For Migrants, Desperation Still Outweighs Risks

Under jalapeno pepper cans stuffed with withering lilies, the dirt is still fresh on the Chavez Munoz brothers’ graves--as fresh as Pedro Fabian Huaroco’s limp and the lingering pain from the Temecula truck wreck that crippled him and fatally crushed his three childhood friends April 6.

As yet another van crammed with illegal immigrants crashed Friday, killing two and injuring 19 in Alpine, Calif., Huaroco’s wounds are reminders--like the three latest mounds in Cheran’s public cemetery--of the new risks that this Central Mexican town of 30,000 now senses after years of illegal migration to the United States, a practice so old that Huaroco says it has been going on here “almost since forever.”

But less than a month after a battered camper jammed with Huaroco, the three Chavez Munoz brothers and 23 others flipped over and crashed as the U.S. Border Patrol was trailing it, it is clear that Cheran’s scars are little more than a higher price of doing business in a human border trade that will endure.

Seven days after that accident, with thousands of Cheran’s Purepecha Indians mourning in the streets, the Chavez Munoz family buried its dead and Huaroco mourned his best friends. Just a week later, though, Fernando Chavez Munoz, one of two surviving brothers, nodded “yes” when asked if he plans to make the same dangerous journey that claimed the lives of his brothers Benjamin, Jaime and Salvador and five other countrymen that day.

“It won’t deter anyone, because of the lack of work here,” Fernando, 30, said. “I know what the risks are. You can lose your life, but . . . “

Huaroco, 22, finished the sentence. As his two children, eight dogs and hundreds of flies swarmed the dirt floor of his wooden shanty, he said: “It is a great risk. You risk your life and everything. But you have to go.”

Friday’s crash on Interstate 8 provided additional proof. Just 20 days after the accident that injured Huaroco and killed his friends, it was almost a mirror image of the earlier wreck: The Dodge van was packed with about 25 illegal migrants when a U.S. Border Patrol car waved it over near an immigration checkpoint; the van flipped over several times, leaving bodies strewn across the highway.

But the April 6 accident and those affected by it tell much about illegal migration into Southern California and the determination, desperation and corruption that continue to drive it. They also help explain the powerful forces still at work behind incidents like Friday’s fatal crash. And they confirm an array of data and studies that have tried to profile Mexican illegal migrants--typically men, unemployed and ages 18 to 35--and the economic forces that push them north.

Studies by American and Mexican universities show that the impoverished state of Michoacan is one of two principal sources in Mexico of illegal migrants. The hundreds of dollars that each of the illegals must borrow--at 15% monthly interest--to pay to Tijuana smugglers who take them by foot and truck across the border are part of a multimillion-dollar industry of exploitation.

But it was the latest Mexican economic crisis that Huaroco says drove him to make his deadly journey and that is now considered the chief cause of a modest increase in illegal migration. Experts say this trend has been tempered only by a border crackdown by U.S. authorities and ensuing increases in the smugglers’ fees.

Like many recent migrants, Huaroco said he never considered the journey north before last year. He had been working in mountain forests an hour’s walk from Cheran, felling trees and loading his mule with lumber--one of the only jobs around. But two decisions by the new government in Mexico City combined, he said, to make life impossible here: The December 1994 devaluation of the Mexican peso sent prices soaring, and a federal crackdown on illegal logging left him jobless.

Huaroco looked north.

Joining what most Cheran residents estimate is at least half of the town’s male, working-age population, Huaroco sneaked into the United States just over a year ago. He spent two days crossing the border into Nogales, Ariz., and toiled for more than 10 months at tobacco farms in North Carolina and onion fields in Georgia. In North Carolina, he made $5 an hour picking tobacco; he paid $60 a month for a place to sleep in an old house he shared with 40 others.

But whatever money he managed to save ran out within months of his return to Cheran. The Chavez Munozes urged him to join them on what had become their annual pilgrimage--slipping in and out of California and working contract jobs in the fields.

“In California, we were going to pick strawberries and blackberries,” Huaroco said, retelling each detail of the six-day journey that took him and the three Chavez Munoz brothers from this dirt-poor town in the barren foothills of Michoacan’s Sierra to a bloodied roadside in Southern California.

