October 29, 2000Marvin's Journey: One migrant's tale
|
||||||||||||||
|
By Ignacio Ibarra and Jeffry Scott
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Water rose in the wash and darkness set quickly on the Arizona desert.
Marvin Hernandez could see his dreams fading with the light.
He was certain it was all over - the year's pay he'd turned over to smugglers. The 2,000 miles he'd traveled from city to jungle to desert. The luck that had gotten him this far on his first try.
It had begun three weeks earlier, when his mother, Angela, packed three neatly pressed pairs of pants, three shirts, socks, underwear, a toothbrush and aspirin in a small bag. She rode with him to the bus station and waved as he left the poorest country in Central America to look for a minimum-wage job in the United States.
He promised to return, but his mother has lost her men to this journey before. She took in his bright smile, his deep brown eyes and his soccer player's build as if for the last time.
In the weeks since, Marvin discarded the personal items piece by piece, lightening his load as he crossed his own land of El Salvador, then Guatemala and Mexico.
The week of America's Independence Day, the 25-year-old mechanic slipped over the last border, into Arizona. With that he became one of nearly half a million people who cross illegally into the country each year.
He expected a two-hour walk to catch his ride to Phoenix. It turned into a grueling three-day march through mesquite and catsclaw in 100-degree heat.
Just five miles into the promised land, in the middle of a summer downpour, a U.S. Border Patrol agent intercepted Marvin's group. The 50 migrants had been resting in the brush, a quarter-mile south of the highway to Bisbee.
The young agent couldn't drive them all to the station, so he ordered them to wait in a culvert under the highway, protected from the rain above.
Agents returned several times to haul away another part of the group. But no one had come back for nearly three hours now.
Two of the last five migrants saw their chance and fled. But two young women, known to Marvin as Mari Reyes and Glynnis, refused to disobey the agent's orders. They waited obediently to be deported.
Marvin stayed behind to protect them, as he'd done before.
Finally, the rising water in the wash convinced the huddled women it was time to go.
They climbed out to the road. There was no Border Patrol in sight. Alone and lost, they remembered the stories they'd heard about ranchers shooting at migrants, about people dying or disappearing here.
|
Marvin was scared.
From hometown to Chiapas
The journey had begun before dawn June 22 at San Salvador's Terminal Occidental.
The engine roar was deafening and a cloud of diesel smoke hung thick in the early morning air.
Cambiadores - money changers - waved fists full of Guatemalan quetzals, promising the best rate of exchange for El Salvadoran colones. Knots of U.S.-bound migrants waited to board the six buses leaving for Guatemala City or directly for the Guatemala border with Mexico.
Marvin had hired a coyote, a smuggler, to take him the 4,200 miles to Boston for $5,700. He'd paid nearly half the fee up front.
Now he waited nervously with 15 others to board the 7 a.m. bus on the Condor line to Guatemala City. The trip was only 110 miles, the distance from Tucson to Phoenix, but it would take five hours - through coffee plantations, sugar-cane fields and rainforest highlands.
"For me, leaving was the only way I could help my mother and make a life for myself," he said. "Everyone tried to talk me out of it. But I had to come."
The first part of the trip would be no problem. El Salvador and Guatemala allow easy entry for tourism or work. But at Guatemala City he would transfer to a bus headed for the Mexican border. Guatemalan immigration police would be looking for him.
"People usually cross at Tecún Umán, or Talismán, but a lot of people are robbed and assaulted there. They were taking us to La Mesilla, where they said things were not so bad," Marvin recalled later.
"I was worried. My brother had told me the road was long and difficult, and you hear stories all the time of people who have problems.
"It's something you think about - dying. It's something that you talk about on the road."
The dangers begin with the smugglers. "The worst ones sell their people to the Mexican coyotes at the border," said one of the Condor bus drivers, "or they take the people into the countryside where they take whatever they have and abandon them."
That's what happened to Ramon Rodriguez Rendero, 30, a fisherman and father of four from the port city of Puerto Libertad, El Salvador, when he set out for the United States in August. He didn't have the money to pay the coyote. So when a man offered to take him to the United States and collect his fee once Rodriguez had a job, he jumped at the chance.
The guides turned out to be bajadores - bandits. They led him and others into the jungles of Chiapas, robbed them and left them. When the migrants came across Mexican police and sought help, the officers tried to rob them, too, then became angry when they saw the group had nothing left to steal.
But Rodriguez will try again. "Making a life here is hard, especially with all of these children. That's why I went, and why I'll try again when I can."
