From drug cartels to pistol and machete-toting street gangs, part of the reason children are flooding the U.S. Mexico border has to do with social conditions in violence plagued areas of Central America. Other reasons for the influx of unaccompanied minors have to do with failed U.S. drug policy in Central and South America, as well as a failed foreign policy.

"At the end of civil wars that ravaged Central America in the 1980s and 1990s, we did not pay enough attention to the region, Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said. "We did not remain sufficiently engaged with our Central American neighbors. We did not work closely enough with them to address the structural problems of social and economic development or the societal violence that is fueling today's crisis," he told the committee.  

The National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Texas at El Paso reported that the 60,000 or so unaccompanied children coming here from Central American has been climbing for the past three years.

The total in 2011 was 5236, which doubled to around 10,759 in 2012, and more than doubled again with 4,481 children arriving in 2013. The current numbers are expected to climb to 90,000 before fall.

The area where these children come from is called the Northern Triangle, which consists of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

With major drug exporting zones in Colombia and Mexico feeling the weight of law enforcement, drug cartel activity has moved into Central America, utilizing an abundance of street gangs to partake in the chaos. The children coming into the U.S. in this latest wave are trying to escape that, according to reports.

As Vox.com explains, "A 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime documented the balloon effect in action: after Mexico ramped up anti-drug efforts in 2006, the Northern Triangle's importance to the flow of cocaine from Colombia to America grew -- and drug trafficking activity subsequently expanded in the region.

Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America says the shift was particularly bad for the Northern Triangle countries, because they don't have the established government institutions to combat such high criminal activity.

"It drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," she says. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong commitment to building the criminal justice system and the police."

And the gang problem, supported by the drug cartels, has been blossoming in Central American for at least a decade.

"Central America's governments, meanwhile, seem utterly unable to meet the challenge, lacking the skills, know-how, and money necessary to fight these supergangs," ForiegnAffairs.com reported back in 2005, "The solutions attempted so far -- largely confined to military and police operations -- have only aggravated the problem; prisons act as gangland finishing schools, and military operations have only dispersed the gangs' leadership, making bosses harder than ever to track and capture."

This epidemic of gang violence that targets and explosion in the youth population has it roots in a problem created even further back, nearly 20 years ago here at home.

"The maras, such as El Salvador's M-18 and Mara Salvatrucha gangs, are directly linked to the U.S.," reports Trust.org. "The Mara Salvatrucha gang originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and was made up of Central American immigrants fleeing the region's civil wars. When U.S. immigration policy was tightened in 1996, tens of thousands of gang members convicted of crimes were deported back to their native countries, spreading the gang culture to Central America. In recent years, the maras have expanded their reach and power, bolstered by alliances made with Mexican drug cartels, such as the Zetas, coming into Central America, the United Nations says."

And while drugs and gangs seem to be the major push for children coming into the U.S. there are still other factors at play having to do with poor development in their homelands. Those factors include rampant unemployment, terrible poverty, drought, and the perception that U.S. immigration laws will give those who struggle to cross the border a chance to live here.