Tijuana, Mexico – Marina figured if she stayed in Venezuela, her life would be short. Maybe special security forces would kill her. Maybe the military. Maybe the police. Speaking out against the administration of Nicolás Maduro, she feared, would be a death sentence.
“One way or another, they are going to kill you,” she said. “I prefer to leave before they come to kill me.”
Marina felt she and her family had no choice but to flee. Escaping Venezuela was only the start of her troubles, though.
Marina — who asked that her full name be withheld — embarked on the perilous trek many migrants and asylum seekers take: up through Central America to the border with the United States.
There, she hoped her family would find a better life. What happened on the road, however, would leave two of her children with lasting scars.
In the tangled jungles of the Darién Gap, a sliver of land connecting Colombia to Panama, an armed gang captured their travelling party.
“We were separated, men on one side and women on the other,” Marina said. She recalled that gang members started pulling some women out of the group. “That’s when they took my two girls.”
The rest of the family was left behind, helpless. Marina understood that her teenage daughters — one 12, the other 14 — were being sexually assaulted in the recesses of the forest.
“They brought one back after about half an hour, but the youngest one took an hour,” she told media.
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