Painful Exodus Follows Hurricane’s Havoc

Pedro Vanegas Lopez, a 33-year-old Honduran refugee fleeing the devastation of Hurricane Mitch, knew his journey to the United States would be a perilous one. He expected to confront thieves along the way, to haggle over bribes with Mexican policemen, to walk for many days and to sleep under the stars.

It was what he encountered as he crossed the Mexican-Guatemalan border that caught him completely by surprise.

“I walked over a mountain, in the jungle of Peten, where I saw tigers pass in front of me,” he said in Spanish. His eyes opened wide as he recounted the terror of the moment face-to-face with what were, more than likely, jaguars. “When they saw me, they would run away.”

A month later, Vanegas made it to Brownsville, one of a number of Texas border towns where Hondurans have arrived in increasing numbers since Mitch cut a swath of destruction across Central America in October, killing about 10,000 people.

Evidence of the exodus can be found in the tally sheets of detained immigrants assembled by U.S. Border Patrol officials, and in the weary faces of the men and women who have left behind flood-ravaged Honduran cities and towns like Puerto Cortes and La Ceiba.

In the wake of the disaster, the U.S. granted temporary legal status in December to an estimated 150,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans who were already in the country. But the newest arrivals don’t qualify.

Misconception Helps to Fuel Exodus

In part, the exodus is being fed by a mistaken belief that the U.S. will grant temporary legal status to all Honduran immigrants, officials said. In fact, only those already in the U.S. as of Dec. 30 are eligible.

After traveling 1,500 miles on buses, freight trains and on foot, the refugees tell strange and harrowing stories of an odyssey across three countries, past border posts in deserts and rain forests. They relate encounters with benevolent strangers and corrupt officials, and speak of the odd jobs they worked along the way. Many were robbed or spent their money to bribe police and pay smugglers to help them get across the Rio Grande.

Hondurans are the largest group of recent detainees being held at the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center in nearby Port Isabel. In Brownsville, Border Patrol officials say the number of Hondurans apprehended after illegal crossings increased 61% in the last three months of 1998. In all, 1,448 Hondurans were detained along the 100-mile stretch of border near Brownsville. No one knows how many have eluded authorities.

Officials said the number of Central Americans arriving in South Texas is smaller than the war-related exodus of the 1980s. Still, the flow of hurricane refugees here has forced authorities to release many to relieve crowding at detention facilities.

Many immigrants are apparently headed for large Honduran communities in New York and Miami; immigration officials at the California border have not reported a similar increase.

Once across the Texas border, some Honduran immigrants turn themselves over to the authorities, even though they are far from their final destinations. Many have lost faith after learning that they face yet another obstacle: Border Patrol checkpoints on the highways to Houston and San Antonio.

“You almost want la migra to catch you because you can’t stand it anymore and you’re dying of hunger” said Fidericio Delgado.

Vanegas said that, after weeks on the road, he has felt the same despair. “I’ve been thinking of going out on the street so they can catch me.”

A soft-spoken man with cinnamon-colored skin, Vanegas said he left Honduras in December with 50 centavos, or about 4 U.S. cents. The father of two was laid off when the hurricane wiped out his employer’s banana crop.

“I would ask for food along the road; I would get rides,” he said, his voice betraying the indignity of the experience. Now in the U.S. illegally, he faced the prospect of being caught by the Border Patrol and being sent back to Honduras.

“It would be very sad if they saw us come home with our hands empty, our clothes dirty, deported,” Vanegas said as he stood with a group of his countrymen at the Ozanam Center here, a nonprofit shelter for the homeless.

Fleeing a Scene of Devastation

The Hondurans said they’ve come this far because there is little left back home. They described the surreal landscape left by the hurricane: the carcasses of cattle tossed onto roofs and the tractors that dug mass graves.

Days after Mitch struck, Delgado returned to his devastated country from Miami, where he had been working as a roofer. A relative had called to say his father had perished in the flood waters.

“My idea was to go back and bury him,” said Delgado, a voluble 23-year-old with a sparse mustache. But when he finally made it to his hometown near San Pedro Sula, “I discovered, thank God, that my father hadn’t drowned. He had been standing under a tree for five days.”