That desperation and persistence is why migrants are willing to pay so much for the chance to escape to el otro lado, the other side, explained a smuggler who would identify himself only as Luis A.
Working the San Salvador bus terminal one morning, Luis was about to bite into a breakfast of shrimp cocktail when his cell phone rang.
"The trip will cost 30,000 to 50,000 colons" - $3,500 to $5,700 - "and take 15 to 30 days depending on how much you pay," he said into the phone. "The more you pay, the less time you'll spend walking or waiting. Sure, we can get you there on an airplane, but that's a lot more difficult to arrange and much more expensive.
"Let me know what you decide, but don't take too long, the trips fill up fast," he told the caller before snapping the mouthpiece closed.
A second call rang in. "Yes, yes, that's good," he said to this caller. "Get them ready to go, but don't move until I call and give you the green light."
Luis A. has been smuggling people north for 14 years, and he says business has never been busier or more profitable.
"There are all kinds of people who come through this area to get to the United States, not just Salvadorans. There are Russians, Arabs, Chinese and people from all over Latin America. And there are many more who would come if they had the money," he said.
A bus out: An American flag adorns a bus leaving Occidente in San Salvador. Such flags are common themes in many Central American countries, where nearly every family has a relative in or knows someone who has gone to the United States. |
They come with the idea that they will be able to work for a year or two, send money home, and put some aside for the day they return to their homes and families. What they don't understand is that "the American dream is no longer a reality," Luis A. said. "It's just a dream."
Most won't return home. "People need to understand that for many of them, this is a one-way trip," he said.
People-smuggling is not illegal in El Salvador, as it is in the United States, although the country's legislature has been asked to crack down. Authorities are going after disreputable smugglers on fraud charges. Salvadoran authorities have been embarrassed by high-profile arrests of foreign nationals caught traveling through the country on forged passports.
Despite the pressure, Luis A. said his basic operation has not changed over the years.
Officially, he is one of about a half-dozen independent cambiadores converting colons and other currency into Guatemalan quetzals for outbound travelers.
But his real job is working as a pollero - "chicken wrangler" - and guide, organizing and leading groups of migrants to the United States for the coyote.
The coyote is the big boss, the money man who pays the up-front expenses and makes it possible for people to finance the expensive journey.
"Most of the people are paying between $4,000 to $5,700 if they're traveling a ground route," Luis A. said. The pollos, or "chickens," pay half the fee in advance. That money is given to the guide, who will use it to pay for transportation, food, safe houses and bribes along the way.
"This is a very well-organized business, and taking care of the authorities, especially in Mexico, is not a problem. If you need to pay a cop, you pay a cop. Everyone has a price."
But things get dicey even before you reach the Mexican border, he said.
Guatemalan enforcement has become so intense that speedboats, fishing boats and pleasure craft are now being used to leap-frog migrants past Guatemala and directly to the Pacific coast of Chiapas. Several people died last month when a wave swamped a speedboat.
Marvin arrived in Guatemala City, nearly 5,000 feet above sea level on a high plateau, the afternoon of the first day. Then he waited with others for their next ride. Mexico City was 700 miles away.
"We left in a bus in the middle of the night and traveled through the jungle all that day until we reached La Mesilla. All of the hotels were full of mojados" - wetbacks - "and everyone was headed to the United States," he said. "There were Central Americans, Peruvians, Ecuadorans, Colombians. I spent two days there. There were beds, food, a place to take a bath."
He and the others waited at a hotel with the guides for the arrival of other travelers.
At the end of the second day he and 14 others at the hotel were awakened at midnight and loaded into a pickup truck that took them to the river at the border between Guatemala and Chiapas.
The water moved fast and wide. The only way across was a narrow suspension bridge made of wood planks and ropes, hung precariously from trees on the steep banks.
"It worried me," Marvin said. "I was plenty scared."
Chiapas to Mexico City
Beyond the bridge, the path led into a swampy jungle, their first steps in Mexico. They walked for several hours, arriving at a small village as the sun came up.
The 15 migrants were loaded into the bed of a truck, covered with a tarp and driven for several more hours until they arrived at the Chiapas city of Tuxtla-Gutierrez.
Marvin dismisses the memory as an uncomfortable ride. But for 37-year-old Araceli Barrentos, who was taken through Tecún Umán, it was the first bad experience in a horrific trek to the United States.
