Marvin's Journey: One migrant's tale

Fleeing despair

Special report

Marvin's Journey: The homeland

Like countless illegal immigrants before him, Marvin Hernandez says he left the grinding poverty of his home and braved the long, harrowing journey to the United States because, 'I just want to live like a human being - that's all.'

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - He wanted a chance to earn some money, enough to own a mini-van or a decent truck.

Maybe enough to buy a home one day, and marry, raise a family, care for his mother.

His dreams were small, but still bigger than his opportunities.

Marvin Hernandez was earning 2,000 colones, about $237 a month, installing and repairing tires in San Salvador. The extra 1,200 colones he earned delivering milk put him in his country's middle class, but it wasn't getting him any closer to his goals.

Then hijackers robbed and killed a co-worker he grew up with, and Marvin knew it was time to go.

"I just want to live like a human being - that's all," he said last July as he sat in a Bisbee home, where he remained hidden for two weeks awaiting his ride out of town.

Lady Liberty looms on a billboard advertising a firm that handles some of the billion dollars mailed yearly to El Salvador from the U.S.

Marvin was trying to explain what had driven him to pay $5,700 - nearly twice what he earned in a year - for a dangerous 2,000-mile journey through El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico to join the half-million people who cross illegally into the United States each year.

The answer is the everyday poverty and violence of a place still reeling from a civil war that ended eight years ago - the smallest, poorest, most densely populated country in Central America.

"In El Salvador, I knew attorneys that didn't earn what I did changing tires," Marvin said. "No one has money. I would have stayed if I could, but it was not possible. There's too little money. For me, leaving was the only way I could help my mother and make a life for myself."

Marvin was one of 2.5 million people living in the smog-choked capital city of San Salvador. The wealthiest live in large homes behind security fences, razor wire and armed guards. Most people live jammed together in tiny houses and small apartments. The poorest live in crowded multi-family housing called mezones, or in shacks, or on the street.

As a passerby ignores the wares he has for sale, Victor Rosales sits under political graffiti proclaiming supprt for the working class and asking for laws to protect pensions in downtown San Salvador.

Graffiti on the walls in the aging center of the city shows that not enough progress has been made since a United Nations-brokered cease-fire in 1992 put an end to 12 years of war. El Salvador is still struggling to rebuild its economy and restore social order.

The Hernandezes lived in relative comfort during the war.

Marvin's father, Miguel Angel Hernandez, worked as a supervisor at a government-owned granary in the town of San Martín, about 27 miles east of San Salvador. His mother, Angela, worked at a nearby textile factory.

With the money they earned, his parents bought a small parcel of land in the canton of La Palma, a neighborhood on a bluff above Lake Ilopango.

They built a small house, planted banana and mango trees and raised their sons with the help of Angela's mother and father.

They had enough to ensure the boys could stay in school and get an education.

But just as peace began to take hold, and things were looking better for El Salvador, the Hernandez family began falling apart.

Father goes first

Marvin's mother, Angela Hernandez, hasn't seen her husband, whose picture hangs on the wall behind her, since he left home eight years ago to find a job in the United States. Like many who endure separations from loved ones working in America, she gets money in the mail from her husband and a son, who also illegally immigrated.

It started when the granary closed in 1992. Then, with one son completing his studies in auto mechanics at the National Technical Institute and a second son set to enroll, high blood pressure and a worsening heart condition forced Angela to leave her job at the factory.

Miguel Hernandez set off for the United States with a friend that year.

He now lives and works somewhere in Los Angeles. A check comes home every month, but Miguel has yet to return.

"I was afraid when my husband left," Angela, now 47, recalled one day last month as she sat in the living room of the family home.

The television set was tuned to "The Flintstones," and her young nephew, Diego, played in a chair with Angela's father, Eugenio Hernandez.

Above her on the wall were framed pictures of her sons and others of herself and the husband she has not seen in eight years.

Miguel did not reach the promised land the first time. He was caught repeatedly and sent back to Mexico at Tijuana before finally landing at the home of a relative in California.

"The boys were grown when he left, but they were still young enough to miss him," Angela said. "He calls, sends money - he's never forgotten us, and that helps. I've gotten used to it, but I miss him. I'd rather have him here with me, but I know he's there by necessity."

In 1997, her eldest son, Francisco, left to join his father. She talks with him on the phone, too, and he sometimes sends money.

The end of the war was supposed to bring social reforms that would improve life for the landless and the poor, but Marvin says it may be even worse today in this period of chaos know as the post-war.

"They call it the pos-guerra, but really, nothing has changed. Instead of soldiers, there are maras" - gangs - "and they control many cantons," Marvin said. "There are places where you have to pay them to go in, and where you shouldn't go at night.

