Deadly Journey of Hope

Mario Alberto Diaz, a biologist nearing completion of his master’s degree, crawled under a barbed-wire fence marking the border with the United States one evening this summer. He had 48 hours to go in his illegal trek across the desert.

Desperate for a way to support his family, Diaz had a lead on a job in his specialty, cultivating mushrooms, at a plant in Florida. But not far into Arizona, his dream turned into a nightmare.

He stumbled and sprained a knee. Limping two nights and days, at times in 95-degree heat, left him dehydrated. On the second day, a cactus punctured his plastic bottle, spilling the last of his water. He fainted twice.

Traveling companions revived him, draped his arms over their shoulders and pulled him along. Each time they crossed a road, they urged him to stay behind, flag down the next vehicle and turn himself in. Each time Diaz refused, even after the ghastly sight of a man, woman and child huddled in lifeless embrace in the desert made clear the risk of continuing.

“It only gave him more courage,” said a woman who made the journey with Diaz and identified herself only as Mari. He showed her a photo of his 4-year-old, Sonia, and kept repeating: “I promised my daughter I would get there.” He didn’t.

At the end of the second day, Diaz collapsed in exhaustion in a dry Arizona gulch and never got up. His body lay there for 20 days, left behind in the biggest yearly influx of illegal migration across the U.S.-Mexico border since 2000.

The Bush administration spent an additional $30 million this year trying to control the most porous and perilous stretch of that frontier, the Sonoran Desert, which straddles Arizona and northwestern Mexico. Despite the effort, including a $15-million airlift home of migrants caught in the desert, well more than a million others got past Arizona’s border defenses and a record number died trying.

The U.S. Border Patrol registered 172 migrant fatalities in Arizona and 153 along the rest of the U.S.-Mexico border in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30. Other tallies for Arizona ranged as high as 221 deaths.

The 36-year-old scientist’s fatal journey, recounted by his relatives and traveling companions, sheds some light on the forces drawing Mexicans into Arizona’s “corridor of death” and the frustrations of U.S. agents trying to stop them.

Diaz’s education was not bringing him meaningful work in Mexico. He had been teaching karate six hours a week, earning about $60. With a second child on the way, his immediate family soon would outgrow its two-room house. He needed money to add on a room.

His anxiety ran deep. Diaz lived on a family compound in Tlalnepantla, a suburb of Mexico City, where three of his four brothers bring home decent salaries in white-collar professions. While accepting their charity -- they had recently bought him a 1991 Nissan -- he told his wife, Teresa, he felt like a failure.

Then a job search on the Internet led Diaz to a food-processing plant in Orlando, Fla., and he sent off a resume. The reply was encouraging, but he would need a U.S. visa. When his visa application was denied -- because his $400 savings account was too small and the title to his home was not in his name -- he decided to go illegally and simply show up at the plant.

One of his wife’s cousins put Diaz in touch with a Mexican migrant-smuggler known to the family only as Gerardo. He offered to escort Diaz to Orlando for $2,700, payable a little at a time once he arrived there. The biologist’s thesis advisor urged him to wait, saying a university research position might open up. But Diaz was restless.

“My brother was submerged in a depression,” said Alejandro Diaz, a geographer and mapmaker for Mexico’s National Water Commission. “I didn’t notice, but Teresa tells me that he cried a lot and became desperate. That job in Orlando was an illusion that got into his head, and nobody could take it out.”

Until June 14, the day before he left home, he kept his plan secret from his brothers. “He knew what we would say,” said Rosa Maria Serrato, Alejandro’s wife. “He knew we would tell him not to go, that it was too dangerous.”

Crossing the U.S. border has become more and more hazardous for illegal migrants in the decade since the Border Patrol, starting in San Diego, began fortifying the most heavily trafficked frontier sectors with new fences, brighter lights and additional agents.

In the mid-1990s, U.S. officials predicted that the crackdown would discourage border crossers in the short term and that the new North American Free Trade Agreement would, within a decade, bring enough jobs to Mexico to stem the wave of laborers migrating north.

Both assumptions proved wrong. Although NAFTA created more than 1 million manufacturing jobs in Mexico, it failed to improve overall wages and it pushed 1.3 million workers off farms made unprofitable by U.S. food imports. U.S.-bound migrants shifted to increasingly remote and treacherous border areas, crossing and dying in greater numbers.

After the Sonoran Desert had become the illegal gateway of choice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in March reassigned 285 agents from elsewhere along the border to bolster the 2,190 already in Arizona.

Mario Villareal, a spokesman for Homeland Security’s division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, called the Arizona clampdown “quite effective.” He said the Border Patrol seized more than 585,000 migrants trying to sneak into Arizona over the last 12 months, more than half the total for the entire border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.

But agents on the front line say they feel overrun. They say that the rising arrest totals simply mean that more migrants are getting in; according to conventional estimates, three migrants enter for every one who is caught.

“The strategy of trying to regain control of the border inch by inch is failing,” said T.J. Bonner, president of the San Diego-based National Border Patrol Council, a union representing 10,000 Border Patrol employees. It cannot succeed, he added, without “teeth in the sanctions” that outlaw the hiring of illegal immigrants in the United States.

It is the near-certainty of employment in a rebounding U.S. economy that is pulling in more border crossers, migration specialists say. Some maintain that President Bush’s proposal in January for an expanded temporary-worker program, which would offer renewable three-year visas for foreigners filling jobs Americans don’t want, is a factor in the influx, even though Congress has not acted on it.

