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Shannon Young profiles a shelter that helps Central America immigrants as they make their way through Mexico to the US border.

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KATY CLARK:  Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.  Several countries in Central America are hardly better off.  Poverty is the main reason many Central Americans decide to head north in search of better opportunities.  Even before they reach the U.S. border, undocumented migrants face a dangerous trip through Mexico.  There’s little support for the migrants along the way except for a network of shelters in key spots.  Shannon Young visited one shelter in southern Mexico.

SHANNON YOUNG:  The shelter is called Hermanos en el Camino, or Brothers on the Road.  It’s in Ciudad Ixtapec in Oaxaca.  And it’s one of the few places in southern Mexico where Central American migrants can find a free meal, a safe place to sleep and someone willing to defend them.  Father Alejandro Solalinde is the Catholic priest who runs the shelter.  He says the shelter offers protection first of all.  But also emotional support and some legal help.  The staff asks migrants if they’ve suffered any kind of abuse or violence during their journey and if so, offers to file a criminal complaint on their behalf.  Right now, they’ve been helping migrants who were the victims of an ambush last month near the Oaxaca Chiapa state line.  Dalila Consuelo Linares from El Salvador was in that group.  She says they were riding on a cargo train when the trouble started.

INTERPRETER:  About two and a half hours after we left we were stopped by the Federal Police.  Everyone started running.  But they caught some of us and the police took our valuables.  When they let us go they told us not to walk along the main road, but to stay along the train tracks, so we did.  And further up the tracks we were ambushed by robbers.  They took what was left, hit people, killed a few and raped some of us.

YOUNG: Linares herself was raped.  She and others have filed criminal complaints, but these complaints can take months to resolve.  Victimized migrants often prefer to keep moving north without stopping to document abuses.  Others who have taken refuge at the shelter have their own stories.  Ricardo Hernandez from Honduras says he was deported from the northern Mexican border city of Matamoros because he couldn’t pay the asking price of a bribe.

RICARDO HERNANDEZ:  I had like $150.00 and the immigration when he caught me he say he wanted me to give him $500.00.  And I didn’t have the $500.00 so I told him I got $150.00 can you help me out and let me go?  But he say no, I can’t do nothing.  If you don’t have the $500.00 we’re going to have to send you back.  So I say go ahead and do it then because I don’t have no $500.00 so they sent me back.

YOUNG: Hernandez says this is his fifth attempt to re-enter the U.S. after his work place in North Carolina was raided and he was deported.  He says he has two U.S. born daughters, but before they can reunite, Hernandez has to finish crossing Mexico.  Shelters like the one in Ixtapec are a God send.  In the shelter’s kitchen Salvador and Alcides Ramirez is hard at work with a handful of other volunteers.  The kitchen relies largely on donations from the local market to provide three meals a day for the shelter’s fluctuating population.  As he peels a crate of potatoes, Ramirez explains that on a slow day the kitchen prepares meals for 50 people, but that tonight they are expecting a train with an estimated 500 people aboard.  The Ixtapec shelter receives a phone call from the shelter in Arriaga Chiapas whenever a train leaves along with an approximate head count of the migrants aboard.  Those in Ixtapec do the same for the shelter in Medias Aguas, Veracruz, which is the next stop along the way.  In his years of operating the shelter, Father Alejandro Solalinde has grown skeptical of law enforcement institutions operating in this part of Mexico.  But he continues to encourage victimized migrants to file complaints in the hopes that honest people within the institutions will respond.  He says if crimes against migrants don’t stop now, Mexico will have a harder and harder time defending it’s sovereignty from organized crime.  That’s a reference to the drug cartels and their efforts to control the migrant smuggling market in southern Mexico.  Father Solalinde warns that the rule of law is at a tipping point in Oaxaca and a key factor is how Mexican authorities react to the abuses reported by Central American migrants.  For The World, I’m Shannon Young in Oaxaca.

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