Reuters news agency correspondent Delphine Schrank filed this report on the Central American migrant caravan in Mexico in late October. It provides a glimpse of the migrants’ daily life on the trail they have been following for weeks…//
PIJIJIAPAN, Mexico — Just past 4 a.m., under a star-streaked sky, the Central American migrants shouldered their bags and picked over broken sidewalks — first as a trickle, then as a flood — to the edge of the Mexican town.
They walked straight, without hesitation. Few spoke much. Their compass point was north, towards the United States.
Their goal for the day was Pijijiapan. The town, 30 miles away, was the next stop on a trek by thousands in a caravan that has so enraged U.S. President Donald Trump he has threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border and slash aid to Central America.
Honduran boys Adonai, 5, and Denzel, 8, set off from Mapastepec still fogged with sleep. Their mother, Glenda Escobar, 33, clutched her youngest’s hand. Her friend, Maria, held onto Denzel’s T-shirt.
No-one had a flashlight. Potholes were treacherous. Only the floodlights of the odd truck in the opposite lane of the highway helped them see a few feet at a time.
Within minutes, a young man lay on his back, hugging his knee to his chest. He’d smashed his ankle on a rock, he said, and was in too much pain to stand. The single mother and her boys strode past, keeping pace with the long train of people.
Her ultimate destination: Los Angeles, a city where she knows no one. “It’s because in my dreams, God told me that’s where he’s sending me,” she said.
Trump, who campaigned against illegal immigration to win the 2016 U.S. presidential vote, has seized on this caravan in the run-up to the Nov. 6 mid-term congressional elections, firing up support for his Republican Party.
Yet its members make up a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people who every year flee violence and poverty in Central America for the United States.
Estimates on the size of the caravan vary from around 3,500 to more than double that. Some migrants have abandoned the journey, deterred by the hardships or the possibility of making a new life in Mexico. Others joined it in southern Mexico.
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