Immigrants Find Misery, Boredom, Fear on Trek North

Every year, all over Central America, hundreds of thousands of people set out on an often perilous journey north, hoping to cross the border into the United States and grab a piece of the American dream. Associated Press correspondent Niko Price and photographer John Moore joined one group for part of their journey.

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At the edge of the water, the men and women came to a stop. It was raining, and the log that had served as a bridge now angled down, part submerged in the muddy, churning river.

The heavyset guide took off his cowboy hat and scratched his mustache. “It wasn’t like this before,” he said. “And there’s no other place to cross.”

The little party of migrants stood crestfallen in the moonless dark. Their parkas were shredded by thorns and barbed wire, and the rain leaked in.

Behind them were 430 miles of two-lane highway through El Salvador and Guatemala, and they had just walked through five miles of cornfields and coffee plantations to cross the unmarked Mexican border.

There were still 2,150 miles of Mexico to walk, drive, sail and fly across before they reached America.

But for now, all that mattered was 20 feet of cold, raging water.

A 23-year-old fisherman named Alvaro stripped down to his underpants, turned his baseball cap backward and dived in, paddling furiously as the current swept him downstream. Finally a darting flashlight illuminated him as he pulled himself up the muddy bank on the other side.

“It’s deep and strong,” he called out over the roar.

Gloria, a Salvadoran housewife, began to tremble in her flimsy T-shirt. She couldn’t swim.

For 20 minutes the group was at a loss. But there was no turning back. Finally the guide asked if anyone had a rope. One of the group pulled a threadbare hammock from his backpack.

They cut it up and strung together a rope. Alvaro swam across again and secured one end to a mass of tree roots. Then he swam back and handed the other to the guide.

And so the perilous crossing began--forlorn figures in the pitch-black, rain-sodden night, embarked on an odyssey of desperation and hope.

A Grueling Journey

The trip from Central America to the United States is arduous, far more grueling than most people imagine. It is built on months of alternating physical exertion and extreme boredom, and constant doses of terror.

It is a journey that hundreds of thousands of people attempt each year.

People like Jose Luis, 34, a Honduran man who has worked construction sites in Pomona, Calif.; waited tables in Baltimore, Md.; picked potatoes near Boise, Idaho; removed asbestos in Baton Rouge, La.; and was now on his way to join his 17-year-old daughter, who works at a Sam’s Club in Baltimore.

People like Gloria, 22, whose husband had painted houses in Dallas for two years and sent her the money to join him. She had left her three children with her mother in El Salvador. Like most of the migrants, she gave only her first name.

People like Jose Hernandez, a 19-year-old with the easy smile of a child, who undertook the journey to support his mother and three little brothers in El Salvador.

“It’s the American dream,” Hernandez said. “Up there, everything works itself out.”

Later he would reveal another, more private motive for the journey.

He wanted to find out why his father, who had left a year earlier, returned in a coffin.

Brutality en Route

Mexican authorities catch 120,000 would-be immigrants a year, and U.S. authorities caught more than 29,000 in fiscal year 1999, an increase of 40%.

Nobody knows how many make it through the lines, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that nearly 700,000 Central Americans lived illegally in the United States in 1996. More recent estimates are due out soon and are expected to be much higher.

Javier Duenas, of Mexico’s migration authority, says estimates are complicated by the fact that most Central Americans, upon arrest, claim they’re Mexican so they won’t be deported--and sometimes are pretty convincing.

“The smugglers will mix one or two in with Mexicans on a bus,” he said. “It’s very hard to find them.”

Most migrants take the coastal route, along the Pacific through the Guatemalan border town of Tecun Uman. But because of the concentration of migrants, corruption is even greater in that area, and the bandits are even more brutal. Female migrants are sometimes raped repeatedly along the way, and the men robbed and maimed.

Dollars Flow From U.S.

Jose Hernandez lives in La Union, a small, ferociously hot town in eastern El Salvador that has fallen on hard times since its port, the main employer, closed down.

His mother, Estrella del Carmen Flores, sells bananas and rice at the town’s market in the mornings. His youngest brothers--Tin, 10, and Eric, 13--are in school. Rafael, 17, works on a construction site.

Since Jose was an infant, he watched his father head north and saw the dollars flow back.

His father, Jose Maximino Hernandez, first left in 1983. He was deported by U.S. immigration officials, but on his second try made it to Washington state, where he worked for four years on construction sites. In 1990 he returned to the United States for another four years, this time in Los Angeles.

Every month, like clockwork, he wired exactly $275 to his family. After returning from each trip, he spent his savings--the first time, buying a piece of land and building a small house; the second, expanding the house into a humble but comfortable home.

But the father still wanted to finish a wall around the yard and pave the kitchen’s dirt floor. So on Nov. 5, 1999, he set out again.

Soon after, he was picked up in Texas by the U.S. Border Patrol. Sentenced to 90 days for illegal entry, he was shuttled between federal prisons in Brownsville, Houston and Pecos.

On Feb. 11, when Hernandez had only seven days left in his sentence, he died. The family said an American prison guard called and told them it was a heart attack. They were suspicious. They knew Hernandez as a healthy, 37-year-old man with no history of heart trouble.

His son dropped out of school and went to work at a construction site. He made 480 colones--$50--a week, not enough to support the family. Besides, there was some unfinished business--his father’s death.

“We talked as a family,” Jose said. “They told me to go up and find out what happened to him.”

Officials Heavily Bribed

Reputable smugglers--sometimes called “coyotes,” sometimes “chicken keepers”--offer a guarantee: They will get you to your destination for a single price, no matter how many tries it takes.

Would-be immigrants pay half up front--in the case of the Salvadoran group, $2,100 each--with the balance paid on delivery in Houston, Phoenix or Los Angeles. Other than Mexicans, Central Americans are the most common migrants, and the price rises for those from more exotic locales: $7,000 for Indians and Pakistanis, $10,000 for Chinese.

The smugglers’ expenses are considerable. They pay for hotel rooms and meals for months on end, and arrange guides to lead the migrants through rough terrain. They buy bus and plane tickets and arrange vans for local transportation. Just crossing the Guatemala-Mexico border by road costs nearly $200 per person.

Several coyotes cited the same prices per migrant: 300 pesos ($33) to Mexican immigration authorities, 300 to federal judicial police and 300 to immigrant-welfare workers, who then divvy up the take; 200 pesos ($22) each to the federal highway police and the state judicial police; 100 pesos ($11) each to customs, state police and municipal police; and 50 pesos ($5.50) to the health workers who fumigate vehicles crossing the border.

And that’s just to cross the first 100 yards of Mexican territory.

Migrants who come without having their way cleared by a coyote are stripped clean by the authorities, according to smugglers and immigrants who have tried to go it alone. “They grab you, take your money and deport you,” one smuggler said on condition of anonymity.

Mexican immigration controls are steeped in corruption, conceded Jose Trinidad Larrieta, the government’s top organized-crime prosecutor.

“There is an enormous penetration,” he said. “There are a good number of people involved. But we’re investigating them.”

One Man’s Luck Fails

Jose Hernandez, the fatherless young man, made arrangements with a smuggler and left home on May 28. Taking the bus across the rice fields of El Salvador and through the mountains of Guatemala, he arrived the next day in the Guatemalan town of Camoja, near the Mexican border.

After a month waiting in a dingy hotel for the coyote to complete the arrangements with Mexican officials, he set out with a group of Salvadorans, walking through the mountains, taking a boat across a lake, walking some more, and arriving at an even dingier hotel in the southern Mexican city of Tuxtla Gutierrez.

There the smuggler gave him clean clothes and a briefcase and put him on a plane to Mexico City. But then, having gotten more than halfway to America, his luck ran out. A patrol car pulled over his taxi as he was going to a Mexico City hotel, and he was deported back to the Guatemalan border.

On July 21 he set out again. This time he got only 150 miles to Tuxtla Gutierrez before he again got unlucky. Police picked him up and deported him. Penniless, he returned to El Salvador and contacted the smuggler again. Seven weeks later he was back on a bus to Guatemala and the hotel in the tiny town of Camoja.

This time he waited 19 days, bored senseless. There was no television, no air-conditioning. Indians sold vegetables by the roadside. A pay phone, decorated with smiling cartoon characters in Uncle Sam hats, advertised collect calls to the United States. Occasionally a wandering guitar player passed through town.

So Jose was giddy with excitement when he heard from other migrants that finally, after a good night’s sleep, they would be heading north.

Instead, he awoke that Friday morning to a maid knocking on the door, shouting, “Run! It’s the migra!” Jose bolted into the hilly woods behind the hotel.

Sure enough, immigration officials and police were combing the town, piling all foreigners into buses for deportation. The police, carrying rifles and wearing floppy-brimmed hats, filled four hand-me-down American school buses with Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Ecuadoreans--even six men from Pakistan.

Jose hid for much of the morning and returned when things appeared quiet. The plan was still on.

At nightfall the smuggler, a former guerrilla from Nicaragua, played host to a dinner of grilled meat, beans and rice--the best meal the migrants had eaten in Guatemala.

They set out an hour later in dark and rain, huddled in a van with tinted windows and no headlights: the smuggler; a Guatemalan prostitute he had brought along; the guide; 13 Salvadoran peasants; and two American journalists. Everyone was scared. Even the smuggler, who didn’t smoke, bummed a cigarette--”for the nerves.”

The van dumped them on a muddy lane outside the border town of La Mesilla, and the guide commanded the few who had brought flashlights to store them for fear of discovery.

The pace was frantic from the outset. The group stumbled up and down hills through muddy fields, squeezed through barbed wire fences, splashed across streams, sprinted across brief stretches of dirt roads.

Then they hit the swollen Santo Domingo River, with its collapsed log of a bridge.

Journey’s End in a Field

One by one, Alvaro the fisherman nursed the travelers across the log and into the river. The water was chest-deep. Several went under, came up, went under, the current tearing at their clothes, but they all managed to cling to the rope.

Finally all were huddled on the other side. Some cried with relief. Others embraced--total strangers brought together by the perilous 1 1/2-hour crossing.

The guide looked nervously at his watch and hurried the drenched, exhausted migrants into a cornfield.

After a while he stopped and waited for the stragglers to catch up.

“I don’t want anyone to make a sound,” he whispered. “There are bandits up ahead. And these guys will kill you.”

The mud sucked at their shoes. Gloria lost hers in the ooze and, hurried by the others, kept walking in her socks.

Jose was trembling in the chilly night air, so Carla, a young Salvadoran woman, offered him a sweater from her backpack. He accepted, then took her hand and led her through the mud.

They trudged on silently.

After five hours and 10 miles, the guide held up a callused hand.

“Scatter, and get down on the ground,” he commanded in a whisper. “If you see headlights, don’t make a sound.”

As the migrants’ eyes adjusted, they realized they were in a coffee plantation at the edge of a road. Rain dripped off the coffee leaves. They waited, shivering. An occasional bus or tractor-trailer sped by.

They knew they still had the whole of Mexico to cross. But just being out of the mud and waiting for a ride on a paved road was reason to give thanks.

Finally a pickup truck rolled to a stop. “That’s a state judicial police commander,” the smuggler said. He trotted out to the truck, pulling a large wad of cash from his pocket. After a short exchange, the truck turned around and sped away.

Another pickup truck pulled up 15 minutes later. “Let’s go,” the smuggler whispered. The group frantically ran toward the truck, but the driver called out: “Only nine! Lie down in the back and pull the tarp over you!”

Within seconds the truck sped away, and those left behind retreated to the coffee field.

Another car pulled up; this time, the driver said only two would fit. Three--including the smuggler and the prostitute--got in. “Another truck will be here soon,” the smuggler called out.

And so they waited--Jose, Gloria and two other migrants, a reporter and a photographer. Shaking with cold and wet, their feet cut by rocks and thorns, they grew more demoralized with each passing minute.

By about 4 a.m., they realized that nobody was coming to get them, that their journey had ended in the coffee field in southern Mexico.

“All this way for nothing,” Gloria lamented.

They squatted in the mud and discussed plans.

Did those who got a ride ever make it? They did, Jose heard weeks later from a neighbor whose daughter was among them.

And what of those left behind, less than halfway to El Norte?

Gloria doubted she would try again. Her husband had never been enthusiastic about her leaving the children behind, she said, so she would go home and take care of them.

But the men were already thinking about their next try.

“There are jobs in the United States, and there aren’t any in El Salvador,” Jose said. “My mom is alone with her children, and I’m the oldest.

“I have to go.”

Epilogue

After this report was written, Jose headed north again, making it almost to Tuxtla Gutierrez in southern Mexico before his smuggler ran out of money and abandoned him. Without bus fare back to the border, he turned himself in to migration authorities, who jailed him for three days before shipping him back.

He is now in El Salvador, working on a construction site--and saving money for his next attempt to reach the United States, still believing he will find out what happened to his father.

Rudy Franco, the warden at the Texas prison, says he has no idea who told the family that the father died of a heart attack. He says a guard found Hernandez hanging in his cell from a sheet. The death certificate calls it a suicide.