Under-age and on the move

A FEW weeks ago Helen Yovanna Mata, a 16-year-old Honduran girl, turned up at Corinto, a scruffy crossing on the border with Guatemala, with a backpack and a few papers. Two of the papers were death threats scribbled in scratchy ballpoint, another was a school document validating her story. One of the notes said: “We’re not kidding. You now have seven days [to leave]. We don’t want to hurt you, but you have to believe us. Death.” It was signed “M18”, the name of a violent Central American street gang. Honduran officials let her through to Guatemala, her first stop on an arduous journey north to the United States. No one knows if she got there.

Rising numbers of children are following in Helen’s footsteps. Corinto is abuzz with wiry, menacing men carrying dirty wads of banknotes who arrange for coyotillos—local kids turned people-smugglers—to lead migrants without passports through the subtropical hills into Guatemala. Since early this year, the vast majority of those migrants have been youngsters themselves, sometimes travelling alone, sometimes accompanied by their mothers. At night, when the coyotillos...