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SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras (AP) – A baby became emblematic of the policy of the United States Government to separate immigrants from their children on Friday for the weekend. end with their parents Five months after he was separated from them at the US border
Johan arrived by plane to San Pedro Sula, but at first he did not recognize his parents .
"When I spoke to him" Johan, Johan … was crying, "said his mother, Adalicia Montecinos, before bursting into tears." He suffered all that I suffered "
However, after a while, his father won by playing balloon.In the space of one hour, the little one smiled while both parents kissed him in front of a center. where they finished filling out some forms and went home
Thus ends the extraordinary journey of Johan, a baby whose short life has passed through the poverty of Honduras, a desperate passage to the southern border of the United States and the front page of the world's newspapers.
Glad to find her 15-month-old son, but is angry because she's been taken away for a long time.
Captured by border police officers almost at the time of his arrival, Johan's father was deported, and the 10-month-old boy remained in an Arizona shelter under the custody of the US government .
In the five months that followed, he took his first steps, pronounced his first words and celebrated his first birthday. His parents, hundreds of miles away, have lost everything.
The last time they saw him, he had two small teeth. Now, his teeth are complete
In early July, Johan appeared before an immigration judge. An Associated Press report on this event – the obscuration of the judge on how to treat the small prisoner in baby diapers – sparked international outrage because he embodied the politics of the Donald Trump government to separate immigrant children from their parents. 19659013] "I never thought that they were so cruel," said his father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37 years old.
Rolando thought his plan was beautiful. He would escape his difficult life in the small town of Libertad. His children will not grow up in the same poverty that he had to endure when he left elementary school to sell burritos and help his single mother to keep him and his four brothers.
Seven years ago, his younger brother left the coffee producing mountains in central Honduras to go to the United States, and he went on to advance in Maryland with his wife and children .
His sister followed him and he did well. The older brother was killed in a shootout from a moving car in San Pedro Sula, one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America.
Rolando stayed at home with his wife and 35-year-old disabled sister. pink, two bedrooms, cement floor and reed roof. I've earned $ 10 a day while driving a bus; his brother in the United States sent hundreds of dollars to help.
Rolando, a man of goodwill and hardworking who did not stand still for long, was aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. Many Central Americans have died while boarding trains or being extorted by police, or kidnapped, assaulted or killed en route to the United States.
He paid a trafficker $ 6,000, money that his brother sent him. Everything was supposed to be included: hotel nights, three meals a day, and transportation in an SUV with two other mothers and three children to the US border. He packed clothes for the baby, a blue and white blanket, cream, 50 layers, two bottles and boxes of formula.
His wife, in the first trimester of pregnancy, would be left on her market stall selling Nike baseball caps, t-shirts with "California Dreaming" prints and jewelry. In Maryland, her family would help Johan while Rolando was working. Adalicia would meet them a few months later
Father and son arrived in Tampico, Mexico, 500 kilometers from the border with Texas, when their plan began to collapse.
The "coyote" took them to a cellar in the port city and asked them to stay in a caravan with other parents and children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru.
Rolando and his son spent three days locked in the trailer, shaking because of the cold breeze coming from a noisy machine that, they are told, would give them air to breathe. They used buckets as toilets.
While other children were crying, Rolando's son was sitting next to him in silence, remembers the father. They huddled in the darkness; in the light of a flashlight, he changed his diapers.
"They took us as meat, but it's not anyone who will decide, we had to do what they told us," Rolando said. from Reynosa, still in Mexico, they boarded a makeshift raft and crossed the Rio Grande or the Rio Grande, as it is called on the Mexican side. They walked hard through the scrub of Texas. They had done it.
But a few minutes later, a border police officer saw them. "Where are you going?" Said the agent. Rolando's answer was simple and sincere: "We are going to seek the American dream."
The officer told him that he would take them to a detention center and, even then, Rolando did not doubt of his plan. He thought that once he was sued, they would release him with his son to take his case to court. In the worst case, they would be deported together to Honduras.
Inside a cell surrounded by a metal fence, they slept on a mattress under a thin insulating blanket that had been given to them
"
" It was covered with dust, "he said
. On the fifth day, the immigration officers told her that they should take her to an office for questioning. One of the officers took Johan from his arms. As they walked away, the baby turned and raised his arms towards his father
This would be the last time they would see each other in five months.
The agents told Rolando that they were going to separate him from the boy and expel him to Honduras because that was the fourth time he was trying to get in to United States. In all four cases, he was captured almost immediately
"It's criminal," one of the agents told him.
"A criminal is someone who kills, steals, harms people, works and gives opportunities to my children," said Rolando
Rolando spent 22 days locked up in various detention centers along the Texas border He knew nothing about his son
He did not have enough money to call his wife and tell him what 's going on She was a social worker at the Arizona Shelter where Johan contacted her and asked her if she was his mother, and told her to send her birth certificate and her husband. Other documents to prove it
Adalicia could not believe that it was true and she was waiting to hear from her husband Five days later, another inmate lent her money for that he can call it
"Dwarf, that's me," says Rolando
"What happened? Where is the child? "The woman asked while crying.
Rolando broke down
" I do not know what happened, they took me away but all will be fine, "he replied
" How? "She cried," When am I going to see him again? "
She felt very lonely, she would wake up to look for her baby and remember what she was doing. Was still being produced, he was watching videos of Johan again and again, kicking and smiling, laughing with his father and looking at the camera.
When Rolando arrived in Honduras in April, he was surprised to see how thin his wife was.weight (20 pounds) and his doctor worried that he could lose the baby.The first thing she said when she saw her husband was, " Where is the child? "
Rolando explained that at the beginning the immigration authorities had told him that the two would be deported together, so he agreed They told him that his son would be sent in two weeks. But the months pass.
Rolando calls the lawyers, the Honduran consulate and the American authorities to know when his son will return home.
The social worker in the United States starts sending videos each week and making video calls. At first, Johan expanded to touch his mother, as if he wanted to get her through the screen. But over time, he distanced himself
Adalicia thought to forget
. The boy's parents discovered that he had made his first steps for the social worker, who had also sent them a video of him. on his first birthday, when he woke up and started crying. Because of the news of Johan's presentation to a judge, the AP discovered that he had started talking.
"I will never see his first steps, I will not be with him on his first birthday," said Adalicia, her voice broken. "That's what I lost, memories that we appreciate as a mother and we remember to tell their children for many years."
At the hearing, Johan asked for water several times. At one point, he took off his shoes and found himself in socks
Judge John W. Richardson could hardly contain his discomfort from having to ask the child's lawyer if his client understood what was happening.
] "I am ashamed to ask, because I do not know who you would explain it to, unless you believe that a child of one year can learn the laws on immigration, "he told the lawyer
. granted a voluntary departure order with which the government allowed to send by plane to Honduras, back to the pink house with seven hens pecking the ground floor on the outside, with the wood stove on the outside and the cement panel full of water used to empty the toilet.
The father who was waiting for him Friday was inundated with guilt because of the catastrophic failure of his plan. One day, he thinks his son will ask him what happened and why he left it in the United States.
"I'll tell him the truth," he said. "We thought we had a good plan to give him a better life."
Will Rolando design another plan to go to the United States? He only says that he is a fighter and that he will work hard to survive, as he has always done.
But he knows that his life and that of his family will never be the same again.
"They hit something in me," he said. "The child is not to blame, why must he be punished?"
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