Hard currency: Money-changers converge on a car at the Occidente bus terminal, where travelers heading north find they need Mexican and Guatemalan money.
Doing business: A smuggler called Luis A. talks on his cell phone while having lunch at the Occidente bus terminal in San Salvador. The conversation was about a trip to either Houston or Phoenix. His companion works as a money-changer. |
Barrentos, a social worker from Santa Ana, El Salvador, and five other women each paid a smuggler 37,000 colones, $4,200, to guide them through Mexico and on to Phoenix.
After being kept in a Guatemalan farm shack for five days among the dogs, pigs and chickens, their group of 28 migrants was led into Mexico, where they were packed into two pickup trucks with cattle cages on the back.
"They call it encebollados" - onion style - "where they lay you down side by side, with one person's head going this way and the next person's head going the other way," she said.
A second layer of people lay across the others in the same way. Then the smugglers bolted a sheet of plywood on top of the truck bed.
"When they told us we would spend hours like that, one of the women began to cry. But she was told that if she made any sound along the way she would be taken out and killed. We probably would have died, except for God.
"After about seven hours, Mexican Immigration stopped the pickup. The people were so desperate that they began pounding on the sides of the truck. When the officials began to search the truck, the guides ran."
Three days later, the Mexican police would turn the 28 migrants over to the same guides, who then loaded them onto the same trucks and continued toward Mexico City.
By the time Barrentos made it to San Francisco in late May, where she now works, she had lost 30 pounds, been abandoned twice by smugglers, left stranded at a Mexico City safe house waiting for more money from relatives, and forced to cook and clean up after other migrants - sometimes as many as 70 people - passing through the house each day.
Luis A. blames increased enforcement for causing such problems. Smuggling fees are pushed so high that new and inexperienced guides are leading migrants into danger, he said.
"There was a time when most guias could say they had never lost a load," said Luis A. "Most of us could cross our people in the first attempt. Now, of the 100 percent that we take, only 30 percent will make it on the first attempt.
"These days there are a lot more people being turned back at the border," he said. "Coyotes used to guarantee that you'd arrive. Now most will guarantee only three attempts and after that you have to pay again."
Marvin and his traveling companions spent three days at a hotel in Tuxtla-Gutierrez, Chiapas, waiting for the guias "to pay off the Mexican officials so they would let us pass. It's like that in Mexico, everything is handled with money."
In Chiapas their handlers began coaching Marvin and the others on how to be Mexican, telling them that once north of Mexico City, they were to identify themselves to anyone who asked as Mexican citizens from the port city of Veracruz.
"They say the Harochos, the people from Veracruz, and Salvadorans speak with the same sing-song Spanish. They told us how to talk, and told us about the city and things like the governor's name, the history," he said. "They told us little details, like the way we call this a braceleta," he said, pointing to his watchband, "and in Mexico it is called an estensible."
|
The Mexican lesson is important, and along with the experience and connections of the guide, a major factor in the success or failure of the journey, said Luis A.
It is also a hedge in case of trouble, because in the event of capture on the U.S. border, being convincing as a Mexican means deportation across the border to Mexico rather than all the way back to El Salvador.
Mexican immigration officials have long complained that many of the people released back to Mexico by the U.S. Border Patrol are not Mexican citizens. Border Patrol officials say such mistakes are rare.
"On the border, it's better if you're a Mexican," said Luis A.
But until Mexico City, Marvin and the other migrants carried Mexican visas, provided by Mexican police, identifying them as tourists from El Salvador. They were under strict instructions to keep quiet and let their guides do the talking.
Mexican police stopped the buses and hopped on all along the road, Marvin said. But the guides had given them a password. "It was the way the policia knew that the guide had paid for the passage," he said. "The smugglers have connections, and they know who has to be paid at each point and they pay. If you give the password, they leave you alone. If you don't, they take you off the bus."
For Marvin's tour, the password was piojoso - flea-infested.
"That told them that we were paid all the way to Mexico City."
The Mexican Embassy in Washington acknowledges that people smuggling can lure police into corruption. But no more so than in Central America - or the United States, said spokesman Jose Antonio Zabalgoitia. "The only way we can be successful against these criminal organizations," he said, "is to work together against them."
It took Marvin's group two days to reach the Mexico City bus station, where they were taken by taxi to a clavadero, or hiding place, a safe house where groups arrived and departed almost continuously.
It was there that Marvin first met Xiomari Reyes, 27, and several other Salvadorans also headed for the Boston area. Reyes left her 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son back home to join her husband in Boston. "It was very difficult to leave them," she said, "but I need to reach my husband if we're going to stay together as a family."
