For Central Americans, nation is way station on path to United States

By RICARDO CHAVIRA / The Dallas Morning News

CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico – The man charged with keeping illegal immigrants out of this tropical swath of southern Mexico watched bemusedly as dozens of Central Americans, perched on inner-tube rafts, floated leisurely across the Suchiate River and stepped into Mexican territory.

"I would need 200 agents just to stop this," said Sergio Toledo, district director of Mexico's National Migration Institute, the government agency charged with enforcing immigration law. He made no move as the illegal entrants from Tecun Uman, Guatemala, hurried past him.

"I have 26 agents," he said. "Including the other sector, we have just a little more than 200 officers to patrol 500 kilometers. In Mexico City, they say the army is supposed to be helping us."

Some 100 yards downriver, 10 Mexican soldiers washed clothes, ignoring the steady raft traffic.

Most of those who sneak into Mexico are headed for the United States, and Mexican officials, responding to heightened U.S. concerns about terrorism, have vowed to reinforce their border security.

But Mexico's southern frontier remains as porous as it was 20 years ago, analysts and officials say. Mexico has been unable to stop the flow of immigrants or to check the violent crime that flourishes here.

"The porosity of the Mexican-Guatemalan-Belize frontier renders it a virtual third American border in terms of U.S. vulnerability," said George Grayson, professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

"We have not found any terrorists coming in," said Roberto Espinoza, chief of immigration enforcement for the border between Guatemala and the Mexican state of Chiapas. "But we can't say for sure that none are coming in."

Noting that much of the frontier is dense jungle, he said: "It is dangerous for us to go in there. We are unarmed, and there are armed gangs all over who rob and kill anyone, especially the migrants."

There are at least 100 criminal bands in the area, ranging from large smuggling operations to robbers who prey on immigrants, according to Mexican officials. They say that even modest smuggling rings depend on a network of guides, corrupt officials and safe houses that reaches into the United States.

A low-tech battle
 

While the U.S.-Mexico border is studded with motion detectors, imposing fences, spotlights, night-vision cameras, aircraft and all-terrain vehicles, Mexican officials have only pickup trucks and raw manpower.

Meanwhile, the number of illegal immigrants deported from the state of Chiapas – almost all Central Americans – has risen 10 percent, to about 62,400, from the same time last year. But there has been no corresponding increase in the number of immigration agents assigned to Chiapas, said Mr. Espinoza.

"We conduct joint operations with the federal police and the army," he said, "but those are not frequent. The truth is that with the little equipment and manpower we have, we are being overrun."

Officials in the government of President Vicente Fox acknowledge that the extra help they promised has yet to materialize.

"We are not the United States, but we can and will do more to help," an administration official said.

In the last several months, economic conditions have deteriorated sharply in already destitute countries, such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

"I would not have thought of leaving my country just two years ago," said Paulino Romero, a 20-year-old dairy worker from Olancho, Honduras. But earning the equivalent of $18 a month and faced with rising living costs, he found himself on a recent night crouched in a train yard in Tapachula, Mexico, with other Central Americans.

Mr. Romero and perhaps 200 other immigrants were about to begin a 1,500-mile trip to the U.S. border aboard an ancient freight train. The odds are that he – and hundreds of thousands of others who begin the journey from the southern border each year – won't reach American soil, say Mexican officials.

Some will be nabbed by Mexican immigration agents or soldiers posted along the route, while others will be robbed, beaten, raped or killed by hundreds of Central American and Mexican thugs called maras. Many more will die or suffer crippling injuries from falling off moving trains.

Tragedy and irony
 

Mexican authorities and immigrant advocates wryly note the intense publicity generated by migrants' deaths in the United States.

"It is tragic when people die suffocated in a truck," said the Rev. Ademar Barilli, a Catholic priest who built the Migrants' Home, a shelter in Tecun Uman for immigrants who have been robbed or injured. "But here – there is no question that two to three times as many migrants are killed or die here each year. The problem is the authorities don't have the time or resources to track down those who are reported missing. We constantly hear of people being killed in the jungle, and nobody can investigate."

Still, a study that he and other advocates conducted in four Guatemalan municipalities last year confirmed nearly 600 deaths.

That's about twice the number of migrant deaths reported last year along the entire 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

On this night, members of Grupo Beta, Mexican federal agents charged with encouraging the immigrants to return home, patiently explained to bedraggled migrants the perils that lay ahead. They listened intently.

The average fee to be smuggled from home to a destination in the United States is $2,000.

"Usually, the migrants have to hock their homes or borrow money from loan sharks," said Gabriela Coutiño, a Grupo Beta public affairs officer. "If they don't or can't pay the loans, they lose their houses or else their families back home are beaten or killed."

Many can't raise enough money, so they make the trip without smugglers. Such was the case of Gerardo González, 22, who was traveling with his wife and sister-in-law.

"You are taking big risks by having these women with you," warned Julio Cesar Cancino, operations supervisor for Grupo Beta. "The gangs can easily overpower you, and I hate to think what would happen to them."

Yet when the train jerked into motion, they and dozens of other migrants quickly lodged themselves between boxcars.

Mr. Cancino roughly grabbed one the men, preventing him from boarding. After a few quiet words, he sent the man on his way.

"He is one of the most brutal of the robbers," Mr. Cancino said. "What he and others do is infiltrate the groups of migrants and later beat, rob, rape or kill them."

Facing the risks
 

Inside the House of the Good Shepherd, Alma Cruz, 30, of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, smiled wanly at the sight of children playing in the dimly lit shelter for injured migrants. Ms. Cruz's experience graphically underscores the hazards of riding a freight train.

On the night of Feb. 8, she and scores of other immigrants sought to board the northbound train. Ms. Cruz said her hands slipped from the slick iron ladder at the rear of a boxcar.

"I felt a very hard blow, but I couldn't tell where I had been hit," she said. "I was on my back and then suddenly I felt the worst pain you can imagine. That is when I saw that my legs were gone – the train took them."

Bystanders drawn by her shrieks rushed to her aid, then flagged down a car.

"I never lost consciousness. I was just consumed by pain and terror that I would die and leave my little girls," said Ms. Cruz, who has two daughters, ages 5 and 2, who live with her mother in Tegucigalpa.

She is waiting in hopes of receiving prosthetic legs. The shelter depends entirely on donations.
 

Across the border in Tecun Uman, a small group of nuns and social workers is battling another phenomenon spawned by the flow of immigrants: prostitution and a sharp rise in HIV and AIDS.

Roughly 600 prostitutes work in tumbledown bars and brothels or prowl the streets in the border area.

"What greatly worries us is that the number of prostitutes keeps growing, and the ages of the girls keep dropping," said Consuelo Berrocano, a nun who regularly visits the prostitutes. She seeks to draw them out of the sex trade and into occupational programs at a shelter called the House of Women.

"Now we are seeing local men who are with prostitutes infecting their wives and girlfriends with HIV," she said. "This could turn into an epidemic."

A Mexican official who lives in the area, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the violence and lawlessness on the southern border is an overwhelming tragedy and political liability for Mexico.

"How can we credibly demand that the U.S. protect our people who cross the border," he said, "when we have the situation you see here?"