Perilous Trek Into Mexico : Salvador Mother Risks All in Search of a Better Life

In El Salvador, Alicia earned $5 a week washing clothes. Her husband brought home money when he was sober enough to work, but more often he was not. When they separated a few months after their fourth child was born, Alicia knew what she had to do.

On a Thursday morning in July, she sneaked a few clothes and a small suitcase out of her one-room house in the town of La Libertad. She told her brother to come home early after work, because the children would be alone. At 6 o’clock in the evening, Alicia silently walked away from her family to seek a job in the United States.

“I didn’t say goodby,” Alicia said, bowing her head as she began to cry. “I thought it would be better that way. I just want a better life for my children.”

Alone, with a borrowed $300 sewn into the seams of her clothing, Alicia embarked on an illegal journey that thousands of Central Americans make each year. Over the next three weeks, she would rely on luck, savvy and a few kind strangers to make her way through an obstacle course of thieves, rapists and Mexican immigration agents. She would suffer days of hunger, a shotgun aimed at her head and the constant fear of deportation.

Alicia, 29, agreed to tell the story of her journey on the condition that her full name not be used. Her story is remarkable not because it is unique, but because it is typical of the dangerous trek that many illegal immigrants undertake to find work in the United States.

And Alicia is only halfway there. Waiting in Mexico City for a friend to send money, she is trying to decide whether to continue. Having made it this far, she wonders if she should cash in her chips and look for a job in Mexico, or gamble all to reach her goal of work in Los Angeles.

“If I’m caught at the border, they’ll send me all the way back to El Salvador,” Alicia said.

When she left home July 27, Alicia was certain that her mother would take care of her children, as do many other poor grandmothers in Central America who find themselves raising their daughters’ children as their own.

Base for Coyotes

Alicia rode a bus from La Libertad to San Salvador, the capital, where she transferred to a direct bus to Tecun Uman, a town on Guatemala’s northern border that is home base to a multitude of people smugglers, called coyotes.

Salvadorans may travel in Guatemala with a national identification card, but Alicia carried no passport or visa to enter Mexico. At the terminal in Tecun Uman, she and more than a dozen other passengers were surrounded by coyotes bidding for their illegal business.

Alicia picked a young guide who promised to lead her for $50 across the Suchiate River, which serves as the border, and into Ciudad Hidalgo on the Mexican side. She paid him a $15 advance to bribe Guatemalan immigration officials at the bus terminal.

“People who have traveled before told me never to pay it all ahead of time or the coyotes will leave you halfway. You learn from the experience of others,” she said.

Waded Across River

By dark, the coyote had shown Alicia and three other Salvadorans to the river bank. The group took off their shoes, grabbed hands and waded the chest-high water to Mexico.

Alicia was luckier than many immigrants in that she met no bandits on the other side. As happens on the U.S.-Mexico border, coyotes or other thieves often rob their prey, but this coyote delivered the group as promised to a safehouse in Ciudad Hidalgo.

“It was a luxurious house, and the woman who owned it was a coyote, too,” Alicia said.

The next morning, Alicia and another woman each paid the owner of the house $50 to put them on the highway north to Tapachula and map out how they should proceed. The coyote told them to leave their bags and extra clothing behind, that carrying suitcases was like wearing a sign marked “illegal.” They handed over their belongings to her.

Official Stopped Bus

After a short taxi ride on back roads, the coyote put the two women on a second-class bus and told them to pray that they would not be stopped at the Manguito checkpoint up the road. An immigration official did stop the bus, but as luck would have it, he just peeked in the door and waved them on.

The coyote had told the women to get off the bus before the next checkpoint beyond Tapachula, and to catch a train to Arriaga. After half a day of waiting, however, the other woman decided to turn back. Alicia was on her own again.

On the train, two immigration agents made their way toward her, but stopped just in front of her to ask two other Salvadoran women for their papers.

“It was obvious they were illegal. They had on jeans and tennis shoes and they had suitcases,” Alicia said. She, on the other hand, had worn a skirt and blouse and leather dress shoes, an outfit she considered camouflage.

Money Changes Hands

Alicia saw the women put money in the agents’ hands. To continue, the agents said, the women would have to spend the night with them in Arriaga. The women agreed, and the agents did not bother checking papers on the rest of the people in the car.

Soon, a group of Guatemalans struck up a conversation with Alicia. She was wary of them, but warier still of traveling alone after she saw the agents return to fondle the two Salvadoran women.

At the next brief stop, the two Salvadoran women made a dash for the door. When the two agents came looking for them later, Alicia silently cheered the escape. She got off the train in Tonala with the Guatemalans--two men, a woman and two teen-age girls.