From Mexico City to U.S.
By taxi at midnight, they left Mexico City. On the way, they were stopped by city police who accused them of being in Mexico illegally and threatened to turn them over to immigration.
The migrants flashed the fake Mexican tourist visas and Salvadoran passports that they'd been given, but that didn't satisfy the police. After talking for a few moments with the guides, however, the officers provided a police escort to the bus terminal.
There they were met by more northbound migrants and loaded onto a bus for the longest leg of the journey, the 1,100 miles to the U.S. border. They would pass in about a day through subtropical forests into the high Chihuahuan Desert.
 Click on map to see full image |
"There were roadblocks everywhere, but the guide has money from the coyote that he uses to pay officials off at each stop," Marvin recalled.
At Chihuahua City, the group shifted to another bus headed for the border at Agua Prieta. "We didn't stop or rest. The bus was paid for and we just kept going through the night."
In El Salvador, Marvin had heard that Agua Prieta, a border city 110 miles southeast of Tucson, would be an easy place to enter the United States - despite the $2.7 billion the U.S. spends each year to control its southern border. More than $126 million of that is spent in Southern Arizona's Cochise, Santa Cruz and Pima counties.
In Agua Prieta, across the line from Douglas, they stayed several days at a safe house where 70 to 100 people a day passed through.
At 4 p.m. on the fourth day in Agua Prieta, Marvin and 20 other migrants were loaded into a van and driven west on Highway 2 toward Naco.
"They took us into the mountains and dropped us off at the end of this road and told us to start walking. We each had one gallon of water, but the walking was hard and we drank a lot."
The area is known as Las Antenas, after the television and radio towers visible at the top of the hills.
It is the same spot where 19-year-old Salvadoran Jose Walter Garcia and Araceli Barrentos crossed the border in May in a group of about 60 migrants led by a trio of guides.
By the third day of their walk, they had run out of water. And with temperatures rising to near 100 degrees, Garcia began to feel ill and fall behind.
Before long he felt faint. He spit up blood. "My throat hurt so badly I couldn't swallow or speak," he said.
"I felt I was dying. I was desperate and I wanted to die."
He remembers hearing his companions ask their guides to stop and let him rest. Someone replied, "Don't worry, the ground is soft here" - as if to suggest he could be buried in the dry stream bed where he had collapsed.
Some of the men threatened to kill their guides if Garcia did not survive. Only then did they relent and allow the group to stop and care for him.
On the second day of their own walk, Marvin and his companions joined up with another 30 people. They refilled their water bottles from a cache of bottles the smugglers had planted along the route.
Mari Reyes, the woman Marvin met in Mexico City who wanted to join her husband in Boston, fell behind.
She became nervous when a man started hanging back from the group to be with her.
She thought he would assault her. Just then, Marvin came back looking for her, chasing the other man away.
"It was frightening. There were just a few of us women, and so many men," Reyes said. "We were hungry and thirsty the entire time, and we walked so much. One day we walked for 16 hours."
By the afternoon of their third day of walking, the 50 illegal entrants and their guides had covered more than 15 miles, over mountain ranges in Mexico to the southern edge of the Mule Mountains in Arizona.
That's when the young Border Patrol agent spotted them in the raging thunderstorm and most of the group was hauled away to be deported.
Bisbee and beyond
Left behind, not knowing where they were or where to go, Marvin, Mari and 17-year-old Glynnis emerged from the swelling wash onto the highway. They had no choice but to flag down a passing car.
The first driver who stopped was an off-duty Border Patrol agent.
He tried to reach his station on his cell phone but couldn't get through. "It's your lucky day," he called out as he drove away.
The next driver, a Bisbee man returning from a doctor's appointment in Douglas, did pick them up.
The driver said it was like a scene from the Twilight Zone.
"It was raining like you wouldn't believe. All of a sudden there were these three figures in the headlights. When they turned, there was a look on their face that I can't describe. It was like, 'I give up, help me.'
"They were in a world of hurt, soaking wet and freezing.
"I pulled over and rolled down the window and the young man said, 'Phoenix?' I asked them if they were alone, and when the two women nodded yes, I told them to hurry and get in."
Although he spoke Spanish, the man had no idea how to help them, so he took them to a friend.
She led him to the home of another woman in Bisbee, part of a network that has assisted stranded illegal immigrants many times.
