“The reality is that a lot of Mexicans have sort of given up looking for work in the U.S. and have started to return home but for Central Americans the conditions may be even more desperate that the ones we’re seeing in Mexico,” said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.
Deported from the United States after years working construction in New Jersey, Hector Augusto Lopez decided to rebuild his life in his hometown in eastern Honduras.
He found a steady job in a shoe store in Catacamas. Then, in March, he watched horrified as robbers shot three customers to death before his eyes. Soon after, he decided to make the hard and dangerous journey north again.
“In Honduras there is a lot of violence, a lot of robberies and a lot of poverty,” Lopez, 28, said as he waited to jump a cargo train just outside Mexico City on a recent afternoon. “There is no future there.”
Half a block away, dozens more U.S.-bound Central American migrants waited outside an overflowing one-story, crammed shelter, napping on pieces of cardboard, wrapping themselves in garbage bags against the cold and trading stories about their journeys north.
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