It is impossible to understand how we continue to fail to implement policies to address the deluge of orphans in Mexico. Programs here languish unfunded. One of the most chilling pieces of statistical data is the finding that only three to five per cent of orphans receive any intervention of any kind from the state.

 The monumental numbers of orphans, so many of them now adults because the pandemic has gone on for so long, pose a bracing, almost insuperable challenge for the countries which they inhabit. I appeal to everyone to recognize that we’re walking on the knife’s edge of an unsolvable human catastrophe. Inevitably we’re preoccupied with the here and now, but the cumulative impact of these orphan kids, their levels of trauma, their overwhelming personal needs, their intense collective vulnerability strikes at the heart of the human dynamic, creating a sociological rearrangement of human relationships. And we’re doing so little about it; our response is microscopic. We are inviting the whirlwind, and we will not be able to cope.

-- Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy