TRAFFICKING HERE LINKED TO HONDURAS' WOES

Drug trade appeals to youths who have no other opportunities back home,
says welfare group's director

More young Hondurans could become involved in Vancouver's drug trade as the
economic devastation left by Hurricane Mitch forces even more young people
to leave Honduras in search of illegal work, an expert on Latin American
street children said Wednesday.

"People don't come to Canada to sell drugs because they want to be drug
traffickers," Bruce Harris, executive director of Latin American programs
for the child-welfare group Casa Alianza, told a Vancouver conference. "We
have to take a hard look at why these kids are coming here."

Casa Alianza, the Latin American arm of Covenant House, estimates that over
the past two years, about 250 Honduran teenagers have been brought into
Vancouver to sell crack cocaine.

Many claim refugee status and then sell crack either on the Downtown
Eastside, New Westminster and other stops along the city's SkyTrain route.

The drug trade appeals to Honduran youth, Harris said, because of the
almost total lack of economic opportunities for young people in Honduras.

Speaking at the International Metropolis Conference in Vancouver, a
gathering immigration experts from all over the world, Harris rattled off a
number of troubling facts about the extent of poverty in Central America -
an area where tens of millions of young people are believed to be living on
the streets.

"The average Canadian cat consumes more protein than the average indigenous
child in Guatemala," Harris said.

Virtually no social services exist to help these street children, Harris
said, leading most of them to beg or steal. And with no youth justice
system in place, many young people who commit crimes are simply sent back
to the streets.

Police in Central America have often responded to the problem with
vigilante justice, Harris said.

"The authorities who are supposed to be protecting these children are their
worst enemies," Harris said. "There is systematic, state-sponsored
violence against homeless children in Central America."

Harris' group estimates that in the past 2 1/2 years alone, more than 350
street children have been murdered in Honduras. Of the few cases that are
brought to trial, half are found to have been killed by police, Harris said.

"Is it any wonder that these kids want to run away?"

The problems that already existed in Honduras have been compounded by the
devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch two years ago. The hurricane hit
Honduras the hardest and devastated what little economic infrastructure
existed.

Since the hurricane, Casa Alianza estimates the number of street children
living in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa has grown by more than 25 per
cent.

While the drug trade has received the most attention in Canada, Harris said
thousands of young people from Central America have also been sold into the
sex trade and smuggled into Mexico, the United States and Ontario.

The Honduran government is reluctant to do anything to stop the involvement
of its citizens in the illegal drug and sex trades because, with few
legitimate industries left in Honduras, many Honduran communities have
become economically dependent on the money sent back by relatives abroad.