Dozens of Mexican migrants interviewed recently said they crossed illegally after hearing from friends or relatives in the United States about specific job openings that pay as much as 10 times what they earn at home. According to a survey by the College of the Northern Frontier in Tijuana, more than 120,000 of those migrating illegally each year are university-educated.

The border’s busiest migration corridor has become the 57-mile dirt road from Altar to Sasabe in the Mexican state of Sonora. Altar’s 7,000 residents run guest houses, sell backpacks and work as drivers for migrants, who gather by the hundreds in the town square each day to meet up with smugglers and ride north to foot trails that cross the border.

Within 25 minutes on a recent afternoon, eight vans crammed with migrants out of Altar passed a checkpoint just south of Sasabe run by Grupos Beta, the humanitarian arm of Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Many of the occupants were from tropical lowlands in southern Mexico, getting their first blast of desert heat.

They looked bored by Julio Mallen’s words of caution.

“It is important to go with enough water for at least two or three days,” the Beta agent emphasized, peering into each van. “Wear long sleeves to protect yourself from the sun. If anyone feels tired and cannot continue, tell your companions so they can help you find a road and get help.”

Grupos Beta defines its mission as minimizing harm to U.S.-bound migrants without explicitly discouraging their exodus. “Have a safe trip and God bless you,” Mallen said at the end of his lecture.

Diaz, bound for Orlando, heard the same warning at the same spot on June 17 after spending the night in Altar. He might have shrugged it off, his brother said; Diaz was a strong 6-footer with a black belt in karate and a biologist’s knowledge of the dangers of extreme heat.

Yet after hurting his knee that evening, Diaz tried to defy the growing odds against his life, traveling companions said later. He refused to give up the trek across a blistering landscape of canyons, copper mines, mesquite shrubs and saguaro cactus. When his water ran out, he drank from stagnant, possibly contaminated puddles.

Eventually, the bulk of the group moved ahead, leaving the limping biologist in the company of Gerardo the smuggler and another of his clients, 40-year-old Jose Cruz.

What happened next is unclear. In recent a telephone interview from Orlando, where he pours cement at construction sites, Cruz said the trio camped in hilly terrain the night of June 19. When he awoke the next morning, he said, Diaz was dead and the smuggler was gone.

“I touched him, but he would not move,” Cruz said. “I started crying. I didn’t know what to do.” He started walking, he said, and found another group of migrants, who guided him to a different smuggler’s van.

But in a late June phone conversation with Miguel Escobar Valdes, the Mexican consul in Douglas, Ariz., Cruz told a different story: He and the smuggler abandoned Diaz during a climb that the biologist could not manage, and the two survivors made it to Orlando together.

“Even if you stay with him, this guy is not going to make it,” the smuggler reportedly told Cruz. “You can stay, but I’m moving on.”

The latter story sounds more plausible. Sheriff’s deputies say they recovered Diaz’s body in a dry creek bed by a shrub to which someone -- perhaps his departing companions -- had tied a bottle containing a third of a gallon of water. The site is in the steep foothills of the Sierrita mountains, about 15 miles southwest of the Arizona mining town of Green Valley.

Alejandro Diaz helped identify the body after viewing pictures of the dead man’s belongings and recognizing his brother’s cap, with its yellow tiger karate symbol.

He is still trying to identify the smuggler, hoping to prod authorities to track down and prosecute him for the scientist’s death. But Cruz and other migrants who survived the trek have refused to cooperate.

U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed Mexican authorities to crack down on migrant smugglers, who can be prosecuted in Mexico for human trafficking. (Mexican police have no authority to arrest individual Mexican migrants for trying to leave the country.) Despite occasional arrests, the smugglers enjoy heavy unrelenting demand for their services, and few migrants testify against them.

Mexico cooperated more fully this summer with an experimental U.S. effort to separate border crossers from the smuggling rings.

Instead of dropping them at the border, where they might try again and again to cross and grow weaker each time, the Border Patrol airlifted 14,071 arrested migrants from Tucson to Mexico City and Guadalajara, from where they were bused home. About 15% of the illegal migrants seized in Arizona between July 12 and Sept. 30 accepted this “voluntary repatriation,” which cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1,000 per passenger.

Both governments say the effort apparently saved lives and might be resumed next summer. The Border Patrol counted 51 migrant deaths in Arizona during the 81-day airlift, down from 63 during the same period last year. In interviews, some migrants who took the flights said they were frightened by their first venture into the desert and were unlikely to go there again; others said they would be back in cooler weather.

Magdalena Carral, commissioner of Mexico’s migration institute, said the airlift “is not the ultimate solution to the migration problem.” Its long-term impact is hard to measure, she added, because “a lot of these people, I think, will go back to try again.... They carry a dream in their head.”

President Vicente Fox has lobbied for years for an agreement making it easier for Mexican workers to migrate legally to the United States.

But Bush’s answer, the temporary-worker proposal announced in January, faltered under election-year criticism within his own party. His Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry, has promised legislation that would lead to permanent residence for many undocumented workers, but he and Bush have barely discussed the issue in the presidential campaign.

Alejandro Diaz has spent three months trying to make sense of his brother’s death, hoping it will help spur some kind of reform. But he says he is haunted by a tragic footnote.

Eleven days after Diaz died, his thesis advisor called the home to offer what would have been great news: He had found a full-time research job for the biologist.