Baby separated from his migrant father returns to Honduras

San Pedro Sula, Honduras .- A child a year old who became an icon of the US government's policy of separating immigrants from their Friday, he was returning home with his parents, five months after he was separated from them at the US border.

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Johan Bueso Montecinos He was on board a plane for San Pedro Sula, Honduras, which he was shipped to the United States after the consular authorities of Honduras and the United States had made the necessary arrangements.

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And so ends the extraordinary journey of Johan, a baby whose short life spent in poverty in Honduras desperately crossing the US border to the front page of newspapers of the world.

Captured by border police officers almost at the time of his arrival, Johan's father was deported. And the 10-month-old boy stayed in an Arizona shelter in the custody of the US government. In the five months that followed, he made his first steps, said his first words, was celebrating his first birthday. His parents, hundreds of miles away, would miss everything.

When his mother and father saw him for the last time, he had two small teeth . Now, his prosthesis is complete .

In early July, Johan appeared before an immigration judge. An Associated Press report on this event, obscuring the judge's concern about taking care of the little baby in baby bottle diapers provoked international outrage because he personified the Donald Trump government's policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. 19659002] "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 would not grow up in the same poverty that he had to bear, 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 He left the coffee producing mountains of central Honduras to go to the United States and went to Maryland with his wife and children. His sister followed him and he did as well. The older brother died in a shootout from a moving car in San Pedro Sula, one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America.

Rolando stayed with his wife Adalicia Montecinos and her 35-year-old disabled sister in her pink two-bedroom house with a cement floor and a laminate roof. I've earned $ 10 a day while driving a bus; his brother in the United States sent hundreds of dollars to help him.

Rolando, a man of good will who did not sit long, was aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. Many Central Americans died by jumping trains or were kidnapped by gangs, robbed or attacked with guns while they were traveling to the United States.

He paid a trafficker $ 6000, he said, the 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 five suits, three jackets, a blue and white blanket, cream, 50 layers, two bottles and cans of infant formula.

His wife, in the first trimester of pregnancy, would stay behind, working at a market stall selling Nike baseball caps, t-shirts with prints and California Dreaming 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 beautiful plan began to collapse.

The "coyote" took them to a cellar in the port city and asked them to stay in a caravan full of other relatives and children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru.

Rolando says his son spent three days were stuck in the trailer, shaking because of the cold breeze coming from a noisy machine that, they were told, would give them air for breathe. Buckets were used 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; Under the light of a flashlight, he changed his diapers.

"They took us as meat, but it's not one that will decide, we had to do what they told us," Rolando said.

In the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, they boarded a makeshift raft. Rio Grande or Rio Grande, as we know 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 his good 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 would sleep on a mattress under a thin, isolated blanket that had them been handed over.

Rolando said that he had to ask for three days to be allowed to take a shower Johan

On the fifth day, the immigration officers told Rolando that they should be there. take them to an office to be interviewed. One of the officers took Johan from his arms. As they walked away, the baby turned around and raised his arms to his father.