As Guadalupe saw it, she had two choices: Flee her native El Salvador, or stay and end up murdered by the same gangbangers who killed her husband.
The 26-year-old widow left her home country in November, paying a “coyote” to facilitate the dangerous, 23-day journey north so she could sneak into the United States with her two young children.
“I had no other choice, I felt I was risking my life and my children’s lives to continue staying there,” Guadalupe — too afraid to reveal her last name — recently told The Post.
The young mother is one of hundreds of thousands who have fled to the United States to escape the violence of Central America’s Northern Triangle region, which is made up of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Like so many others, Guadalupe’s family had been targeted by the “maras,” local gang members who showed up at their door demanding “rent” soon after her husband started a small electrical company.
“My husband didn’t have that kind of money,” she said. “We couldn’t go to the police because [the maras] would find out and then definitely kill you.”
They murdered her husband anyway, shooting him 20 times.
“I knew then I had to leave or they would kill me,” she said.
The number of illegal migrants coming to the United States from the Northern Triangle has surged in recent years, as immigration from Mexico has declined.
“The spike that we’re dealing with now, that began several years ago, is not a blip but a more enduring phenomenon that does have to do with much greater degrees of danger and violence in these countries,” explained Doris Meissner, head of US immigration policy at the Migration Policy Institute.
The region is one of the most violent areas in the world, where savage gangs and the proliferation of drug cartels have led to a staggeringly high homicide rate.
In 2016, El Salvador’s murder rate was 81.2 per 100,000 inhabitants — down from 104 in 2015, the highest in the world. Honduras’ murder rate was 59 last year, while Guatemala’s was 27.3, dropping from a high of 46.5 in 2009.
“There’s no such thing as people going out jogging there,” Ana Quintana, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said of Honduras. “There are 24-hour funeral homes. It’s incredibly sad.”
Civil wars rocked El Salvador and Guatemala until the mid-1990s, leaving them vulnerable to transnational crime outfits — like MS-13, which was created by Salvadorans who fled to LA.
Drug trafficking from South America and Mexico — in which some of the gangs have become involved — has also contributed to the bloodshed.
In 2014, US officials said 80 percent of drug flows into America pass through routes in Central America.
Honduran newspaper La Prensa estimated that Salvadorans pay about $390 million in extortion to crime groups each year, while Hondurans fork over roughly $200 million.
Corruption has seeped into the fabric of society, allowing gangs to maintain power and giving many citizens little opportunity for recourse once they’ve been targeted.
“Entire police precincts in Honduras have had to be shut down [because of corruption],” Quintana said.
Experts insist the only way to combat migration from the troubled region is to address its root causes.
“We need to take a much more active role in Latin America — not just pay attention to it when we have tens of thousands of children at our border,” Quintana said. “Ambassador engagement is an important place to start.”
In 2016, El Salvador’s murder rate was 81.2 per 100,000 inhabitants — down from 104 in 2015, the highest in the world. Honduras’ murder rate was 59 last year, while Guatemala’s was 27.3, dropping from a high of 46.5 in 2009.
Previous US administrations have sought to address the complex problems through targeted aid packages — but the results have been mixed.
In 2007, years before migration from the region became a major US concern, then-President George W. Bush launched the Merida Initiative, a bilateral security agreement established with then-Mexican President Felipe de Calderon.
That initiative was mostly meant to help Mexico combat drug trafficking and related violence, but also included $65 million for Central America, as well as for Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Out of that was born the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), a separate strategy aimed specifically at boosting law enforcement and strengthening governments in the region.
Since 2008, Congress has appropriated more than $1 billion to Central America through that effort.
“CARSI was a security strategy, it wasn’t a development strategy — it didn’t address economic issues,” explained Eric Olson, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program.
By 2014, the State Department had already begun mulling the idea of rewriting CARSI to make its mission broader.
Then that summer, thousands of unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle poured into Texas, setting off a border crisis that suddenly amplified the need for aid in the region.
The Obama administration took a multipronged approach to address the underlying issues plaguing the area — developing the “US Strategy for Engagement in Central America” and the Alliance for Prosperity Plan, which was meant to help the nations in the Northern Triangle come up with their own strategies to address migration issues, Olson said.