Delgado was stranded in Honduras, however, without money for the trip back to Miami. He soon discovered that many of his compatriots were in a similarly bleak situation.

Samuel Lopez Barrera, 17, said he left Honduras because he felt he had become a burden to his parents. He was the youngest of four sons whose father was a partner in a ruined farm in the coastal region of Atlantida.

“They didn’t want me to come,” he said. “My mother cried and cried. When I think about her crying, it makes me want to cry too.” He left with a friend, also a teenager, headed for the Guatemalan border.

Gustavo Olivares, 24, was laid off from his job in Puerto Cortes because no ships were docking at the damaged port. “All I want is to make $5,000 so I can rebuild my house.”

Weeks later, in Texas, Olivares unfolded a crumbling and water-stained map of Mexico. “I carried this all the way from Honduras. I marked all the checkpoints.”

Police Corruption Makes Voyage Tough

It is the constant harassment of local officials, the immigrants say, that makes the trek especially difficult.

Not long after Delgado crossed into Guatemala, a policeman there stopped his bus and demanded a bribe, he said. The policeman then radioed ahead to another official that “there’s some Hondurans on the way and they still have money.” He was stopped four or five times, each cop taking a cut until he was broke.

Vanegas’ passage across Guatemala involved an unlucky detour that took him to a Mexican border crossing deep in the jungle. As he walked through the rain forest, he saw a group of drug smugglers toting AK-47s, but, like the jaguars, they ignored him.

When teenager Barrera reached Mexico, he and his friend walked across most of the state of Chiapas, spending five nights sleeping in roadside brush. They celebrated New Year’s Eve at a church, where the nuns gave them 30 pesos.

“There’s a lot of good people in Mexico,” Barrera said. Once he and his friend made it past Chiapas, they hopped on two freight cars. Somehow, they got separated when the train reached a Mexico City rail yard. He hasn’t seen his friend since.

Traveling alone, Barrera worked in San Luis Potosi shelling corn, earning enough to pay for the bus ticket that would take him to Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville.

Delgado and others said that while traveling through Mexico, where their Afro-Caribbean features made them conspicuous outsiders, they learned to sing the Mexican national anthem to fool the local authorities.

“All you have to sing is the first line, ‘Mexicanos al grito de guerra!’ ” Delgado said.

Once at the Rio Grande, immigrants find themselves at the mercy of a dangerous border subculture of “river bandits” and “coyote” smugglers.

Amelia Morales, who runs a migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, related the story of a 16-year-old Honduran woman who was raped by two men at the border. “She had lost the ability to speak,” Morales said. The young woman was four months’ pregnant at the time of the assault.

Getting across the Rio Grande--here, a shallow, greenish river about 30 feet wide--poses its own difficulties. Those who cross at night will likely show up as ghostly green figures on the new “night vision” equipment used by U.S. agents.

Still, they “low crawl” through the tall grass that lines the river’s edge and lose themselves in the back alleys of Brownsville.

After wading across the Rio Grande one night, Elvin Leyva, 19, approached a Border Patrol vehicle parked at the river’s edge. He believed the rumor that all Hondurans were being granted refugee status.

“I walked up to the car, but the officer was asleep,” he said. “Then I looked up, and I saw these truck drivers standing on the bridge over me, yelling: ‘Run, run! What are you doing? Run!’ ”

In Brownsville, he met a Salvadoran gardener who drove him to the Ozanam shelter. There, on a recent morning, more than a dozen Hondurans planned their next move.

“We have to walk four, six days to get around the checkpoint,” Delgado said. “We’re going to take the risk because here there’s nothing left for us to do” in Brownsville.

The next day, when a reporter took a tour of the INS detention facility in Port Isabel, he found Delgado and Vanegas. The two had been caught the night before while trying to walk to Houston, and now were dressed in the blue jumpsuits issued to inmates.

“We were walking by the railroad tracks when they caught us,” Delgado said. He was hoping that relatives in Boston might win his release. Many Hondurans are ordered deported but are released on their own recognizance, pending their appearance before an immigration judge.

This week, Delgado remained in custody, his fate uncertain.