Father’s Modest Dream Leads to Tragic Journey

LOS CONOS, Mexico -- Roberto Esparza was a skilled, hard-working young man with a welding shop in his mother’s garage. He had a baby son, the joy of his life, and a modest start toward his dream: the mud-brick walls of a little home for his new family.

But one day in June, Esparza despaired of his limits and made a heartbreaking choice. Welding jobs in this poor farming village bring $4 on a good day, too little for building materials in addition to food, so he turned to a thriving local businessman for help.

The man was a wealthy migrant trafficker. For $1,500, he would get the 23-year-old tradesman to Sarasota, Fla., where he might earn enough to return next year and finish his house. On June 10, Esparza kissed his wife and left for the Texas border with two cousins.

Then something went horribly wrong. Esparza, one cousin and nine other migrants died after being left in a locked grain car, and their skeletal remains were discovered only last week in a Denison, Iowa, rail yard. The trafficker called the family from somewhere in Florida to beg forgiveness.

The family’s tragedy underlines the poverty that spurs migration from thousands of small communities across Mexico, making people-smuggling their most lucrative enterprise and draining away their ablest workers. The gruesome scene in Iowa was a sign of the risks Mexicans are willing to take for higher-paying work in the United States.

The problem will be high on the agenda this weekend when President Vicente Fox, playing host to world leaders, will press President Bush for a revival of Mexico’s proposals to make migration by its laborers to the U.S. easier and safer. Talks on the issue were shelved after the Sept. 11 attacks diverted Bush’s attention.

The U.S. Border Patrol has stepped up its checkpoints in populated areas along the Mexican border since the mid-1990s, but this has only prompted undocumented migrants to take more perilous paths. At least 320 people have been reported dead trying to cross the frontier in the last year.

“It’s terrible what happens to them,” said Father Jesus Mendoza, the Roman Catholic priest for Los Conos and the 23 other villages of El Llano municipality in Aguascalientes state, about 260 miles northwest of Mexico City. “They die in train cars, drown in the river, get lost in the desert.”

At least 600 of El Llano’s 16,000 people work in the U.S., most of them in Florida, authorities here say. The priest said he has buried at least a dozen others who died trying to get there over the last eight years.

Villagers leaving Mass here Sunday said the latest deaths left the community shaken but not surprised, gripped by new fears for those trekking north but no less certain that they’ll go anyway.

“You can never trust the smugglers,” said Saturnino Martinez, a chicken farmer whose teenage son followed one smuggler to Texas this year. “But you cannot stop the young people from going to them. There aren’t enough jobs here.”

Mayor Francisco Silva estimated a 20% to 30% jobless rate in El Llano. A textile plant, its biggest employer, is losing jobs to China, and farmers are adjusting poorly to a decade-old withdrawal of government subsidies. There’s little commercial traffic on the muddy streets save for the twice-weekly Corona beer truck.

So poor are people here that, when a collection was taken up for the Esparzas, the heartfelt sympathy for the family translated into just $69.05 from 44 donors.

Although remittances sent home from U.S.-based migrants are Mexico’s third-largest source of income, El Llano has not benefited as much as some places have.

“Our young men go north, dreaming of returning with money for a car, a house, or so a brother or sister can go to university,” Father Mendoza said. “But they get there and forget why they went. They try to live like Americans. They get another wife. They drink.”

Roberto Esparza seemed an exception. He labored 11 months in an Indiana shoe factory in 2000, came back to start a family, and left again in mid-2001 to build swimming pools in Sarasota, sending hundreds of dollars home each month.

Back from Florida last March, he met his son for the first time, and the two became nearly inseparable. His mother’s four-room house began to feel cramped, occupied as it was by 11 members of the Esparza clan, so he started building his own. To pay for bricks, he bought welding equipment and set up shop, making metal doors and signs.

“He wanted his son to grow up better than he had, in a nicer place,” said his wife, Irene Godinez.

But Esparza soon realized there wasn’t enough money here. Without one last trip to Florida, he told his wife, the new house would remain an illusion.

“We can build gradually,” she remembers arguing, begging him to stay. “But he was driven to finish it.”

Godinez, 22, and her mother-in-law, Leticia Rico, 45, told this story while playing with the toddler, now 14 months, in their tiny living room. Both women wept as the tale turned to woe.

Traffickers in migrants are known as coyotes, and the best-known coyote in town supervised a cross-border network of guides. Esparza told his wife he trusted the man, who had smuggled him safely across the Rio Grande last year and put him on an airplane to Florida.

This time, the welder was accompanied by two 16-year-old cousins, Omar Esparza and Eduardo Martinez. On June 10, they took a bus to Matamoros, the family said, and were rafted across the Rio Grande. Five days later, they joined about 30 other undocumented migrants in Harlingen, Texas, where they were smuggled aboard three empty grain hoppers.

A grain hopper is a rail car that can be sealed tightly from the outside to keep its contents clean and dry. Locked inside too long, a stowaway can suffocate, starve or succumb to 150-degree heat.

“You’re dripping wet, gasping for air and praying to get caught,” said Fidel Macias, a Los Conos migrant who once spent 14 hours in a hopper in Texas before the Border Patrol opened it.

In stifling darkness, the Esparzas and their companions apparently were supposed to travel several hours to Houston, far beyond the last Border Patrol checkpoint. Then the coyote or a guide was to let them out for a safer overland trip to Florida.

Rico, Roberto’s mother, said she learned these details from Eduardo Martinez, who was caught and deported. Border Patrol agents inspecting the train in Harlingen found him among the stowaways in two hoppers but didn’t check the third.

Back in Los Conos in late June, the teenager told Rico: “Don’t worry, Auntie, the other boys got through safely.”

But weeks went by without word from them. The family’s agony stretched into the fall.

The third hopper, it turns out, had gone not to Houston but to Oklahoma City, where it remained in storage from June 18 to Oct. 10. The 11 stowaways’ bodies were discovered Oct. 14 after the car arrived in Denison to collect grain.

Of the dead, only Roberto and Omar Esparza and two Honduran men carried identification papers. Officials said the others -- three men and four women -- may remain unidentified unless relatives come forward with DNA samples.

Last week, before the bodies were officially identified, the coyote called Roberto’s stepfather from Florida to report that the two Esparzas were among the dead, Rico said. The coyote was crying into the phone.

“I am sorry, but don’t do anything against me,” he pleaded, according to Rico. “Think of my family.”

“Why didn’t you think of my family?” the stepfather replied before slamming down the phone. “You could have saved them.”

The Esparza family and others here want the trafficker in jail, but he hasn’t been seen here in months.

Coyotes have rarely been prosecuted in Mexico. But the government is starting to crack down, using laws against organized crime. Mexico’s Congress is debating a bill to raise the maximum prison term for human smuggling from 12 to 25 years.

But Fox wants a comprehensive deal with Washington that would expand permanent U.S. visas and guest-worker programs for Mexicans, give legal status to about 3 million Mexican migrants working in the U.S., and pump aid and investment into villages like Los Conos to keep their workers home.

“Fox and Bush could join forces,” said Rico, whose late father worked six months in a U.S. guest-worker program in the 1940s. “They could end the fear and uncertainty of thousands of families over what might happen when their children go north.”