Figures on the geography of fear: The relationship between violence

National perception averages are usually misleading because violence tends to have a very unequal geographical distribution within a country. Although Guatemala and El Salvador—with 39.9 and 41.2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively—appear far removed from the scythe-bearing Grim Reaper hovering over Honduras, it should be borne in mind that the homicide rates in the three countries’ capitals are all very high and not so different: 116.6 in Guatemala City (2010), 102.2 in Tegucigalpa (2011) and 89.9 in San Salvador (2011).⁴ It is therefore reasonable to suppose that many Salvadorans and Guatemalans also emigrate to escape violence, and that national averages dissimulate an unequal distribution of that violence.

As for Honduras, prioritizing a territorially balanced sample in the surveys could cover up the fact that violence is concentrated in what drug trafficking-related jargon terms “hotspots.” For this reason, a sample in which San Pedro Sula, located in the northern coastal area, is considered only relative to its demographic weight and not its victimization levels and weight in the migratory flow will produce an incomplete image of the specter of violence and its influence on migrations.

For the third consecutive year, San Pedro Sula nailed its position as the world’s most violent city in 2013 with 187 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.⁵ Considered Honduras’ economic capital, San

1 Hiskey, 2014, p.3.

2 BBC Mundo, 2014.

3 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2014, p.126.

4 Ibíd., p.146.

5 Ortega, 2014.

Pedro Sula hit first place in 2011 with 125 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and remained there in 2012 with an increase to 174 homicides. Its reputation has earned it sinister headlines in internationally circulating newspapers: “San Pedro Sula convulsed with violence,” “Seven at night, the most dangerous time in San Pedro Sula,” “Central America’s kidnap capital,” “An earthly hell called San Pedro Sula,” “A city turned morgue”...

The population couldn’t remain indifferent to San Pedro Sula’s “heating up.” Signs of this include, for example, that 51 of the 238 Honduran migrants (21%) fed at the Kino Border Initiative’s soup kitchen in Nogales in the Mexican state of Sonora between September 2013 and March 2014 were from San Pedro Sula. That is clear over-representation given that projections based on the last census indicate that only 9% of Hondurans live in that city.¹ There’s a correlation between this over-representation and another, according to 2005 data: 27% of the total arms registered in Honduras were located in San Pedro Sula.² Yet another sign of the correlation between violence and migration explained by the geography of fear is the fact that the most Hondurans attended by the Kino Border Initiative come from the most violent departments identified by Honduran sociologist Julieta Castellanos in 2011 based on the number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants: Atlántida (149), Cortés (127), Copán (114), Colón (103), Ocotepeque y Yoro (97) and Francisco Morazán (88).³

Another reason national public opinion or even victimization averages require a disaggregated analysis to establish their impact on migrations is the very diverse distribution of victimization and risks by sex and age groups, which the following figures for El Salvador evidence clearly: in 2005, the general death rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 392 for males between the ages of 15 and 29 in El Salvador, compared to 84 for females of the same age range. This difference is more pronounced when the homicide rates for that age range are examined: El Salvador’s overall homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 62.2 for the same year, but for males it was 223 and for females only 20.⁴⁵ In Honduras, all we know is that young men and women between the ages of 15 and 24 accounted for 25.7% of the total homicide victims in 2007.⁶

1 Estimates for 2010. Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2001

2 Registro Nacional de Armas de la Dirección General de Investigación Criminal. Quoted by CIPRODEH, n.d.

3 Castellanos, n.d.

4 CEPAL, 2008, pp.54 y 57.

5 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, p.126.

6 CEPAL, 2008, p.91.

Homicides throughout Latin America are concentrated among young people between the ages of 15 and 29, which is the same age range of those who migrate most.¹ But that doesn’t mean that only youths or even only young men have violence-related motives for emigrating.

Violence doesn’t only have the face of a hit man with a revolver in his hand. It also has the face of a rapist, very occasionally superimposed over that of a youth gang member and far more often camouflaged beneath the “protective” visage of a father, stepfather, cousin or uncle. Or else it has the face of a pimp, in which case girls and female adolescents are its most frequent victims, although it can be suspected that machismo gags any accusations from boys.

In El Salvador, most victims of abuse and commercial sexual exploitation are females aged 10-17 years old.² In Honduras, a daily average of two cases of the rape of under-14s was registered in 2010 in Tegucigalpa alone.³ Of the cases reported the following year—as always a small proportion of those actually committed—only 31% ended up investigated by the public prosecutor.⁴ The picture for Guatemala is very similar, where a report by Médecins Sans Frontières says that 93% of rape survivors cared for in 2011 were female and 64% were 12- to 17-year-olds for whom the rape was their first sexual experience.⁵

These are precisely the ages of the unaccompanied minors arriving in such large numbers in the USA. In other words, they are the demographic dividend in which the technocrats place such vaunted and vain hopes.⁶ And given that the Central American countries are “heating up,”

they are moving away in search of “cooler” places. My conclusion regarding the underestimation of the relationship between migration and violence is that national percentages can’t be used to weight variables being correlated with migration. Migration is a phenomenon whose actors don’t represent the national averages, but rather have a certain profile being chiseled out by the multiple faces of violence and certain opportunities.

When survey-takers armed with questionnaires containing variables that aren’t mutually exclusive press the migratory subjects themselves to exclusively identify a simplifying reason for having left their country, it puts them in a real predicament. Among the emigrants cared for by the Kino Border Initiative in a seven-month period starting in September 2013, only between 4% and 7% said they migrated due to violence. The rest focused on lack of work and family reunification.

1 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, p.28.

2 Consejo Nacional de la Niñez y de la Adolescencia, 2013, pp.81-82.

3 Silvestrucci, 2010.

4 Casa Alianza, 2013, p.37.

5 Médicos Sin Fronteras, 2011.

6 ECLAC, 2008, pp.143-169.

But my long one-on-one conversations with young migrants there showed me a repeated archetypal story: the plan to be reunited with a mother who has been living for years in Los Angeles or Maryland because in Guatemala or Honduras they’re more likely to get a bullet in the head like other people they knew than to get a decent job, which almost nobody they knew ever ends up with. These three motivations—to avoid violence, find employment and reunite the family—can coexist in the same emigrant. Sometimes motives are so tightly braided they’re interwoven into a single strand, as observed by Jeremy Slack, a researcher at the University of Arizona, who often finds it nearly impossible to clearly delimit the motivations. For example extortion—the various “taxes” different groups charge back home for “protection” or other

“services”—overlaps both violence and economics.¹

While some downplay violence as a motivation for the migration of Central Americans, other sources corroborate the current link. Based on a survey of 404 unaccompanied 12- to 14-year-old migrants in the custody of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, the UNHCR report “Children on the run” revealed that 44% of the Hondurans said they had been threatened by or were direct victims of armed criminals, including youth gang members, cartels and thieves. The same was true for 66% of the Salvadorans who, like the 35% of Salvadorans attended by the Kino Border Initiative, could well have come from San Salvador, El Salvador’s most violent city.² The method UNHCR used to establish the link between violence and migration is obviously more effective than the sophisticated statistical models of Americas Barometer Insights. UNHCR gathered the testimonies of people who had already migrated rather than the perception of people still in the country expressing migratory intentions.

Moreover, its design encompasses the plurality of motives for migrating.