A Cemetery without Tombstones or Epitaphs

[Judi Lynn]

A Cemetery without Tombstones or Epitaphs
By Danilo Valladares*

GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 6, 2010 (IPS) - With a backpack full of dreams, Gelder Lizardo Boche, a 17-year-old from Guatemala, set out for the United States on Aug. 9 from his hometown of San Antonio La Paz, with two brothers-in-law.

The bodies of Boche, 22-year-old Gilmar Morales, and 24-year-old Hermelindo Maquin were identified among the 72 victims of the massacre committed on Aug. 23 far from Guatemala, in the municipality of San Fernando in northeast Mexico. The killings have been blamed on the Los Zetas drug cartel.

But the families of the three young Guatemalan men at least found out what happened to their sons, were able to identify them and are waiting for their bodies to be sent home.

Thousands of Latin American migrants, mainly from Central America, die of thirst and exposure in the desert or at the hands of youth gangs or drug traffickers every year, without anyone ever finding out what happened to them.

Authorities in Mexico estimate that more than 10,000 migrants were kidnapped between September 2009 and February 2010.

Maximina Barrientos, a 48-year-old Honduran woman, lives with the anxiety of having a missing daughter. Seven years ago, her daughter Irene left her home town of Texiguat, in the southeastern Guatemalan province of El Paraíso, in search of the American dream.

Barrientos warned her daughter not to go "because she left behind a son, who is now 12 and needs her. But she left because here she had no options," she tells IPS.

"Three years ago she called and told me she was ok, that she was in Ciudad Juárez (in Mexico), but I never heard from her again," Barrientos adds, tears welling up in her eyes.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52739

From what "dictator" are these people "fleeing?" Do Guatemalan citizens flee President Colom? Are Mexican people on the run because of Felipe Calderon?

Our right-wing seems to believe all these many people have no right to leave their home countries to find work elsewhere, and they should stay there, but Cubans HAVE to come here because they are "fleeing" from their government. That's why we have to make available to them, through the Cuban Adjustment a smorgasbord of advantages over even Native American citizens: instant work visas, instant legal status, green card, instant access to social security, welfare, food stamps, Section 8 HOUSING, medical treatment, and financial assistance for their educations, all at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.

All others, should they make it across the desert, survive drowning in the various water barriers from California to Texas, may easily still be murdered by vicious, rabid racists once they get here, if they aren't spotted, thrown into jail, then deported first.