Opening eyes to faces of Mexico caravan 'an achievement' for Alberta photographer
A 16-year-old soccer player runs from a gang member who decapitated two of his friends.
A girl, 19, carries her four-year-old daughter hundreds of kilometres to avoid dying like her brother.
A 14-year-old boy travels alone and insists he's not scared, despite leaving his mother in Honduras.
The people at the heart of the Mexico caravan — the thousands fleeing violence and economic instability in Central America — are often lost in the heated political debate around accepting those migrants as refugees in the United States, photographer Brett Gundlock says.
Gundlock, who covers the caravan from Mexico, wants to tell the migrants' stories in a way that the world can understand. He interviewed and photographed travellers in front of a portable white screen that blocked out the busy background of the migrant camps.
The result is a moving photo series in the award-winning online magazine, Mother Jones, accompanied by short interviews with each migrant.
"The violence is a main issue but it's also interconnected with the poverty that exists, the corruption from both the government here in Latin America and from organized crime [that] has really crippled the economy in a lot of areas," Gundlock told the Calgary Eyeopener.
Many of his subjects said they had family members or friends threatened or even murdered for resisting gang member requests, including for bribes to keep their businesses open.
One boy's story struck Gundlock: that of 16-year-old Mainor Isaac Melendez Suazo, an up-and-coming soccer star. He was expected to join the national team, and worked hard at school.
Gang members tried to recruit him and his friends outside the school one day, pressuring them to use marijuana. They resisted, and the gang member later killed his two friends, cutting off their heads.
The gangster then threatened to kill Suazo, so his mother sent him away.
"He jumped on the migrant caravan, and he was just seeing where it was going to take him. So yeah, pretty tragic story," Gundlock said. "I'm really not sure how the rest of his life is going to play out after this."
The striking photos and stories have found their way to Gunlock's own home in southern Alberta. Although he now lives in Mexico, he's from Lethbridge.
"My auntie from Warner, Alberta., posted on my Facebook, 'Well, that adds quite a different light to this story,'" Gundlock said. "I think that's an achievement for me."
He's hoping that fresh perspective helps people in the U.S. and Canada better understand the reality of what people on the ground are going through.
Thousands are waiting for a chance at asylum in the United States. In recent months, it has become harder for migrants to meet the definition of refugee.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who has a hardline stance on immigration, called two weeks ago for Mexico to ship the asylum seekers back to their home countries. A day earlier, on Nov. 25, U.S. officials fired tear gas into the crowd and temporarily closed a border crossing to California.
With files from Kathryn Marlow and the Calgary Eyeopener.
