrants were captured in Guatemala with kidnapped children. Leo Valladares, the Honduran government’s human rights commissioner, said many of the minors used as “passports” were street children.

He accordingly urged the National Congress to approve the Code for Minors, which seeks to eradicate child abuse, exploitation and mistreatment and to provide better health and education services for children.

Immigration trafficking is just one form of abuse of Honduran children. Almost 10,000 boys and girls live in the streets and are subject to sexual abuse and other mistreatment by adults, family members or the authorities.

More than a year ago, the Casa Alianza street children’s defense organization denounced the government for jailing some 100 minors with common criminals who abused them. The organization threatened to file charges of child abuse against Honduras in an international forum.

The Washington-based Interamerican Human Rights Commission (CIDH) negotiated a settlement between Casa Alianza and the Honduran government that required the latter to correct the problem of children imprisoned with criminals.

But the government has not fulfilled its obligations. Last week, Casa Alianza asserted that at least 12 minors were tortured in a prison in central Comayagua Valley, 150 kilometers from Tegucigalpa.

The humanitarian organization acknowledged that the executive branch had shown its willingness to transfer minors from jails to rehabilitation centers but said judges were ignoring orders to keep children out of prisons holding common criminals.

Casa Alianza lawyer Gustavo Escoto said the judges’ behavior threatened to scuttle the CIDH-brokered settlement. He warned that “this could end in an international lawsuit.”

Miguel Angel Rivera, the country’s leading judicial authority, said he would begin investigating cases in which judges sent Honduran minors to prison.

Of Honduras’s population of 5.5 million, 2.7 million are minors under 18 years of age. Some 28 percent of Honduran children aged 10 to 17 do some kind of work.

UNICEF attributes this early labour market entry to the fact that seven of 10 Hondurans live in poverty or extreme poverty.

Unicef local representative Bernardo Cameratti added that “the evidence shows that there is child trafficking, and all of society must reject this activity because the boys and girls who are being abused constitute the future of this country.”