A soccer field in colonia San Martín is a popular place for El Salvador's favorite sport. Shoes are optional; many of the impoverished residents of the town near the capital of San Salvador can't afford them.

"I was 6 when the war began, but I remember a bridge where the train went by not too far from our house where every day they would find dead bodies, mostly students killed by soldiers. They still find bodies there all the time."

Down the street from the Hernandez home, weeds are taking over a concrete tower with slatted windows that served as a guard post in the war.

Outside the tire shop where Marvin worked, and at businesses and government buildings throughout San Salvador, the war still seems alive. Hired men in plain clothes, heavily armed with automatic rifles or shotguns slung over their shoulders, guard against thieves.

They are a reminder of the conflict that claimed more than 75,000 people, nearly half of them civilians killed by death squads bent on purging suspected dissidents.

But the most enduring sign of war may be the barren landscape, cleared of rain forests by chemicals so rebels could not hide.

More than 300,000 people left the country during the war. Most fled to the United States, but others sought refuge in Mexico, Europe or Australia.

The maras, El Salvadoran gang-bangers raised in Los Angeles and deported under the 1996 anti-terrorism act, began to take hold in 1997.

Gangs help explain the country's eight homicides a day, Francisco Bertrand Galindo, minister of public security and justice, said at a conference on violence last month.

But so do unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence, he said.

Salvadoran soldiers march throught the streets of Chalatenango during routine patrols. Althought the country's civil was ended neatly a decade ago, the military is a strong presence in this city, which was an FMLN stronghold during the conflict.

What's more, nearly 600 officers have been removed from El Salvador's 20,000-member police force in the last year after investigations turned up crimes from misdemeanors to kidnapping, murder and torture. Another 400 officers are under investigation.

The number of Salvadorans living abroad has grown to about 1 million since war's end, nearly 20 percent of the country's population. An estimated 335,000 Salvadorans are living illegally in the United States, second only to the 2.7 million Mexicans believed to be living here illegally, the Immigration and Naturalization Service says.

Angela Hernandez knew her youngest son would eventually join them. She wasn't surprised when Marvin, 25, told her last year that he was leaving. But she wasn't prepared to let him go yet.

One last task

The rainy season in El Salvador lasts five months. This year's rains have sent floodwaters pouring into the Hernandez home, damaging the family's clothing and furniture.

Angela asked her boy to do one last task before she sent him on his way.

Marvin set to work improving the drainage that carries waste water from the home out into the dirt street, where it flows freely in a downhill stream. He also built 2-foot- high concrete dams across the front and back doors of the house to keep the floodwaters out of the house.

Photo by Ignacio Ibarra Armed plainclothes guards keep watch over businesses and homes of wealthy Salvadorans to deter criminals, especially gang members.

Finally, he helped pay for a security fence across the entrance to the property, worried that thieves would try to break in once it became known that his mother and grandfather were alone.

The Hernandezes are like many families in El Salvador, said neighbor Ismani Bernal.

"Everyone here has family in the United States, and the ones who don't would like to," said Bernal, 39. "I have a brother in Houston, and a husband who would like to go, but he's afraid of the journey."

American flags hang in places of honor outside shacks and businesses throughout San Salvador. Inspired by relatives in the United States or by America's military presence in El Salvador through the years, parents give their children names like Marvin or Nancy. The practice has become so common that the government now requires parents to report what an American name means.

Expatriates send more than $1 billion home to their families each year. As in Mexico, where the figure is an estimated $7 billion, this is El Salvador's largest source of foreign capital.

Rene Rivera, 10, and Juan Carlos Riva, 13, step around sewage while bringing a jug of fresh water from a community well back to their school. Below Sisters bathe in a river in the coast city of La Libertad about an hour from San Salvador. The Water is most likely polluted with human waste, but there are few alternatives for the poor.

People in the Hernandezes' town of San Martín receive their checks at the local branch of Gigante Express, a courier service specializing in cash, packages and mail between the United States and Latin America.

About 95 percent of the 80 letters arriving here each day contain a money order from the United States.

"The amount can be as little as $5 or $10, but I'd guess that an average of $300 to $400 wouldn't be too high," said the manager, 72-year-old Antonio Vigil Canales. "The people know exactly when that money is expected, and they come here and wait, and they get anxious and sometimes become demanding when their letters don't arrive."

The injection of $20,000 to $25,000 a day into the local economy has obvious benefits for the families and the community, but Vigil said he worries that in the long run, the country is weakened by this dependence on U.S. dollars.

Julio Novoa, 62, a neighbor of Angela Hernandez, said the pull of U.S. dollars and the American lifestyle is so strong that it can tear families apart.

He and his wife, Maribel Alvarado, 34, struggle to keep their four children clothed and fed by selling snow cones, soda pop and snack food from a tiny storefront adjacent to their home. At times they survive on the checks from his brother-in-law in the United States.

