CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — The flow of Central American immigrants bound for the United States has surged 25% or more this year, say government and aid agency officials, who point to a sharp climb in deportations, injury reports and need for assistance as the basis for their estimates.
Confronted with increasingly bleak economies in their home countries and rising gang violence, the immigrants, many of them young, are heading north through Mexico at a rate that Mexican and Honduran authorities agree has gone through the roof.
Alex Pacheco, the Honduran consul in the Mexican border city of Tapachula, about 20 miles north of here, says the number of stranded, broke and injured Hondurans he has helped is up 30% from when he arrived in late 2003.
"There is no reason to hide it. It's grown at an exaggerated pace," said Pacheco, who thinks the workload and the tales of woe have aged him prematurely. "The reason is simple: The majority of the countries they come from are in big trouble."
One such immigrant is Marlon David. The 18-year-old Honduran was interviewed as he waited to hop the northbound Chiapas-Mayab railroad line here with about 200 other youths. Neither police nor railroad officials made any apparent effort to stop them from hitching rides atop empty boxcars and fuel tankers.
His goal: to earn money in Florida and send it back to his mother.
"Necessity forces me to go," David said, adding that there was no work in his hometown, Tegucigalpa. He had crossed over into Mexico that morning from Guatemala.
"My mother has heart problems and can't afford the medicine."
Immigration experts estimate that Central and South Americans make up less than 2% of all those who illegally cross the United States' southern border. The vast majority of illegal immigrants to the U.S. are Mexicans -- nearly half a million per year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Even with the increase, the number of Central Americans entering Mexico in hopes of making it to the U.S. is still a "drop in the bucket" compared to Mexican migrants, said migrant advocate Claudia Smith of Oceanside, Calif.
But the percentage of Central Americans among illegal workers in the United States is slowly rising, if deportations are an indicator, said Andy Adame, spokesman for the Border Patrol in Tucson. The number of Central and South Americans caught and deported from his region rose to 1.7% of all those apprehended from 1.5% a year ago. Adame said the vast majority were from Central America.
