For Rosa Sanchez, crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. would be just the latest desperate measure she has taken since leaving Honduras five months ago.
For two weeks, she has found refuge in a church shelter in this border town. She is out of money and alone, but she is determined to reach her sister’s home in Houston, and that makes her vulnerable to unscrupulous people offering to take her across the Rio Grande.
“You can swim, but the river is just the beginning of the obstacles,” said Sanchez, 45, who has a sick and pregnant daughter back home. “It’s clear that I need a pollero [guide].”
Sanchez is among thousands who risk the uncertainties and dangers of crossing the border illegally to fill the needs of U.S. employers each year. Many journeys end tragically. Last week, for example, 11 people were found dead in a locked grain hopper in Iowa that left Matamoros four months ago.
The deaths underscore the debate behind demands for revising the U.S. immigration policy, a topic that Mexican President Vicente Fox will put at the top of the agenda when he meets with President Bush next weekend at a summit of Pacific Rim leaders in Baja California.
Latin American officials and immigrant advocates have long argued for some form of “normalizing” of the unending flow of workers over the border. The goal is better protection of their safety, dignity and rights while they are supplying crucial labor to the U.S.
Fox has been frustrated that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the U.S. focus on security sidetracked that debate. But the Iowa deaths may help him put the issue back on the burner.
“This is the continuing human costs of our failed immigration policy,” said Nathan Selser, a community organizer with Project Liberty, a non-profit legal firm in Texas that helps those coming across the border.
“In Latin America, there is a lot of history of people disappearing,” he added. “But this is a whole different type of disappearance, where people are not being persecuted by a government but under a particular policy.”
The 11 deaths in Iowa included at least two Hondurans and two Mexicans.
The Mexicans were young men, about 18 years old and cousins, from the central state of Aguascalientes, said Jose Luis Cuevas of the Mexican Consulate for the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska.
They were identified because one was carrying a government-issued voting card and the other had paperwork from a Mexican university, the diplomat said Friday. The consulate had contacted family members in Aguascalientes who would come to claim the bodies, he added.
The Associated Press reported Friday night that the families of the two cousins had been informed that they were among the dead in the train container.
Family members in Los Conos said Roberto Esparza Rico and Omar Esparza Contreras had boarded a train around June 15 near Matamoros, hoping to rejoin Mexicans working in Sarasota, Fla.
The perilous journey
The Iowa deaths were hardly the first casualties in the pursuit of the American dream. More than 2,000 have died since the United States started beefing up border security in the mid-1990s.
This year, a record number of immigrants died of dehydration and heat exposure trying to cross the Sonora desert into Arizona, where temperatures soared to 115 degrees.
While overall border arrests appear to be down, in the Matamoros area, 134 people died in the desert so far this year compared with 79 for all of 2001. Mexican officials attribute the jump to the heightened border security that has forced illegal immigrants to cross in more remote and dangerous areas.
Many others drown trying to swim across the Rio Grande near Matamoros–19 in 2001 and nine so far this year. Nearly half of the recovered bodies were never identified and are buried in unmarked graves.
Not all of the deaths are known, because many undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans simply disappear during the journey. This year, Mexico’s consulates in the U.S. have registered nearly 1,400 reports of missing persons.
That means fear and uncertainty for hundreds of families across Mexico and Central America. Officials say family members show up in Matamoros and Brownsville, on the Texas side of the river, looking for traces or gravesites even 10 years after their loved ones disappeared.
“There are literally thousands that are never seen again,” said Nestor Rodriguez, co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston. “And for every one, there is a family without a word.”
Issue sidelined
Bush and Fox vowed to tackle immigration reform when they met Sept. 6, 2001. But the issue was nearly forgotten as Americans suddenly became more concerned about terrorism and security than open borders.
That sentiment could be heard in the beeps of car horns passing Border Patrol headquarters in Brownsville last week. The drivers were showing support for Dagoberto Barrera, a retired school counselor who donned a Stars and Stripes outfit and planted himself behind a banner thanking the agency for “cleaning up our town.”
“We have to be very, very vigilant,” said Barrera, 70, who worked in the Education Department during the Reagan administration. “Mexico has got to start taking care of its people. We can’t be the papa for the whole world.”
James Ziglar, commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, recently proposed a new legal guest-worker program for Mexicans. He said it would better control immigration flows, free agents to focus on real security threats and help the U.S. plug an expected 20 million-person labor shortage.
Many analysts say that is the most Washington could contemplate at this point. Some believe that passing broader immigration reform would take as much effort in Congress as winning approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement a decade ago.
But Mexican officials say they will hold out for the “whole enchilada,” which includes some form of amnesty for those already in the United States. They note that U.S. labor unions support an amnesty but not a guest-worker program, which would be temporary fix.
“With a little bit in there for everyone, it is a sellable product,” one Mexican official said. “If we forget the enchilada and only go for the beans, someone will shoot it down.”
All the dangers and contradictions of the illegal immigrant trail are heard in the stories told at night in the courtyard of the church shelter in Matamoros.
It took Rene Hernandez, 26, four weeks and 10 bus rides to get to the border from his home in El Salvador. Men with machetes stole half of his $400 in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Now he stays at the shelter at night and hides in the church during the day, plotting how to earn enough for the crossing to join friends in Miami or Houston.
“Look, your government has people to stop me, so I need someone to tell me where they are,” said the father of two. “A taxi driver said he would charge me $1,000, but I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know people here.”
A cook from Honduras, Carlos Cardona, 48, said he had been working in the States since 1989 and had just gone back to see family. He had two jobs waiting at steakhouses in Indiana. For him, the biggest threat is corrupt Mexican police officers preying on people like himself.
Rosa Sanchez said she hadn’t been in contact with her family for three months.
The Honduran mother was not sure of her next step, only that it would not be easy.
“I’d never get on a train,” she said. “I’ve seen where people fall and lose their legs, or where they all arrive dead.”
