By Hugh Dellios and Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune staff reporters

HARLINGEN, Texas -- On a dark June night, in a hushed train yard on the edge of this border town, the difference between life and death hinged on something as
simple and arbitrary as where a man stood in line.

Two Honduran farmers--Pedro Amador and Isidro Avila--stood toward the front.

Somewhere toward the end of the line was a pair of small-town Mexican cousins, Roberto and Omar Esparza.

And waiting nervously in the very back was the Mexicans' childhood friend Eduardo Martinez.

Only halfway to their U.S. destinations and fearful of being apprehended by Border Patrol agents that blanket southern Texas, the five illegal immigrants stood before
a long row of grain hopper rail cars. Along with about 20 other men and women who had gathered there that night, they believed that climbing into the containers
would be their ticket north, their ticket to the American dream.

Unfortunately, like more and more illegal immigrants trying to outwit post-Sept. 11 border patrols, the destinies of these desperate people actually rode in the hands
of the "coyote" smuggler who began shepherding everyone into two train cars. With no time for debate, he ordered Martinez into one pitch-black, already crowded
hopper while Amador, Avila and the Esparzas were directed into another.

Of the five, only Martinez would emerge alive.

"I commit myself to you, God," Martinez remembers murmuring amid the whispered prayers of his terrified companions as the smugglers lowered and locked the
train car's roof hatches over them. "I commit myself to you."

No one realized it yet, but this was the fateful moment in the tragic odyssey of the 11 illegal immigrants found dead in Iowa on Oct. 14, almost four months after they
were condemned to cook to death inside their train-car tomb. The journey would be dirty, and oppressively hot, and the increasingly weak stowaways would have
braced themselves against the deeply slanted walls of the lurching grain car until finally slumping to the bottom in a lifeless, defeated heap.

As shocking and unlikely as the tragedy in the heartland may have seemed to people throughout the U.S., officials on both sides of the border fear that cases like this
may be repeated with increasing frequency in the months and years to come.

Stepped-up border vigilance and the success of new programs by the U.S. Border Patrol have kept many would-be immigrants from entering the U.S. in the past
year, and as a result, the most determined are choosing more risky ways to get through. That has fed an almost endless stream of potential victims into a human
pipeline operated by ruthless smugglers who care less about their clients than about evading U.S. and Mexican authorities trying to shut them down.

"It's almost impossible to get across now without a coyote," said Arturo Solis, director of the Center for Border Studies and the Promotion of Human Rights in
Reynosa, Mexico. "It's very common that the [immigrants] are tricked."

A month after the remains of the 11 migrants were found, the Tribune--through dozens of interviews in Mexico, Honduras, Florida, New York and Texas--has
pieced together how and why four of those doomed souls ended up in a train in Denison, Iowa. The interviews were with the grieving families left behind, the
relatives and friends they were going to join in the United States, and Martinez, the young man who survived the ill-fated trip because his hopper car was discovered
by the Border Patrol.

The journeys of these would-be immigrants, the only four identified thus far by Iowa's medical examiner, illustrate how completely the desire for a better life can
confuse a human's instinct to survive.

Iowa tragedy: An overview

Roberto Esparza, 23, was a stoic, tight-lipped welder from central Mexico who worried about providing for his year-old son back home. His happy-go-lucky
cousin Omar, 17, was essentially tagging along, driven by a desire to own a pickup truck but also by worries about his girlfriend's pregnancy.

One of the Hondurans, Isidro Avila, 38, was a tall, fretful bean farmer who had lost faith in his ability to provide for his family after another failed harvest. His
compatriot, Pedro Amador, also 38, had a restless streak compounded by his tangled personal life and his country's collapsed coffee markets.

As the four men made their way from their homes to the Harlingen rail yard, they would become links in an illicit chain that runs from South America through Central
America and Mexico before funneling thousands of illegal immigrants each year to and over the southern U.S. border.

The four paid smugglers $1,400 to $4,000 each for their journeys to their deaths. The trips would become emotional roller-coaster rides suffered at the hands of
smugglers who demanded more and more money along the way.

The four had three things in common: All had dreamed of well-paying jobs and better lives in the U.S., all had hired well-known smugglers from their home regions,
and none had been told he would be sealed inside a train.

As a task force of U.S. officials investigates the case, the biggest question is: Why did the smugglers fail to reappear as promised to open the rail car's rooftop door
once the train had gone far enough into Texas?

Some believe the smugglers may have been scared off when the Border Patrol discovered the first car of stowaways only about an hour into the trip. Others
speculate the smugglers figured that all of the immigrants had been arrested, and therefore there was no need to show up to open the hopper cars. Still others
wonder whether the real reason had more to do with the sheer indifference of smugglers who already had cash in hand.

"You are not so choosy about who you pay to help you get across," survivor Martinez said recently. "I can't point my finger at someone and accuse them of having
blood on their hands. All I know for sure is that for some reason God gave me a second chance."

Eastern Honduras: Early May

The tale of how the four star-crossed men came to be on that train begins in far eastern Honduras on May 8. Pedro Amador bartered his black Toyota pickup truck
to a local coyote known as Moncho Duarte in exchange for safe passage to the U.S. border, his family said.

The next day, Amador set out from his mountain village of Bella Vista, a remote community near where civilization dead-ends into Honduras' rugged Mosquito
jungles. In Bella Vista, the law is the pistol on your hip; the steep, muddy roads leading to town defy both maps and four-wheel drive.

By local standards, Amador wasn't a poor man: His family owned 140 acres of land in a lush region that produces coffee beans so sweet that locals eat them right
off the bush.

With his wife and four children, Amador lived in a nice house with a television, a stereo and an ample kitchen where his wife produced pots full of tamales. But sitting
in their living room a month after the macabre train discovery, Amador's family said he had never been satisfied with the life he'd built.

"Pedro was always looking for something more," said Agresio Sanchez, the stepfather who recalled how Amador, as a boy, would deliver him lunch in the coffee
fields.

Like almost all the villagers, Amador often had pondered the opportunities and promise of the U.S. But three events appear to have spurred him to set out on the
journey in May.

The first was the precipitous fall of global coffee prices in the last few years, which severely reduced his income. Then a local schoolteacher became pregnant,
naming Amador as the father, and friends said he worried about how he would support two families. Finally, last Easter, a friend from Miami came to visit and
promised that he would help Amador enter the United States and find a job.

With high hopes, Amador began planning his trip, expecting that the Miami friend would meet him at the Texas border and guide him safely to Florida.

Northern Honduras: Late May

Hundreds of miles away, Isidro Avila, 38, was despairing about the harvest.

Yet again, the tiny fields he rented every year had failed to produce even enough corn and beans to feed his family. This meant that he would owe even more money
to the owners of the stingy land to which his family had been tied for generations by tradition and a cycle of debt.

"What I am doing here is worth nothing. It's a waste of time," Isidro told his wife. The two dreamed of improving their tiny house in San Jose de Montanuela, where
they shared their bedroom with some of their four children and a grandson.

Avila had tried on his own in April to make it to the U.S., but he had been turned back at the Guatemala-Mexico border.

In May, he set out again, this time hiring a neighbor as his coyote, paying him $2,000 and promising another $2,000 later. