When the Trek North Becomes a Slow March Toward Death

Mario Castillo died for a simple dream: to add a kitchenette and indoor plumbing to his two-room house.

The Mexican peasant’s 1,650-mile journey to the United States began in this village of 350 people, where the banana trees, sugar cane and jungle vines weave a fabric of blinding tropical green.

For Castillo and 13 other men, the trek ended in a chest-searing death from dehydration in a white-hot Arizona desert studded with saguaro cactus and discarded plastic water jugs. Their bodies were found east of Yuma on May 23 and May 24. It was the largest recorded death toll among a single group of desert crossers along the U.S.-Mexican border. Twelve other men survived.

The number of people who die along desolate stretches of the border has climbed relentlessly since 1994, when the United States clamped down on city crossings and migrants shifted to deadlier terrain: swift canals, snowy mountains and burning deserts. The Mexican government says 491 of its citizens died last year, up from 369 in 1999.

Mexican President Vicente Fox may call the migrants heroes for the risks they take to earn money and send it home. But heavy costs are exacted all along the route: families shattered, educations broken off, crime and corruption overwhelming border towns where migrant-smuggling mafias are now entangled with drug traffickers.

Tracing the trail north offers a glimpse of a world where migrants turn to loan sharks to finance their trips, then evade thugs and corrupt cops to congregate, six to a room, in flophouses hugging the U.S. border. Their fate in the Arizona desert depends on their stamina and on the wiles of cellular phone-toting smugglers. Falling short can mean arrest and a ride to safety in the back of a Border Patrol truck. Or it can mean death.

Many migrants do make it, picking fruit in California or tobacco in North Carolina. They sent back $6 billion last year, Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign revenue. Migrants come home with success stories that inspire others to go. In some Mexican states, going north is almost a rite of passage. But for many would-be migrants, the motive is simple: gnawing need.

The many tributaries of human movement originate in backwater ranchos and ejidos in Guanajuato or Michoacan, Guerrero or Jalisco.

In Atzalan, just one sprawling town in Veracruz state, families buried seven victims of the Arizona disaster, Castillo among them. Other victims came from elsewhere in the state. One came from Guerrero.

Castillo, 25, crossed illegally once before, to wash farm machinery in Galena, Ill. U.S. immigration officers caught him after several months and sent him home. But with the money from that first trip, he built a cinder-block house with a corrugated tin roof for his wife and two children. After this trip, he intended to finish it.

It wasn’t that Castillo couldn’t find work at home. What he wanted was a job that paid him a fair wage. With no land of his own, Castillo labored on the coffee and citrus plantations here. But commodity prices were low, and there wasn’t always work. He earned 35 pesos, about $4, a day.

“How terrible it is to lose your life just looking for a job!” said Castillo’s 71-year-old father, Filiberto, his knee trembling as he stared at a bare wall.

Irma Vazquez, Castillo’s widow, clutched their 4-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter to her chest, tears streaming down her face. She must not only raise her children without a father but somehow repay the $1,200 he borrowed toward the $1,900 payment to the migrant smugglers. Loan sharks usually charge 5% interest or more per month on such loans, and they’ll want their money, even though he’s dead. She will probably have to depend on relatives and handouts.

“He himself knew it was dangerous. He said, ‘I am risking my life to earn some money,’ ” the widow recalled.

While Vazquez waited listlessly in her darkened room for her husband’s body to be returned for burial, other villagers gathered on the hamlet’s dirt road to collect money for her from passing trucks and buses. They held up a simple poster declaring, “For the family of our brother who fell into misfortune in the desert of Arizona.” People mainly gave coins worth 10 cents; a few managed the equivalent of a dollar or two.

More Migrants Staying Longer in the U.S.

The benefits of migration to villages such as Cuatro Caminos are economic; the costs go far beyond dollars and cents.

Margarita Arcos, 47, said her six sons and daughters and her husband are working the fruit fields in Washington state. “The first went six years ago, the last, two years ago,” she said. “Who knows when they will come back?”

Her husband managed to return for a visit last year, but her children have never come home.

U.S. immigration officials this year have cited a drop in arrests at the border, from a peak of 1.6 million last year, as a sign that migration is subsiding. But others think it just means that Mexicans are coming home less often because the trail has gotten more difficult. What was once a seasonal migration, often for just a few months’ work, has stretched into years away from wives and children.

U.S. and Mexican policymakers are discussing guest worker programs and other options to increase the flow of legal migrants, reducing the pressures for crossing illegally. They are also debating ways to make the border safer, including a joint crackdown on human smugglers.

Atzalan Mayor Ramiro Barradas has big plans to boost the local economy through ecotourism, and maybe building a refrigeration plant to keep the litchi fruit fresh for export. He hopes that will bring home some of the town’s 2,000 or so migrants working in the United States.

“The only option is development for tomorrow,” he said. “Because today, what can I offer? If I say ‘Don’t go!’ then what do they eat?”

The trail’s attractions are evident in rural areas across central and southern Mexico: Homes of successful migrants sport metal window frames and even satellite dishes. The building materials suppliers in Atzalan are among the few whose business is thriving.

Raymundo Barreda, 54, wanted some of that for himself and the 15-year-old son who carried his name. With Castillo, he signed up to join the trek north from Veracruz after being laid off by the local Coca-Cola distributor, where he was a laborer. His son dropped out of school to go along.

Both died in the desert.

Minerva Barreda, 20, said she told her younger brother: “You shouldn’t go, you’re too young, you are going to suffer. But he said, ‘I want to work, I want to buy a good used car.’ ”

And the smugglers, adept at marketing, made it sound so easy.

Barreda said a merchant from the adjacent state of Puebla came to town to drum up business. “ ‘Let’s go, it’s easy, it’s just one night, nothing will happen,’ ” she recalled him saying.

So her father, brother and the others signed on for a costly package that included transportation to the border, the crossing itself, and support in arriving at their final destination, said to be North Carolina.

The smuggler, whom Barreda identified as Moises Sierra, has since disappeared. Court papers filed in Arizona identify one of the suspected traffickers as Moises but give no last name. Mexican law enforcement sources told The Times that four suspects had been detained and four others were being sought, some of them in the United States.

The Veracruz group left before dawn May 15. Relatives think that the group made the entire trip by bus, a journey that can take several days. But once migrants leave home, communication is sporadic at best. No one is really sure what route they took.

On May 19, some relatives received calls saying the group from Veracruz had arrived in the border town of Sonoyta. For many, it was the last contact they had until the bodies came home.

Domestic Migrants Head to Northern Mexico

Meanwhile, across the heart of Mexico, an unrelated group left the southern state of Guerrero. It would eventually join the deadly expedition by a different, but also common, route.

Brothers Efrain, Isidoro and Mario Gonzalez Manzano left their mountain village of Verde Rico, not for the United States but for Baja California. Like millions of domestic migrants, they were lured to northern Mexico by promises of big money, in this case $120 per week, to pick tomatoes. Four other family members joined the pilgrimage.

But the promise was a lie, said Mario’s fiancee, Maria Cira Vazquez. In fact, they were paid $6.50 a day, and they were forced to buy from the company store at inflated prices. So the three brothers decided to try their luck farther north, making their way east to Sonoyta, where they met up with the group from Veracruz.

Efrain died with Castillo and the Barredas.

Isidoro and Mario lived. Along with the other survivors, they are being held as witnesses by U.S. authorities and have not spoken to reporters.

Like many would-be border crossers these days, the Veracruz and Guerrero men would get help entering the United States. Entering illegally is no longer a matter of jumping the fence in San Diego, thanks to more Border Patrol agents, extra fences and stadium-style lighting.

Migrants are now more likely to sign up with a smuggler, known as a pollero--”chicken runner”--or a “coyote.” The migrants themselves are the pollos, or chickens.

The tools of the smuggling trade have grown more sophisticated, including cellular phones, scouts and global positioning devices. While U.S. and Mexican leaders demonize the smugglers, most migrants think that they provide a useful service, or at worst are a necessary evil.

Pit Stop in a Border Town

The Gonzalez brothers and the group from Veracruz came together by chance near the border in Sonoyta, a town of 20,000 people that resembles an oversized truck stop. It is built for passing through. The gas station offers showers for tractor-trailer drivers. And evidence abounds of the sudden rush of migrant traffic--people just like Castillo, the Barreda father and son, and the Gonzalez brothers.

On any given day, the migrants may number 1,500. They arrive at the storefront bus station, hang around the small park or wait in the boarding houses for word from their pollero.

In addition to a couple of motels on the highway, which slows briefly to become the main street in Sonoyta, guest houses for migrants have mushroomed. Mayor Octavio Celaya Ortiz says 20 new ones have opened over the last couple of years, all to serve the migrants.

But an uneasy feeling is growing that Sonoyta is losing itself to an underground world that becomes more corrupt and more dangerous with every arriving busload.

“Our No. 1 problem is drug trafficking,” the mayor said. “And in second place is people smuggling. Now these two activities have been mixed, and this is a dangerous detonator.

“We are talking of a mafia in all its senses, and we are talking of powerful forces,” he said. “People don’t want to work for 100 pesos [$11] a day because of the ease with which they can earn $50 or $100 with a load of marijuana.”

David Hurtado, a local priest who has spoken out against traffickers, says his car was nearly run off the road. People have shouted threats from the street outside his home.

“Some are enriching themselves from the poverty of these people [migrants]. This is a social sin, because they often take them to places where they know they will die,” the priest said. “Worse, it is becoming socially acceptable.”

New pickups with tinted windows cruise the streets, a sign to locals of the new easy money.

Jose de Jesus Partida, principal of a school in a nearby border village, says boys as young as 11 are dropping out to serve as guides for migrants or “burros” for drug traffickers. He tries to lure them back, “but it’s hardest with those who have made a trip, because they have earned up to $1,000.”

U.S. authorities say one of those young people was Jesus Lopez Ramos, a 20-year-old from Sonoyta who was among the survivors of the Arizona debacle. He has been charged as one of the polleros who abandoned the Veracruz group in the desert.

Most migrants arrive here by bus, and station owner Pedro Mota has become a student of the phenomenon.

“When they arrive in a group of 10 to 20, they have a guide who tells them exactly what to do, when to move, what to eat and when not to move,” he said.

Taxi drivers take newcomers to the boarding houses, and taxis or private vans ferry groups from the guest houses to crossing points, usually about 7 p.m., when it is growing cooler. Local guides drive the groups along dirt tracks through the ejidos, rural settlements of communal peasant farmers.

The vans often cross the unfenced border and drive a mile or two before dropping off their customers with their knapsacks, food and water bottles.

The migrants are instructed to pack light--a jug of water, canned tuna and beans, crackers, a loaf of bread or packet of tortillas. Some carry a change of clothing, but many bring only what they’re wearing. The better-prepared have bought new sneakers for the hike. Others set out in sandals or cheap shower flip-flops.

Human Smuggling Is a Binational Venture

Court papers say the Veracruz group went through the border at an ejido called Papalote--nothing more than a food shop and a couple of shacks along Mexican federal Highway 2 from Sonoyta northwest toward San Luis Rio Colorado.

A week later, scores of other hopefuls crammed into a dozen rooms at a new, brightly painted guest house on the outskirts of Sonoyta. Another wing of eight more rooms was being hurriedly built. In one room, six people, including a woman with a 6-month-old baby, slouched across a double bed, killing time.

On the stoop, men smoked cigarettes and waited for the pay phone to ring with word on when they would cross. Many of the calls came from the U.S. side, underscoring that this trade is a binational venture, with plenty of American involvement.

A variety of routes, motives and attitudes brought people to this bottleneck in the trail.

At 29, Rainero Alejandro Alvarez is a toughened veteran of the crossing. Hailing from Yuriria, Guanajuato, he said he has operated heavy farm machinery in Irvine for 10 years, returning home every two years or so.

This time, he flew to Tijuana and tried to cross on his own, but he was arrested by the Border Patrol and spent 24 hours in custody. He decided to travel 300 miles east to Sonoyta, where he has crossed the desert twice before.

Alvarez, his arms covered with tattoos and his hair shorn, was certain he would make it, however many tries it took. One year, he said, he was arrested five times in Calexico before slipping through. Having budgeted $2,000 for the crossing, which usually takes three days and two nights, he said he was still waiting to find a pollero he trusted.

“We know there are plenty of dangers,” he said. “By managing your own body, you can keep alive. It is psychological.”

The danger starts long before the border. Alvarez said migrants actually suffer most on the Mexican side, where corrupt police and criminal gangs prey on them. Officials extort money at roadblocks, and thieves know that the migrants are carrying lots of cash for the trip.

But Alvarez doesn’t blame the coyotes. “They are doing a job, it’s a service. On the route, they ask who can continue, and if not, they tell you to walk out to the road, so you can be saved by la migra [the border patrol]. It’s a personal decision.”

With a shrug, he added: “The U.S. is just protecting its border. But in Mexico, you can’t wait until the bread falls into your mouth.”

Enrique Lopez was a contrasting image. The 61-year-old farmer from Veracruz was trying to make his first crossing in a group of four that included a 17-year-old nephew. Apparently following a route similar to those who died in Arizona, Lopez’s group spent 70 hours traveling by bus from Veracruz city, through Tampico and Monterrey and across to Sonoyta.

They had been waiting for four days for a call from the United States arranging the desert hike and the pickup details on the other side. Lopez, en route to Oakland, said he needed money to provide for his 93-year-old mother.

He had tried to cross once before, at Agua Prieta into eastern Arizona, but was quickly caught by the Border Patrol. The migrant flows shift fast in response to U.S. enforcement, and, like Lopez, more people are pouring into Sonoyta.

The soft-spoken farmer, hardened by decades in the fields, touched a plastic oval portrait attached to his belt. “I am confident,” he said. “My faith is in the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

Crossing the Inferno That Is the Desert

Whether a migrant trusts in God or in himself, his first view of the promised land on the northern side of the border is hardly auspicious. Mexican authorities have put up signs warning of “extreme temperatures” and adding, “It’s not worth it.” A knocked-over white concrete pillar is all that marks the U.S. border.

To plunge ahead into southwestern Arizona, even weeks before the onset of summer, is to sink into a vast inferno, as beautiful as it is pitiless. The heat in this remote expanse--an area bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island together--has been known to hit 125 degrees. There is only paltry shade beneath scattered paloverde trees, which punctuate a landscape of saguaros and greasewood bushes, bone-dry arroyos and low mountain ranges that seem to repeat endlessly.

Home to both a federal wildlife refuge and a military bombing range, it is a place remote enough for a person to trudge 50 miles in a straight line without hitting a paved road.

In the heat, it is not possible for hikers to carry enough water to sustain themselves for those distances. The coyotes normally pick more direct routes but sometimes veer off course to avoid Border Patrol agents, as they are believed to have done during the recent disaster. Sometimes, they simply get lost.

The migrants who died in May succumbed in the gruesome manner that people will amid such heat, without water: clawing holes in the gravel in search of water or shade, disrobing as delirium takes hold. Survivors told rescuers of trying to suck moisture from cactus and drinking their own urine. An emergency room doctor said they bore the desiccated look of mummies.

Yet the area has long been a well-traveled corridor, crisscrossed by Papago Indians, later by Spanish colonizers and then by Mexican fortune-seekers on their way to California’s Gold Rush.

These days, Border Patrol agents in air-conditioned trucks troll for telltale footprints along a dirt track the Spaniards called the Camino del Diablo, or the Devil’s Road. Hidden in the sandstone canyons are ancient water holes that have long sustained travelers. But as veteran Border Patrol agent Rick Sanchez pointed out, you can die of thirst 50 feet away if you don’t know where they are.

On a recent morning, as the mercury approached 100 degrees, Sanchez and four other agents searched for a group of about 10 people, based on a count of the footprints left for miles across the desert crust. Seismic detectors, buried in the desert floor near Yuma, had been triggered by human movement, further confirming the migrants’ path.

The trekkers had crossed southeast of Yuma, at a different point than that employed by the ill-fated group a week earlier. But judging from the later migrants’ direction, it was apparent to the agents that they were headed deeper into desert--and potential trouble.

The agents steered around cactuses and twisted ironwood trees. From low overhead, a Border Patrol helicopter pilot radioed directions as he followed the meandering tracks north through a break in the mountains called Smuggler’s Pass. Another agent, Buster Hummel, picked up the trail on foot. A fine, sugary dust kicked up by the agents’ trucks filled the folds of his dark-green uniform.

After three hours, the hunt paid off. Small clusters of people--seven in all--emerged from beneath the paloverdes where they had sought shelter from the noontime heat, now up to 106 degrees. Sanchez asked in Spanish how many more there were.

No answer.

He said 14 people died a week earlier: “We don’t want any more deaths out here, OK?” Someone in the group let on that there were 13 people. Soon, all were located, all in good health.

The migrants said they had set out from the San Luis Rio Colorado end of the Mexican highway about 16 hours earlier. Agents figured that the group had walked about 20 miles and was not yet halfway to Interstate 8, the likely goal.

Migrants Ill Equipped for Desert Trek

The migrants were ill equipped for such a desert trek. In sneakers and jeans, each had started with a gallon of water. Not yet into the first afternoon, most of the jugs were close to empty. Another day in the desert heat and this group, too, could have found itself in life-threatening conditions.

Three men and two women, all from the same town in the state of Nayarit on Mexico’s Pacific coast, appeared stunned to learn that they would have had to walk at least 25 more miles. For many, it was their first crossing and their first taste of the desert, they said.

“We had no idea how far it was,” said Maximiliano Valdivia Vasquez, a 32-year-old construction worker.

The migrants, bound for the orchards of Washington state, said they were not traveling with a coyote, but that is a common denial. They are coached not to snitch. The same guide might be leading them again the next day, once the group is returned across the border.

Slumped in the back of a Border Patrol truck, one of the migrants, 30-year-old Santiago Jara Ramirez, said he successfully crossed the Arizona desert during one of five previous journeys north of the border. He smiled broadly at mention of Los Angeles. He’d once worked as a gardener in Pasadena.

None had heard of the 14 deaths a week earlier. They listened somberly to an account.

It was Jara who spoke up: He grew beans back in Nayarit. Business was bad. He pulled an invoice from his wallet and unfolded it. It was from a sale he’d made in March. The price of beans had fallen to five pesos a kilogram--less than 30 cents a pound. That was no living, he said. Hence, the journey north.

His solution to the crisis in the desert was simple: Open the border to temporary workers. The others nodded in agreement.

Eighteen-year-old Yadira Graciano, whose pretty smile was edged in silver fillings, said she knew the trip was perilous. Her parents had tried to talk her out of it.

“They warned me. They said not to go. But I wanted to look for something better,” she said. “And to help them.” The brush with danger left her unbowed. She vowed to cross again.

Cousin’s Death Ends One Group’s Journey

On the same afternoon as Graciano’s group was rounded up, a graver drama was facing a separate group of Mexican migrants in a different stretch of the desert about 100 miles to the east, directly north of Sonoyta.

The six migrants, three of them cousins and all from the same town in the southern coastal state of Oaxaca, had set out on foot from the border two days earlier, part of a group of 16 who were being guided by a pair of Sonoyta smugglers.

It had taken some doing for the men to make it north, their first trip to the border: borrowing money from relatives to pay for the two-day bus ride from Oaxaca to Sonoyta, then lining up a coyote to get them to Los Angeles. The smuggler’s fee, $600 each, would be paid when they arrived.

But far short of California’s farm country, five of the men found themselves sitting in a Border Patrol detention center, recounting how Armando Rosales Pacheco, a fit if slightly chubby 25-year-old campesino, died before their eyes on a lonely, sun-cooked stretch south of Ajo, Ariz.

After an all-night hike, Rosales complained of feeling poorly and weak in the legs. A companion, David Soriano, rubbed his legs to recharge them, but Rosales kept falling behind. The two coyotes grew impatient but were decent enough to replenish the migrants’ bottles with cloudy water they’d found nearby, probably from cattle tanks.

Rosales faltered. The smugglers and the 10 other migrants couldn’t wait. They pushed on, leaving Rosales and his five companions not far from Highway 85, which runs from Ajo to the crossing into Sonoyta.

Alone the next day, the men swabbed Rosales’ face and neck to cool him. He vomited the brackish water. Two cousins, Rosebel Miguel Rosales and Oscar Morales Rosales, propped him between them as the little group hobbled north. They still held out hope of making it to Ajo, maybe pooling their money to buy a junk car and then driving on.

They made it 100 yards. Armando Rosales went faint, his cousins laid him down. He trembled, his lips went purple. And just like that, more than 1,500 miles from a verdant Oaxaca countryside of cooling ocean breezes and rivers and fishing and broad-leafed papaya and fields of corn, Rosales was dead on a parched bed of gravel.

“It happened fast. He shook and his eyes went back in his head and he was gone. He didn’t say a thing,” said Morales, one of the cousins.

Two of the men went for help and flagged down a Border Patrol agent out on the highway. Their trip was over.

A day later, the men bore shellshocked expressions as they described the ordeal. They were concerned about getting back to Oaxaca in time for the funeral. They were awed by the desert’s cruelty.

“This is the last time I try--too dangerous,” Morales said. “It is my first time--and my last time, too.”

*

Smith reported from Mexico and Ellingwood from the United States. Times Mexico City Bureau researcher Rafael Aguirre contributed to this report.