El Salvador Committee For Dead And Missing Migrants Champions Rights Of Those Returning South

[Derechos]

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Hiding in the bushes, 17-year-old Marcelo Larin watched in terror as attackers raped a fellow migrant, a Guatemalan woman, near her naked, unconscious and machete-wounded husband.

Larin wasn't the only witness to the violence that day more than five years ago in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Other Central American migrants were also quietly waiting out the attack until they could rescue the Guatemalan couple. They finally helped the pair to a nearby highway and loaded them into a passing police car.

Larin is now back in his native El Salvador where he goes by the handle "Marcelo the Migrant" and spreads an urgent message to others thinking of trying their luck in the U.S.: Don't go, at least not without legal permission.

"When I'm in the schools, I talk as a kind of prevention," said Larin, now 22. "It's difficult to find opportunities in El Salvador, but there are some."

He works with the nonprofit Committee for Dead and Missing Migrants of El Salvador, which is the first of its kind in this Central American country, championing the rights of those who have survived and returned from the dangerous journey north.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/14/el-salvador-immigrants_n_898712.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Derechos, thanks for posting this article. It's a lot to absorb.

Will be thinking about it long after reading it.