Gangs Drive Thousands of Central American Youngsters to Run for Their Lives Ioan Grillo - The UN Refugee Agency
go to original December 8, 2016

A group of Salvadoran children play and watch television at a shelter for asylum refugees in Chiapas, Mexico (UNHCR/Markel Redondo)

The two members of the Barrio 18 street gang waited until 15-year-old Maribel’s* parents were out and then called at the family home in the outskirts of San Salvador. When she answered the door, they told her they were going to rape her.

“They were shouting about what they were going to do to me. I managed to use all my strength to push the door shut on them. They were still outside shouting when I called my dad,” recalls Maribel.

These were no empty threats. Members of the murderous street gangs, or maras, have killed girls, and even their parents, for refusing their advances.

When her father, a security guard, got home he realized that it was no longer safe for his teenage daughter to be in the neighborhood, and fled with the family to another department in western El Salvador.

“I was terrified,” she recalls.

Maribel is among a soaring number of children and adolescents running for their lives from worsening violence in Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Read the rest at UNHCR

Related: Girls Under 12 Most at Risk of Getting Pregnant by Rape in El Salvador According to U.N. Study (The Costa Rica Star)

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