As a whole, the package targeted several problems the region faces — including extreme poverty and lack of economic opportunities, high homicide rates and corruption.
For fiscal year 2016, Congress granted $750 million in aid to the Northern Triangle — more than double the money allocated to the region in 2014. Much of it went toward development assistance, drug-related CARSI efforts, and supporting Northern Triangle economies.
While it’s too soon to tell what kind of impact those funds have had, the aid the United States has provided over the last several years has done little to improve economic conditions and gang violence in the region.
“I think that by and large it’s been well-intentioned aid,” Olson said. “[But] their economies have not improved a great deal. The security situation has improved a little bit, but it’s hard to draw a straight line between what the US has done and that.”
He added that the United States has been very supportive of anti-corruption efforts in the region, especially in Guatemala, where former President Otto Perez Molina was brought down by the same corruption probe the United States pressed him to support.
“That is one concrete example of US assistance and policy helping to begin to tackle the problems of corruption, which we all agree is a huge part of the problem here,” Olson said. “I think we should highlight that that’s positive, but it’s one piece in a big picture that hasn’t been particularly successful.”
So far, President Trump’s efforts to curb illegal migration have weighed heavily on deterrence — and there’s some evidence his strategy may be working.
Last year, Homeland Security officials apprehended 530,250 illegal immigrants, including 137,514 families and unaccompanied children, marking a 15 percent uptick from the year before.
But the number of border apprehensions plummeted by 40 percent between January and February of this year.
And in March, there were only 16,600 immigrant apprehensions — marking a 17-year low.
Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly was quick to interpret the recent numbers as a win for the Trump administration, saying the decrease in migrant apprehensions is “no accident.”
Last year, Homeland Security officials apprehended 530,250 illegal immigrants, including 137,514 families and unaccompanied children, marking a 15 percent uptick from the year before.
Several experts insist it’s too early to definitively identify what accounts for the dramatic dip — but it’s true that smugglers swiftly adapt their strategies to US policy changes.
“The networks are very quick to react to what happens at the border,” said Theresa Brown, director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Olson pointed out that the number of border detentions was unusually high between last August and October, when apprehensions are typically at their lowest point.
“There’s nothing in the Northern Triangle that changed significantly that would explain that rise or the subsequent fall,” he said. “Conditions are roughly the same — there was no new big breakthrough in terms of violence.”
He theorized that Trump’s outspokenness about immigration during his campaign encouraged migrants to make the trip before he could take office.
“It’s reasonable to say the kind of rhetoric that was happening during the campaign . . . probably created an incentive within the smuggling networks to say, ‘You better get up there now. You never know, Trump could get elected, and it would be impossible,’ ” he explained.
As a result, fewer people are rushing to get into the United States now, he speculated.
Olson’s suspicion is that the numbers will likely climb back up — perhaps as early as May or June, when migrants seek US seasonal work.
“It’s possible that people, including smugglers, are taking a wait-and-see attitude,” he added.
Trump has also vowed to crack down on immigrants with criminal records — and that includes members of MS-13.
While many Central Americans apprehended at the US border are legitimately fleeing gang violence, it can be difficult for authorities to tell true asylum-seekers and gang members apart.
“Some of the gangs have used the process to try to infiltrate the US,” Brown explained. “Some of the gangs may be involved in the smuggling.”
MS-13 now exists throughout the United States, and members continue to commit horrific crimes.
In March, 10 illegal-immigrant members of MS-13 — including one deported — were indicted for several Long Island slayings, including the slaughter of two teenage girls attacked with baseball bats and a machete.
In Texas, two illegal-immigrant members of MS-13 were arrested that same month for killing one woman as part of a Satanic ritual, and kidnapping another teen girl, whom they physically and sexually tortured.
Solving the many problems the Northern Triangle faces will be far from easy. Experts say the United States should continue providing financial aid and pushing governments to do more to increase transparency and cut down on corruption.
Meissner said she believes Homeland Security Secretary Kelly understands the issues.
“He gets this, and has made statements prior to become part of this administration that as long as these conditions exist, there will be flows, because these are conditions that people have to escape from,” she said.