Their destination: Watsonville, where Florentino Chavez Munoz--the only one of the five brothers with legal work documents--would meet them a week or so after they parted company in Tijuana.

They paid $2 to board an old bus from Cheran to Zamora in northern Michoacan on April 1, Huaroco said, adding, “I only took the clothes I was wearing”--a T-shirt, pants, a thin jacket and a Michigan State University cap that would serve as a signal to a smuggler in Tijuana.

Compared with what would follow, the $50 journey from Zamora to Tijuana--two nights on a cramped, intercity bus--was “normal,” Huaroco said. “We arrived at dawn. In Tijuana, in the bus station, the [smugglers] found us. They approach you. They know each other and they know who you are. They can tell--most people who want to cross [the border] wear baseball caps.

“It’s totally open,” Huaroco said. “There are police and they see what’s going on, but what do they care?” They work with the smugglers, he said.

He said the smugglers negotiate their fee. He was approached by two, he recalled. “They said, ‘$400.’ We said, ‘We didn’t bring that much. We have $300.’ They said, ‘$350,’ and we said, ‘OK.’ ”

What happened next was nothing less than nightmarish.

On April 3, in a house behind the Tijuana bus station, Huaroco and the Chavez Munoz brothers waited until night--the smugglers’ working hours. Just before midnight, the chief smuggler appeared and identified himself as “the Pelican.”

By then, the migrants’ number had grown from four to 32. The Pelican took them 15 minutes by bus, then an hour by foot along a trail to an abandoned house on the Mexican side of the border. Huaroco said they stayed there until dawn.

“I don’t know where it was, but it was very cold,” he recalled. “We had nothing to eat, and it was so cold I couldn’t sleep.”

At 7 a.m. on April 4, the smuggler led the group along a small river that he said was “the line”--the U.S.-Mexican border. After 15 minutes, they stopped, and the group waited by the river for 12 hours. At 6 or 7 p.m., the smugglers, he recalled, beckoned them on and “we crossed the little river. . . . We walked all night. At 3 or 4 in the morning, we stopped in a field and waited. Two of the [smugglers] said they were going for a truck, and one waited with us. They said if they didn’t see ‘la Migra’ [U.S. authorities], they’d be back right away. But if they did, we would have to wait. So we had to wait all day without anything to eat.”

Finally, at 9 p.m., the smugglers returned with a truck. By then, the group’s number had fallen to 27--five couldn’t keep up and were left behind in the fields.

It was now around 4 a.m. on April 6. The group was awakened, and all 27 were crammed into the back of a camper truck whose windows were painted black. “We weren’t thinking about anything but work,” Huaroco said of the moment he boarded the ill-fated vehicle. “We have no way to earn a living here, so we were thinking we just wanted to get there as soon as possible and start working. . . . We drove for about an hour before the accident.

“ ‘La Migra’ started to follow us without putting on their lights,” he said. “But then, we passed another [patrol] car that had its lights on, and it started to follow us. We were packed into the camper, sitting on each others’ laps. The people sitting in the front started banging on the windows so the driver would stop and the people in the back started screaming and waving so La Migra would stop.

“Nobody stopped,” he said. “So I guess both of them are to blame.

“Benjamin [Chavez Munoz] was to my left and the other brothers were in back,” Huaroco recalled. “Another . . . one of us was up front, sitting between the driver and the [smuggler]. Benjamin died immediately. He and Jaime were crushed . . . from the chest up. I found them--I recognized their pants--and I tried to pull Benjamin out. But he didn’t move. So I pulled Jaime’s feet, but I couldn’t get him out. I never found Salvador. I had blood dripping in my eyes and my foot hurt so much I couldn’t walk.”

After he was treated at Riverside County General Hospital and interviewed and released for deportation by U.S. immigration authorities, Huaroco and seven others from the camper accident were led back across the border into Tijuana.

He and three other badly injured passengers then went to the Mexican immigration office to arrange transport home, he said.

But the other four drifted off into town--most likely, Huaroco said, to arrange another attempt to cross “the line.”