From Migrants To Refugees: An In-Depth Look At The New Plight Of Central Americans

Oscar Martinez, a journalist from El Salvador, has spent years documenting the up close and personal stories of migrants, street gangs, and organized crime in Central America. In this longform special (available in English and Spanish), a partnership between El Salvador's El Faro and Univision, Martinez profiles Central American migrants who are applying for asylum in Mexico, fleeing violence in their home countries. It is an hour-long read, but you can also hear a narration by Melvin Félix.

From the get-go, he writes that in 2017 "an estimated 20,000 people will request asylum in Mexico – almost all migrants from the north of Central America. It’s a request to live… a by-product of the daily violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala". He is right. But he goes beyond the headlines and the statistics to try to understand the refugees arriving in Mexico from one of the most violent regions of the world.

He visits a migrant home in the Tabasco state, several youth shelters in Mexico City, and chronicles the particular perils girls and women face on their journey across the country. For many of the characters in the special, Mexico is no longer a transit country, but a destination — and one that is ill-equipped to guarantee the basic human rights of those arriving. Among migrants and their support networks, there is a growing sense that an increasingly difficult journey northwards may have prompted the recent spike in asylum applications, according to the piece. At the same time, more Central Americans have been deported from Mexico than are granted asylum status. This is their story, a plunge into the cold waters that many people just south of the United States face daily.