Locked in a Boxcar and Gasping for Air

BY SONIA NAZARIO, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Coyotes, or smugglers, mistook Darwin Zepeda Lopez for a paying customer.

They herded him along with their clients toward four boxcars, doors open. Then they loaded him and about 40 of the others into one of the cars.

Zepeda, 22, lanky and with big hazel eyes, was traveling north to the Rio Grande. He had been on his own, with no coyote to help him, because neither he nor his family could afford one.

Now it seemed he might get a free ride.

Zepeda says he heard the metal doors slide, then clang shut. The smugglers locked them in from the outside, so the boxcar would not look suspicious. It was April 2000 in southern Mexico, and the outdoor temperature was climbing past 100 degrees. Inside, the car was turning into an oven.

As the train rolled north, the immigrants drank their water bottles dry. The air in the car turned rank with sweat. Zepeda could hardly breathe. People began screaming and shouting for help.

Some knelt and pleaded with God to stop the train.

At 40 migrants in each of the four boxcars, the smugglers were making at least $320,000. Coyote fees have doubled since 1993, when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service added 5,600 agents along the U.S.-Mexico border and made it harder for the undocumented to enter the United States.

The lowest fee for Central American adults is $2,000 to $3,000.

For children, the price doubles, says Robert J. Foss, legal director at the Central American Resource Center, a Los Angeles migrant aid group. Some parents pay more than double. Top smuggling packages for youngsters, Foss says, run as high as $10,000. These packages guarantee arrival by air.

Most mothers save for years and hire smugglers for their children. Some females coyotes pretend to be aunts. They use false identification papers for the children, lull them to sleep in backs of cars and, just in case, teach them English responses to typical INS questions. Others put them on small boats and ferry them up the Mexican coast. Still others ride with them on buses.

Few smugglers can be trusted. Some are drunks or drug addicts. Many collect part of their fees upfront, then abandon their charges along the way. Sometimes they rob and rape them.

As Zepeda learned, they have little regard for life.

Fistfights broke out in his boxcar as the riders jockeyed to suck fresh air through tiny rust holes over the doors. After four hours, he says, a woman with asthma begged for water, then slumped to the floor unconscious. Others pried open her mouth and tried to give her the few drops they could find. Finally, they left her for dead. Some stood on her to reach the highest air holes.

For a reason Zepeda could not determine, Mexican officials grew concerned and stopped the train. But the engineer, perhaps bribed by the smugglers, gave them no time to inspect thoroughly before moving on. During the next 40 minutes, Zepeda says, he saw seven migrants fall to the floor.

The boxcar, he says, looked like a rolling morgue.

It was five hours into the ride before immigration agents and Mexican soldiers forced the engineer to stop again and opened the boxcars. In the confusion, Zepeda escaped.

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