Guatemalan Official: Caravan Used Babies, Women, Elderly As 'Human Shields'
By Susan Jones
October 31, 2018 | 7:19 AM EDT

Bild entfernt (keine Rechte)
Children in the migrant caravan are lifted over a gate at the Guatemala-Mexico border on October 19, 2018 in Ciudad Tecun Uman, Guatemala. The caravan of thousands of immigrants, most from Honduras, pushed past Guatemalan police before clashing with Mexican riot police. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - Guatemalan security forces were not able to hold back the thousands of people, many from Honduras, who broke through a chain-link fence into Mexico earlier this month.

Videos posted online show the moment when the border was breached and members of the "caravan" – the first of two -- dashed into Mexico, on their way to the United States.

Why couldn't Guatemalan security forces hold them back? Fox News's Laura Ingraham asked Mario Duarte, the Guatemalan Secretary of Strategic Intelligence, on Tuesday night:

Video:
https://www.mrctv.org/embed/534450

"Central American countries, we have these agreements since 2006 or 2008 that our citizens can freely move between the countries as long as they carry their national I.D. and go through a regular immigration process or a border checkpoints,” Duarte responded.

“Now, these caravans as you have seen from different videos, it was a very, very big group of over 3,000 people. And Guatemalan security forces, let me say really quickly, we put over 2,000 police officers and close to 1,000 military--"

"Yeah, But you couldn't hold them back, Mr. Secretary," Ingraham interrupted.

"We tried very hard, as you could have seen in the videos," Duarte responded. “The issue is that these people put babies, women and the elderly at the front, almost like human shields, so when they started pressing them against our security personnel we had to do all our best to protect their lives, to protect their human rights and protect their dignity as well," Duarate said.

“With that in there, we always put life first. And we had to protect these people, and obviously that is when the rest of the caravan over passed our security forces.”

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https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/sus...y-human-shields