Now, things are so desperate, his wife has talked of leaving him and the children and joining her brother. Only money stops her - the 30,000 colones charged by the smugglers, or coyotes.

"How will I ever get that much money together here?" she asks.

A woman, who wouldn't give her name, operates a makeshift restaurant at the municipal dump in San Salvador, offering workers hot food. Hundreds live and work at the dump, going throught the garbage for anything that might be of value.

Her husband shakes his head. "Many people gave their blood to change things, but in the end, nothing changed."

Pedro Sanchez Palacios, 54, is a construction worker skilled enough to earn more than 3,000 colones a month, about $343. He fought for the government in the war. But as he looks out from his modest, dirt-floor home on the mansions of the wealthy, he feels betrayed.

"On television, the government only wants to talk about the beauty of El Salvador, the progress, and how El Salvador has it all. They don't talk about the problems," Sanchez said.

He witnessed a carjacking last month at a San Salvador intersection and says the police are powerless to stop the violence.

"We all lost in the war. It was 12 long years of fighting for nothing."

Cidelina de la Paz has nothing.

The 40-year-old woman lives in a shack she built at one of San Salvador's four public dumps.

In the shadow of a volcano, she competes with vultures, stray dogs and about 200 other people scavenging a living from mountains of trash. Plastic is prized, paying 3 cents a pound.

"We look for plastic bottles, cans and paper, but we'll pick up anything that we can sell or use," she said. "They pay us 28 centavos per pound for plastic, but there are so many people that it is difficult to make enough to live."

Pedro Vivas Soto lives at the dump, too, struggling to make enough for beans with his tortillas instead of just salt.

He hopes his family in the United States can help rescue him, so he writes to them from time to time.

Photo by Ignacio Ibarra Scavengers at a Salvadoran dump make a living by salvaging materials. Plastic, which fetches a price of 3 cents a pound, is especially prized.

"But they haven't responded," said Vivas, 33, who worked many jobs, including ticket taker, before falling on hard times. "We'll see, maybe someday I'll make it over there."

Preparing to leave

When the time came to plan for the journey north, Marvin turned to his family in the United States, too.

His brother told him to forget it. The road had become too dangerous.

"At first he tried to discourage me, but when he saw that he couldn't, he sent me the money to arrange the trip," Marvin said.

Finding a coyote who could get him to the United States was no problem. In San Martín there are several, including a man who operates from a food stand at the city park.

Some "travel agents" even advertise in the classified ads of the local newspapers, though less frequently now because the government is cracking down.

Marvin's friend, Cesar Rigoberto, 24, hangs out on a street corner in San Mar- tín, a town that offers few opportunities.

"I hired the same man who had helped my brother and paid him $2,500 in advance," Marvin said. "That's the normal way. You pay about half at the start and you pay the rest when you arrive."

His co-workers got little advance warning at Punto Radial, a tire store in the upscale San Salvador community of Merliot.

But none were surprised.

Juan Carlos Ayala, 25, said he and his wife are expecting their first child, and he's just come to the realization that Marvin reached two years ago.

6 million illegal immigrants The estmated population of illegal immigrants in the United States is 6 million—the same number as the total population of El Salvador. El Salvador No. 2 The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. from El Salvador is second only to Mexico. Mexico: 2.7 million El Salvador: 335,000 Guatemala: 165,000 Canada: 120,000 Haiti: 105,000 Philippines: 95,000 Honduras: 90,000 Bahamas: 70,000 Poland: 70,000 Nicaragua: 70,000

The smallest house or condominium will cost at least 84,000 colones, $9,600. Even if he could manage to finance the purchase over 20 years, each month he would have to pay more than $100 of his $230 a month income to cover the mortgage.

"To support a family with a job like this in El Salvador is impossible," Ayala said. "That's why people leave every day. Even Mexico is in better shape than we are. That's why there are people leaving here to go work over there."

Angela Hernandez knows this as well as anyone, but it didn't make it any easier the night she packed her youngest son's bags.

She had watched a news report on television about two Guatemalan men drowned in the Rio Bravo near Matamoros, Mexico. And she had seen the story of the young mother who died crossing the desert near Tucson after giving her baby the last of her water.

"I ironed three pairs of pants, some shirts and put them in the bag with some socks and underwear. Then I packed some things like toothpaste, soap and shampoo. I put some pills for his headaches in the bag, too. Marvin has always gotten headaches, even as a little boy."

The next day, when she took him to the bus station in San Salvador, "I felt totally alone. He was very close to me and I miss him.

"Before he left he said to me, 'Mama, I'll stay two years and then come home,' but I don't know. I hope some day he'll come home, at least to visit.

"But I don't know."

The 'Journey' team 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."