Where are our children?

This post is also available in: Spanish

One could respond to this title in many different ways. Some might respond metaphorically, or else by thinking of the positions—of power, participation, or consultation—that children occupy in communities of faith and society in general. But in starting my reflection with this question, I’m asking literally: physically and geographically, where are our children?  

To help answer this question, I want to think about two stories that have had a significant effect on me personally, as well as on the life of the Christian community. These stories detail the way in which the lives of two different people were saved—two people who, in turn, saved the Jewish people from slavery and humanity from sin.

What these two stories have in common is the persecution and massacre of children by those in positions of power: Pharaoh in Exodus 1 and 2, and Herod in Matthew 2. In both stories, Pharaoh and Herod did what they did for a reason. Their goal, when faced with the threat of revolt from those they oppressed, was to stamp out any and all hope for freedom, and in so doing, they set in motion a system of death in their attempts to eliminate that hope for those exhausted by submission to the physical and economic slavery that, in Jesus’s time, was all too often condoned by religious leaders.

In the Exodus story, the vigilance of Moses’s sister Miriam allowed her to rescue her brother and hide him in a place where the swords of Pharaoh’s men could not reach him. In the New Testament story, Matthew recounts Joseph and Mary’s flight from the violence of Herod’s soldiers, as they emigrated to Egypt to protect the life of their child. Later, they moved again to Nazareth, where the child Jesus could grow up without the threat of violence and death.

Both of these iconic stories end with a renewed hope for the oppressed, and both are stories that continue to this day.

Between 2013 and 2014, US Customs and Border Patrol detained a record number of unaccompanied migrants, children who had fled violence and poverty, seeking to rejoin their families in the US. According to the statistics, 68,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, arrived at the US border and were returned to their countries of origin between October 2013 and September 2014. The word “arrived” here is key, because no one knows exactly how many died on the way, or else fell victim to abandonment, kidnapping, gang recruitment, or the other realities of life between home and the border.

Many of these children arrived without even a family member’s contact information. Although the arrival of unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico border is nothing new, the sheer numbers combined with the hardening of US border controls and low capacity for response in the sending countries resulted in the collapse of the organizations, weakened by years of corruption and neglect, that should have been safeguarding these children’s rights, leaving them even more vulnerable than before.

From 2018 to the present day, Central America and Mexico have been faced with another strong migrant movement, this time in the form of caravans distinguished by the movement over land of thousands of people walking together to the US-Mexico border, also mainly from the countries that make up the Central American Northern Triangle. It’s been estimated that at least 15% of those traveling in the caravans have been children and adolescents.

While the practice of traveling in large groups has existed for years, the number of people and the frequency of the caravans increased significantly in 2018. According to the International Organization for Migration, many choose to migrate with a caravan because they believe travelling in groups will better protect them against crime, facilitate access to assistance from government and NGOs, and will cost them less money, as it’s not necessary to pay a “coyote.” In the caravans, children might travel with acquaintances, alone, or together with their families, including pregnant women. Regardless of who they’re traveling with, children remain the population most vulnerable to the dangers of dehydration and exhaustion due to a lack of nutritious food and a long journey. UNICEF spokesperson Marixie Mercado declared at the time that the practices of separating children from their families and detaining migrants are profoundly traumatizing for children and often have long-term effects on their lives. For this reason, they have urged governments in transit countries to seek out alternatives to detention that allow migrant families to remain together. 

In Mexico, the mothers and families of the disappeared are asking themselves, “Where are they? Where are they? Our children, where are they?” According to official data from SEGOB, Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior, between the 1960s and 2019 a total of 61,637 people have gone missing, of which 11,072 are children and adolescents. But families searching for their relatives know that these figures aren’t an accurate reflection of reality. Many disappearances are never reported to the authorities, whether out of fear, lack of trust, or lack of information. As a result, it’s almost impossible to discern the true magnitude of the problem.

2006 was a turning point for disappearances, dividing the phenomenon into a “before” and an “after”. This was the year that then-president Felipe Calderon’s “war on drugs,” a US-supported militarized crackdown on drug trafficking, began. Violence, corruption, and abuse of power skyrocketed, causing serious damage to the social fabric of the country. Whereas disappearances happened during the so-called “dirty war” of the ’60s and ’70s for political reasons, now it’s not just social leaders, political activists, or members of insurgent groups being disappeared, but all kinds of people, including children and adolescents. According to statistics presented by the Network for the Rights of Childhood in Mexico (REDIM by its initials in Spanish), from 2006 until April of 2018, 6,614 children and adolescents disappeared; 1,537 disappeared during Calderon’s administration (2006-2012), while 4,980 disappeared during the administration of Calderon’s successor Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018).

Today, as families continue their search accompanied by people and organizations in solidarity, these 11,072 children are present in their homes in the form of a photo with their name, the date of their disappearance, their age at the time of their disappearance, and their community of origin. In many cases, these photos have been circulated widely throughout Mexico by local, state, and national search brigades which have been organized and lead by the families themselves since the 60s due to the lack of response from the Mexican state to the families’ demands for truth, justice, and an end to the violence. Families find in themselves and in the union with their brothers and sisters the hope of finding their children and bringing them home, alive or dead.

As we think back to the Biblical stories and to the realities of life in Latin America during the last decade, seeking dialogue and the voice of God in these experiences, a clear common truth emerges: this system of death is still in action, and it is still snatching away the lives of our children and our adolescents.

This is the system that forces children to leave their homes in search of safety and a better life, to escape persecution, recruitment, and death, be it by organized crime or by poverty. And this is only the part we can see—behind these social problems lies the urge to dominate, to strip people of their resources, miring ourselves in a dehumanizing logic in which capital, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and hegemony destroy everything in their path: the earth, natural resources, people and their dreams.

So I ask again, but more specifically this time: to the church, where are our sons? Where are our daughters?

Will we be like Miriam and Mary and Joseph, and become defenders of life? Or will we retreat into passivity, allowing ourselves to become nothing more than a club of privileged families, forgetting our call to act?

As the church, because of our inspiration and tradition, we have an enormous social debt. We have forgotten who we must think about first, and we have remained silent. We have allowed ourselves to believe that those children that Jesus blessed and embraced, saying “theirs is the Kingdom of God” (Mark 10:13-16) are limited to the children of the privileged, to the traditional family, to the able-bodied, and we have excluded those who diverge from this perfect image of childhood.

The church must look outside itself to the families outside the church building, and go out to meet them rather than trying to attract them to us—especially those in need. We must be a church without walls, that makes itself relevant to the social realities of Latin America. Enrique Pinedo notes that “more than thirty times the Bible makes reference to orphans, the majority alongside two other social groups: widows and foreigners (who in certain translations are referred to as ‘immigrants’ or ‘refugees’). So abundant are the Biblical references to these three social groups that the Church must take them extremely seriously in its mission.”

All children are models of those who will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 18:1-5) and need to be protected, seen as subjects, and encouraged to participate in communities that welcome and value them, where hope overcomes the system of death.

To value our children is to safeguard the abundant life of those around us and, especially, those who suffer, encouraging a wholistic well-being in which they feel not only safe, but supported by a community of economic, emotional, and physical support. The church must be a space where they can be both children and full participants in the house of the Lord, where they can be both seen and heard in all the freedom that Jesus has given them by centering them and making them models of a kingdom that we as adults must learn to reach.

Ilich Avilés Ramírez is a Nicaraguan psychologist currently living in Mexico City, where he works with MCC partner Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos (Center for Ecumenical Studies) as part of a team accompanying families in search of their disappeared relatives.