As hundreds of migrants embark on a march towards ‘El Norte’, Trump launched a Twitter war against the caravan

‘No way to live here’: new Honduran caravan sets off north as Trump blasts warnings

‘No way to live here’: new Honduran caravan sets off north as Trump blasts warnings

Rosa López was six months pregnant with her seventh child when the killers came for her husband – unnamed assassins acting on orders she cannot, or dares not explain.

Ten months later the 30-year-old Honduran sits on a muddy embankment outside the San Pedro Sula bus station with her eldest son, Sergio, 12, getting ready to flee their homeland on the latest migrant caravan north.

“It’s not easy. I leave half of my heart here,” López said of her decision to leave her other six children – including seven-month-old Josué Alexander – behind, in the care of a sister. “But there’s no going back.”

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“We don’t envision becoming rich,” said López, from Santa Cruz de Yojoa, a city 86km (53 miles) south. “We just want the basics – a job to survive.”

It is a plan Donald Trump says he is determined to thwart.

On Tuesday morning, as hundreds, possibly thousands of Honduran migrants embarked on a punishing and highly politicized march towards “El Norte”, the United States president launched what promises to be a protracted Twitter war against the caravan and Democratic opponents on whom he blames the ongoing government shutdown.

“A big new Caravan is heading up to our Southern Border from Honduras,” Trump tweeted.

“Only a Wall will work. Only a Wall, or Steel Barrier, will keep our Country safe!”

Trump’s tweet echoed recent warnings from Republican allies that migrants were not welcome and should not come. “We want the word to get out that it is harder to get across the border,” Marco Rubio told Fox. “When people start coming back and saying, ‘We tried to get across but we couldn’t’ … it’ll discourage them from coming.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Honduran migrants taking part in the second caravan towards the US, on their way to the border with El Salvador, on Tuesday. Photograph: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images

In the day’s leading up to the caravan Honduran airwaves have filled with government propaganda adverts striking a similar tone. “Honduran brother – don’t be fooled!” a narrator warns would-be travellers in one. “Just listen to your brothers who have come back from previous caravans and say it was all lies and pain.”

But there was no sign those warnings had been heeded on Tuesday morning as the sun rose over San Pedro Sula and migrants trudged out of this notoriously violent industrial hub towards the Guatemalan border.

“Lies. Pure falsehoods,” scoffed Leonel López, an unemployed factory worker who setting off on the 5,000km odyssey alone.

“God will open the doors to the United States for us,” predicted the 24-year-old, who said he was abandoning his country because it offered too few jobs and “so much death”.

López, the bereaved mother-of-seven, also shrugged off Trump’s threats. “He makes himself out as being tough. But God is tougher and for God nothing is impossible,” she said, adding: “And so we move forwards, with sadness in our hearts.”

When the last Central American caravan set a course for the US last October Trump painted it as an invading force filled with gangsters and “some very bad people”.

But as scores of young families set off from the bus terminal on Tuesday, the caravan appeared to contain more pushchairs than drug pushers.

“We want a future for our son,” said Ramón Cruz, 31, a jobless motorbike mechanic, as he pushed his three-year-old son, Joshua, down the hard shoulder, container trucks rattling past. Hanging from the back was a Buzz Lightyear backpack with a carton of juice tucked into its side pocket.

“Our dream, like everyone here, is to make it to the United States because here there’s no way to live,” said Cruz’s 22-year-old wife, Ingris, who was wearing a blue and red Superman T-shirt. “There are so few work opportunities, so much violence. We have to leave our country practically fleeing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa Yolanda López, a mother of seven, is fleeing Honduras with her eldest son,12, after her husband was killed last year. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

Another family, including a three-month-old baby girl and her 16-year-old mother, said they were literally fleeing for their lives after being forced from their homes in the northern department of Colón by gangs of armed gunmen with ties to the military.

“The whole department is virtually at war,” complained the baby’s grandfather, who said he had decided to get his six-member family out on the caravan after his daughter was raped and two of his homes burned down. “I’ll have to ask for political asylum. I can’t go back … they’ll kill my whole family.”

Tears rolled down his teenage daughter’s cheeks as she considered their sudden decision to take flight. “I want a good future for my child. I don’t want her to have the same destiny as her mother,” she said.

Dennis Matute, a 43-year-old traveling with his 11-year-old son, said poverty had forced them from the same region, a cocaine trafficking hub on Honduras’s Caribbean coast.

“We are looking for a place where we can see a future for our children,” said the rural worker, a devout Christian who had spent four days fasting before setting off in order to ensure his God’s support. “Here, things just go from bad to worse.”

Matute, who had left his wife, Dalila, behind, believing she was not up to the gruelling journey, admitted the trip was “a dramatic adventure”, not least for someone who was leaving Honduras for the first time.

“It’s a bit overwhelming because it’s a tough journey – and there are risks,” he said of the caravan which members expect to last up to a month.

“But … there’s a [Honduran] expression that goes: ‘Who wouldn’t give up on a boat to get to know a port? It’s worth risking everything for the sake of a dream’,” he said.

“With faith we will manage it. I am going with faith and hope in God.”

Like most of the wanderers, Matute, was carrying just one small black backpack containing a single change of clothes for him and his son.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yet another caravan of Central American migrants sets out overnight from Honduras, seeking to reach the US border. Photograph: Delmer Martinez/AP

An estimated 5,000 people eventually joined last October’s caravan as it snaked northwards through Guatemala and then Mexico towards the US border where many of its members remain in camps and shelters.

How many will join the latest expedition remains unclear, as does the exact route it will take.

But Bartolo Fuentes, an opposition politician and radio presenter who was accused of organizing the last caravan – charges he forcefully rejects – told the Guardian he expected it to be larger than the previous one.

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Up to 3,000 people had set off from San Pedro Sula between 10pm on Monday and 5am on Tuesday, by bus and on foot, Fuentes claimed.

“There is a humanitarian crisis in Honduras,” the activist said by way of explanation, adding that most of migrants hoped to reach the US where they could find the best-paying work.

Fuentes laughed at the idea that Trump’s bluster – or his Great Wall – would succeed in halting the daily exodus from his country.

“It is madness for Trump to keep insisting on this wall. This wall won’t stop anyone,” he said as a column of pilgrims filed past him through the hills south of San Pedro Sula and, slowly, towards the southern border.

“It’s a show, it’s a spectacle, it’s propaganda,” Fuentes sneered. “These migrants aren’t a threat to anybody, not even Donald Trump.”