The group made its way to a cheap hotel, where Alicia pulled out a 50,000-peso note (worth about $20) to pay her share. One of the Guatemalans grabbed it from her hand.

“We’ll use this to pay the hotel,” he said. They were broke, he said, pocketing the change.

Purse Is Searched

She told them it was the last of her money, but in the room they went through her purse anyway, just to be sure. Warned of thieves, she had sewn her cash into her shirt collar and the waistband of her skirt.

“Then I had to continue with them to make them believe I didn’t have any money. I didn’t know the way and didn’t want to be asking questions,” she said.

Although in physical appearance, Central Americans can easily blend in with the population of southern Mexico, their high-pitched accent is a giveaway, and illegal immigrants know to keep quiet in the street.

No train was due in Tonala the next day, so in the morning the group set out to walk the 15 miles to Arriaga along the railroad tracks. By afternoon, they were hungry and weak. Alicia had a cold and had eaten only a sandwich the previous morning. She knew that if she brought out her money she’d have to feed the whole group for the rest of the trip--if they didn’t steal it from her first.

As they pushed forward toward Arriaga, two Mexican peasants on horseback suddenly raced out of the bush, one of them brandishing a shotgun.

‘Give Us Your Women’

“Give us your women or you men will die,” the two said.

The older one picked one of the two teen-age Guatemalans, a fair-skinned girl of 15; his young partner pointed to Alicia, who is tall and slender, with a pretty, heart-shaped face and a blue beauty mark between her eyes.

“I said I couldn’t, that I was sick,” she said, using the Spanish euphemism for menstruation. It was a lie, the first that came to mind, she said.

“The older man put his shotgun to my head and said I’d better go or I’d die. I told him to kill me, but that I wasn’t going. One of the Guatemalan men said to go with them or they’d kill us all, but I said no.”

The younger Mexican peasant, about 18, selected the other Guatemalan girl, who was 14, instead, and the four rode off.

Alicia prayed and the other woman vowed revenge as they waited for the girls’ return. The Guatemalan men went looking for the kidnapers, until the peasants fired shots into the air.

“I thought they’d killed them,” Alicia said.

An hour later, the girls came running back. The 14-year-old had been spared after she had told her young captor that she was pregnant. But the 15-year-old sobbed as she showed the others the bite on her chest. She had been raped.

Tired, angry and afraid, Alicia said she was sick of hiding in the brush and walking the tracks. It had begun to rain. She announced that she was heading out to the road, and the others could follow if they pleased. They did.

Within minutes, a driver picked them up in his car and drove them through a tropical downpour right past the Arriaga checkpoint. Alicia quietly tried to pay him, but he would not accept any money for his good deed.

In Arriaga, one of the Guatemalans admitted that he still had $30, and paid for a hotel for the night. In the morning, they jumped on a boxcar of a freight train headed for Ciudad Ixtepec in Oaxaca state, but a worker spotted them and reported them to the train operator.

Wanted Women in Caboose

“He told us all the women should ride in the caboose with him, that the men could put up with the cold in the open car,” Alicia said.

“He said we’d have to get off before the checkpoint in Ixtepec unless we had money; then he’d get us through. He said if we had money or if we were alone, he could help us. That is, he let us know that if we slept with him he’d help us, but since we were with the men he couldn’t,” Alicia said.

The group stopped at a house outside of Ixtepec, and begged lodging for the night. They stayed for two weeks, while the men worked in the owner’s small brick factory, and Alicia pondered how to break away from the group.

“Finally, I confided in the man of the house. I told him I had $30 left and I wanted a bus ticket. He changed the money and bought me the ticket. His wife gave me a fan and magazines, and he took me along the river past the Ixtepec checkpoint,” she said.

Woman Paid Agent $420

Twice on the road to Mexico City immigration agents entered the bus. At one stop, they tapped a Salvadoran woman with five children for $420, or $70 a head. The mother then paid the driver $50 to let her off the bus before its final destination at the North Terminal in Mexico City, where immigration agents also would be waiting.

Alicia felt she couldn’t spare the cash.

Just before the bus pulled into the terminal, a young Mexican woman with two children turned to Alicia and whispered, “Don’t worry. I’ll help you get out. Here, take one of my children.”

With the little boy in tow, Alicia walked past the last immigration checkpoint. Shaken, but safe, she was at last in Mexico City.

For now, she has moved in with a Salvadoran friend while preparing for the rest of her trip.

“I want to earn money to send to my children, and I expect I will continue to Los Angeles because I trust things will go well for me,” Alicia said. “But if I am caught and sent back, this is too dangerous to do again. If that happened, I would know I tried and accept that we must remain poor.”

A DANGEROUS JOURNEY Alicia: A Salvadoran immigrant’s perilous trek northward, JOHN SNYDER /Los Angeles Times