Tag Archives: Central America

Magnitude 7 offshore quake shakes Central America, no damage seen

People play at La Pazon beach after a tsunami warning was lifted following a 7.0 magnitude undersea earthquake off the Pacific Coast of Central America, in La Libertad, El Salvador,

By Nelson Renteria

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – A strong earthquake off the Pacific Coast of Central America shook the region on Thursday just as a hurricane barreled into the Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, but there were no immediate reports of any quake damage.

Emergency services in El Salvador said on Twitter it had received no reports of damage at a national level, but urged those living along the country’s Pacific coast to withdraw up to 1 kilometer (0.62 mile) away from the shore.

The 7.0 magnitude quake, initially reported as a magnitude 7.2, was very shallow at 10.3 kilometers (6.4 miles) below the seabed, which would have amplified its effect.

Its epicenter was located some 149 km (93 miles) south-southwest of Puerto Triunfo in El Salvador, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center warned that tsunami waves of up to 1 meter (3 feet) could hit the Pacific coasts of Nicaragua and El Salvador after the quake, but later said that available data showed the threat had passed.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega declared a state of emergency due to the quake and Hurricane Otto, which landed on the country’s southeastern coast earlier on Thursday, his spokeswoman said.

“We were serving lunch to the lawmakers and the earthquake started and we felt that it was very strong,” said Jacqueline Najarro, a 38-year-old food seller at the Congress in San Salvador. “We were scared.”

Earlier on Thursday, the Category 2 Hurricane Otto hit land near the southeastern coast of Nicaragua, where thousands had already been evacuated away from vulnerable coastal areas and into shelters.

(Additional reporting by Sofia Menchu in Guatemala, Gustavo Palencia in Honduras and Ivan Castro in Nicaragua; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Sandra Maler and Simon Gardner)

Victims of Gang Violence in Central America flee home to survive

By Anastasia Moloney

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Children and women whose husbands were killed in front of them are among the growing numbers of people fleeing gang violence in Central America, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said, as it urged governments to do more to identify and protect refugees.

Every year, gang violence drives tens of thousands of people from their homes in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – countries with the world’s highest murder rates.

Most head to the United States in the hope of refuge and a better life.

UNHCR said the number of refugees and asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras reached 109,800 in 2015 – a more than five-fold increase over the past three years.

“People who saw husbands shot in front of their eyes. People who don’t want their children to be drawn into gangs. It’s a very strong system of repression and exploitation imposed by organized criminal groups that makes violence a key reason why people flee,” said Volker Turk, UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner for protection.

“They flee extremely precarious situations. The only way for people to save their lives is to flee,” Turk told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the start of a conference in Costa Rica on Central America’s forced displacement problem.

UNHCR said more than 14,600 Hondurans applied for refugee status worldwide in 2015, nearly double the figure in 2014.

The Honduran capital Tegucigalpa and the country’s industrial city of San Pedro Sula have the highest murder rates outside a war zone, UNHCR said last month.

“Some see it as only a migration problem, others see it is a refugee problem. It is both. We increasingly need to see this as a forced displacement issue,” Turk said by telephone on Wednesday.

“It’s growing in numbers, in scope and complexity.”

“UTTER DESPAIR”

Rights groups says governments in Central America have either downplayed or been slow to recognize that violence is the main reason why people are fleeing their homes.

Instead governments tend to list people seeking to be reunited with relatives already living in the United States, poverty and the lack of jobs as the key drivers of migration.

The flow of Central American migrants heading to the United States came under the spotlight in 2014 when nearly 70,000 children traveling alone were caught crossing the U.S. border with Mexico, more than double the number apprehended in 2012.

The children were mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

“One of the features of this particular situation is the fact that there are many more children on the move, unaccompanied minors, which is usually an indication of a survival mechanism, of utter despair,” Turk said.

He said the problem was being neglected as the world’s attention focused on hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from North Africa, and war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq, who have been crossing the Mediterranean into Europe.

Turk called on Mexico and other Latin American countries through which migrants and asylum seekers are likely to pass, to strengthen their asylum services.

“We need to make sure asylum systems, including integration measures are robust, comprehensive and are appropriately equipped so that people who have fled violence have the option to stay in the first country they arrive in,” he said.

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney, Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Advocates puzzled by U.S. response to Central American migrants

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Refugee advocates said on Thursday the Obama administration is sending mixed signals to Central American migrants by deporting families who have fled to the United States while increasing resources in the crime-ridden region for asylum seekers.

Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Wednesday that the United States would work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to expand opportunities for people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to apply for refugee status before coming to the United States.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently conducted raids in the United States on Central American families who had fled the region in an effort to deter others from doing the same.

“That frankly leaves us scratching our heads and leaves us wondering how the administration could be talking about the refugee resettlement issue in such different terms,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, an advocacy organization for children who enter the U.S. immigration system alone.

Young said the families were not given due process before being deported.

The question of what claim Central Americans fleeing violence have to refugee status in the United States comes amid a polarized national debate about the U.S. immigration system.

Some congressional Republicans have said migrants, including refugees from Central America and the Middle East, could threaten public health and national security. More than 140 Democrats in the U.S. House wrote a letter to President Barack Obama condemning the deportation raids.

Refugee and immigration advocates said the administration’s plan to deport Central Americans from the United States while increasing opportunities for them to seek asylum from their own countries wrongfully assumes that those asking for asylum at the border are a threat.

The asylum application process, which can take two years, is unfeasible for families needing to flee violence quickly, said Jen Smyers, associate director of immigration and refugee policy at Church World Service.

Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said the administration’s “border enforcement approach to this issue has been a mistake from the beginning.”

Young said the administration wanted to counter the perception that border is out of control but “I think what they’re going to find out is that the most dangerous political calculation is that the immigrant rights community … are now all unifying and speaking out in strong opposition to this new policy.”

(Reporting by Julia Edwards; Editing by Bill Trott)