She and the driver who picked them up asked not to be identified because helping the migrants could land them in prison for five years, jeopardize their livelihoods and allow the federal government to seize their homes and cars. But most importantly, they say, it would hinder their ability to help people in the future.
Marvin, Mari and Glynnis were in relatively good health when the Bisbee network took them in, although they needed to clean up, rest and recuperate.
Sometimes the migrants are in such rough condition that the Bisbee group must tend to cuts, blisters or more serious injuries. When more medical attention is necessary, members call on the services of a doctor.
Often, the migrants are traumatized to the point of physical shock.
Araceli Barrentos and Jose Walter Garcia were in bad shape when they arrived on the woman's doorstep in May.
After crossing near Las Antenas, they had been picked up by the Border Patrol north of Bisbee and taken to hospitals.
Barrentos remembers when she and three other people were released from the Bisbee hospital in the middle of the night. The nurse on duty pointed to some doors at the end of a long hall and said, "The Border Patrol is waiting for you there." Then the nurse pointed to the double glass doors at the front entrance and said, "Or you can go through there."
They left through the front doors. They split into pairs and walked away in different directions. Barrentos never learned what became of the other two, but she and Garcia went to a home where they saw a light, in search of help.
The man who answered turned out to be a U.S. immigration officer who had just gotten home from his job at the Douglas Port of Entry.
The man apologized and said he could not help them. But he offered them water, and told them how to find the highway.
The next man they approached took them in to talk to his wife, who had a friend who knew someone who could help.
They ended up in the care of the Bisbee network, which eventually helped them reach their families and arrange for transportation to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Getting people out of Bisbee can be complicated because of the Border Patrol's immigration checkpoints. But the group is usually able to drive the migrants to Phoenix and Tucson where they can catch the bus, a train or an airplane to their final destination.
Marvin and his companions spent nearly two weeks in Bisbee, an old copper mining town turned artists' colony, with Victorian gingerbread homes and miners' shacks perched on steep, rust-colored hillsides.
 Turning point: This is the culvert near Bisbee where Marvin and 50 others were told to wait by Border Patrol agents. Rising waters made Hernandez and two women disobey those instructions. |
They holed up in a home, watching children play across the street but never venturing outside. One day a Bisbee police officer knocked on the door, but he didn't discover them.
Their Bisbee hosts spent the two weeks preparing them for their trip, changing their hairstyles, buying them new clothes - coaching them to act this time like Americans.
From the Bisbee home, Mari, Glynnis and Marvin also called their families in El Salvador and Boston, asking for money for airfare.
When the time came to go, they loaded into two cars. Two other vehicles had left a short time earlier to scout ahead on the route the caravan would take, making sure the Border Patrol had not activated its Highway 80 checkpoint yet.
A set of car keys was briefly lost, then found. One car overheated on the drive to Phoenix. Then confusion at the airport parking lot split the caravan and delayed them at Sky Harbor.
The tickets and boarding passes had been obtained in the names of three volunteers, who would transfer the tickets to Marvin and the two women before they reached the loading gate.
The plane was departing sometime around 2 p.m., and the group was supposed to arrive 40 minutes before. They arrived at the final second; the plane had already boarded. So they had to make the transfer right out in the open.
"The woman who takes the boarding passes saw everything, but she didn't say anything. She was very gracious," said one of the women who helped that day.
The experience rattled the participants so much that one said, "I've prayed to God not to bring me any more people for a while."
But she knows that if it happens, she will help again. "It's just one of those things where you have to do what God tells you," she said.
The first airplane ride of Marvin's life would take him 2,300 miles.
"I was nervous. I got on the plane and I didn't even know where to sit. I used what little English I had to ask the attendant where we should sit.
"When we landed at the Providence airport, three immigration officers followed us and checked us out, but they stopped this man with long hair, and we just kept walking."
Glynnis' brother-in-law was at the airport in Rhode Island to meet the three of them and drive them the final leg.
Marvin got his first look at Boston just after midnight. He was enchanted and hopeful, even comfortable.
It was all hills and bright lights, just like San Salvador.
"Boston is a beautiful city," he said. "It feels like home."
* Day 2: The homeland he left behind.
 |
 |
|
Ignacio Ibarra, 45, has covered border issues for the Arizona Daily Star since 1991. He lives in Bisbee. Jeffry Scott, 38, has been a Star photographer since 1996. Both men have traveled extensively in Mexico and Latin America. They also worked together to produce the Star's special July 1999 report, "Lives on the Borderline." | |
