A Surge South of Mexico

The flow of Central American immigrants bound for the United States has surged 25% or more this year, say government and aid agency officials, who point to a sharp climb in deportations, injury reports and need for assistance as the basis for their estimates.

Confronted with increasingly bleak economies in their home countries and rising gang violence, the immigrants, many of them young, are heading north through Mexico at a rate that Mexican and Honduran authorities agree has gone through the roof.

Alex Pacheco, the Honduran consul in the Mexican border city of Tapachula, about 20 miles north of here, says the number of stranded, broke and injured Hondurans he has helped is up 30% from when he arrived in late 2003.

“There is no reason to hide it. It’s grown at an exaggerated pace,” said Pacheco, who thinks the workload and the tales of woe have aged him prematurely. “The reason is simple: The majority of the countries they come from are in big trouble.”

One such immigrant is Marlon David. The 18-year-old Honduran was interviewed as he waited to hop the northbound Chiapas-Mayab railroad line here with about 200 other youths. Neither police nor railroad officials made any apparent effort to stop them from hitching rides atop empty boxcars and fuel tankers.

His goal: to earn money in Florida and send it back to his mother.

“Necessity forces me to go,” David said, adding that there was no work in his hometown, Tegucigalpa. He had crossed over into Mexico that morning from Guatemala.

“My mother has heart problems and can’t afford the medicine.”

Immigration experts estimate that Central and South Americans make up less than 2% of all those who illegally cross the United States’ southern border. The vast majority of illegal immigrants to the U.S. are Mexicans -- nearly half a million per year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Even with the increase, the number of Central Americans entering Mexico in hopes of making it to the U.S. is still a “drop in the bucket” compared to Mexican migrants, said migrant advocate Claudia Smith of Oceanside, Calif.

But the percentage of Central Americans among illegal workers in the United States is slowly rising, if deportations are an indicator, said Andy Adame, spokesman for the Border Patrol in Tucson. The number of Central and South Americans caught and deported from his region rose to 1.7% of all those apprehended from 1.5% a year ago. Adame said the vast majority were from Central America.

In addition to factors at home driving Central Americans northward, the United States has become a more realistic goal for many of the migrants. Enough family members and friends have made it to the U.S. that a financial and psychological safety net is available to newcomers.

“If a migrant knows there is some kind of shelter, a prearranged job, that makes them less apprehensive about making the trip,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego. He noticed a similar effect in southern Mexican states that until recently, did not send significant numbers of migrants.

What is clear to anyone standing on the Suchiate River that separates this steamy Chiapas border town from Guatemala is that there isn’t much that stops youths from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua from at least trying to go north.

Vigilance along this stretch of the river a quarter-mile east of the official crossing is relaxed to nonexistent. A flotilla of rafts fashioned from two huge tractor-tire inner tubes brings an unending stream of immigrants, day laborers and shoppers north from the Guatemalan side of the river.

A few dozen yards to the west, many youths simply wade across the 100-foot-wide river, unchallenged, so as to save the 50-cent fare. From there, they walk to the yard of the Chiapas-Mayab railroad, the trains of which on most nights are boarded by hundreds of youths, throwing down the gauntlet to immigration police and predatory gangs in their efforts to make it to El Norte.

“We have a very porous border, and it is very vulnerable,” said Horacio Schroeder Bejarano, Chiapas state public security secretary. The regional office of the National Immigration Institute, which regulates immigration and naturalization, says overall deportations to Central American countries are up 36% so far this year over 2004.

It’s next to impossible to say how many of the migrants actually make it to the United States, but academics such as Cornelius extrapolate from the numbers of migrants who are caught and other anecdotal indicators to come up with an estimate of the overall flow.

Those indicators, and the spectacle of the exodus funneling through Mexico’s southernmost Chiapas state, leave little doubt among officials here that immigration is up significantly. For example, the number of amputees at a clinic serving migrants injured in falls off the northbound train is up 50% over last year.

The number of arrivals at a hostel for migrants in Tecun Uman on the Guatemalan side of the border is up 25%, said Ademar Barilli, the Catholic friar who runs it as well as other hostels in Ciudad Juarez and Tapachula.

“The increase is similar to what we have been seeing for the last three years,” Barilli said. “Why? There is corruption and poverty where they come from, and 70% to 80% of them have relatives in the States, so they can feel sure they will find work there.”

The Mexican government is building a new migrant terminal to accommodate the rising flow. At the existing depot, an average of 25 buses leave each day from Tapachula and are jammed with up to 700 illegal immigrants being repatriated.

“It is a flow that is uncontainable in its magnitude,” said Mauricio Gandara Gallardo, the regional director of the National Immigration Institute in Tapachula. “The only way to stop it is with some economic development scheme so that these people have reason to stay in their home countries.”

But for many of the youths, the long, treacherous path to the U.S. is now a rite of passage.

“It’s become a passion among our youths, like soccer,” said Pacheco, the Honduran consul.

But he couldn’t talk long. He had to reunite a father with two daughters, barely teenagers, who had run away from Roatan, Honduras, to be with their mother in New York before being caught by Mexican authorities.