In Home Village of Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody, Poverty Drives Migration

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/world/americas/migrant-jakelin-guatemala-border.html

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SAN ANTONIO SECORTEZ, Guatemala — Claudia Maquin said goodbye to her 7-year-old daughter a few weeks ago, when the girl and her father left their small village with the dream of making a new life in the United States.

Now she is waiting to say goodbye to her again.

Ms. Maquin’s husband and daughter, Jakelin, did make it across the border — but just over a day later, on Dec. 8, the girl died in the custody of the United States Border Patrol.

For Ms. Maquin, 27, there is nothing to do now but wait for her child’s body to come home as she burrows into the protective embrace of her extended family in a village of thatched-roof homes in the rolling hills of the Guatemalan lowlands.

Ms. Maquin has a simple explanation for why her husband joined a growing number of villagers and made the dangerous journey north: the absolute lack of alternatives in this lush but remote part of the country. Indigenous communities like theirs have endured centuries of poverty, exclusion and repression by economic and political elites.

“I am living with a deep sadness since I learned of my daughter’s death,” she said in a Mayan language, Q’eqchi’, through an interpreter. “But there are no jobs, and this caused the decision to leave.”

In the United States, Jakelin’s death has emerged as yet another flash point in the political debate over immigration. But in Guatemala, the unceasing flow of citizens out of the country is seen as an indictment of their own government and its failure to provide opportunity, particularly for the indigenous groups that make up at least 40 percent of the population.

On paper, Guatemala is not poor; the World Bank classifies it as an upper-middle income country. But those statistics mask profound inequalities, the legacy of centuries of racism and economic control by powerful groups that even now resist attempts to soften the sharp edges of the country’s systemic discrimination.

Guatemalans have always looked to migration to escape the entrenched divisions of their homeland. In the past few months, though, apprehensions at the United States’ border with Mexico suggest that still more Guatemalans are attempting to cross.

Jakelin’s father, Nery Caal, 29, was part of that exodus. He left for the United States because he believed that, with little formal education and a parcel of land too small to support the family, he had no hope of improving their lot.

Mr. Caal’s decision to leave Raxruhá, his impoverished municipality, was not in and of itself unusual. There has always been a steady flow of people migrating from there, with maybe 10, 20 or 30 people leaving every month, said César Castro, the mayor.

But in less than two months, Mr. Castro said, 200 families have left. He cannot explain the sudden spike, but he offered one theory.

“Somebody came and tricked people and told them, ‘I will get you political asylum — and take a child with you,’” Mr. Castro speculated. “It’s a new tactic, and people believe it because of their poverty.”

Mr. Caal’s family said he decided to take Jakelin with him because the young father and his lively, determined daughter were especially close.

But Mr. Caal, like so many other migrants, may well have heard — from others who made the trip, or from the smuggler he paid to take him to the border — that he would have a better chance of remaining in the United States if he arrived with a child.

There is little to counter the information provided by smugglers.

Nobody has a television in the village, much less internet access, though the mayor’s press officer has just begun broadcasting a news segment on community radio in Q’eqchi’ in which he warns people about the risks of traveling to the United States.

Still, from time to time, villagers get good news: Someone has made it across the border to the United States. When that happens, the residents of San Antonio Secortez, the Caal family’s community, set off firecrackers.

In San Antonio, families eke a living from the land, growing corn and beans, and raising goats, chickens and pigs. For subsistence farmers in a cash economy, every quetzal counts, and Domingo Caal, the 61-year-old family patriarch, calculates his expenses in terms of how much corn he would have to sell to pay for them.

During the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, Domingo Caal helped organize a small group of Q’eqchi’ farm laborers who pressed for their own land, maneuvering between leftist guerrillas and the military government, which waged a brutal war against many indigenous communities in the early 1980s.

“You had to watch your skin,” he said.

The army carried out some of its deadliest massacres under the presidency of Gen. Romeo Lucas García in the department of Alta Verapaz, where the Caal family lives, and neighboring departments. The names of the targeted villages are seared into Guatemala’s memory.

The fields no longer yield what they once did, Mr. Caal said. He is unsure whether changing weather patterns or declining soil quality may be to blame, or perhaps something else. “I don’t know if it’s because of God or if it’s our own fault,” he said.

As the forest to the north is overtaken by oil palm plantations, there are fewer wild deer and boar to hunt and the large catches of river fish have dwindled, he said.

“Then the family grew,” said Mr. Caal, whose one-room dirt-floor wooden house is the center of the family’s activity. At one end, the women cook over an open wood stove. The family eats at a long wooden table.

Family members gathered there agreed that it has become harder to get by.

“There is no space, no opportunity,” said José Manuel Caal Cuz, 33, Domingo Caal’s eldest son.

And there is scant help from the government, which has little money to spend. Guatemala’s government collects a smaller share of tax revenues, relative to the size of its economy, than any other country in the world, according to the World Bank.

Still, a few services do make their way to San Antonio Secortez. When a traveling nurse, Arnoldo Quib Che, made his monthly visit on Monday to check on the village’s children and pregnant women, Ms. Maquin brought in her 6-month-old daughter, Angela, Jakelin’s sister, concerned about the baby’s slight fever.

Although almost 50 percent of Guatemala’s children are malnourished, in San Antonio Secortez babies are breast-fed and there is no money for junk food. Families eat mostly what they raise themselves, including chicken and eggs, said Deysi Amarilis Alvarado, an auxiliary nurse.

Jakelin’s medical records, brought out by Ms. Alvarado, show the girl had been growing normally.

Despite her grief, Ms. Maquin does not want her husband to come home and help her raise the couple’s three remaining children: Audel, 9, Elvis, 5, and Angela. Mr. Caal is staying at a migrant shelter in El Paso, while the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office conducts Jakelin’s autopsy.

In a statement, the Border Patrol said its agents had done “everything in their power” to care for Jakelin. A White House official said the Trump administration, which was blasted this year over its treatment of migrant children, was not responsible for the girl’s death.

Jakelin’s father has disputed an earlier statement by the Border Patrol that the girl had not eaten or drunk for days on her trip across the border. Ms. Maquin is angry at suggestions that the couple did not care properly for their daughter.

Over the past few days, she consented to photos and interviews because, she said, she hoped it would help her husband win the right to stay and work in the United States.

Ms. Maquin sees no other route out of her poverty — now increased by their debt to the smuggler who took her husband and Jakelin to the border. The family will not say how much they paid, but Mr. Castro estimated it at between $5,000 to $10,000.

Ms. Maquin said her husband had not decided to make the trip lightly.

“He had been talking about going for awhile,” she said. “The land here just isn’t enough.”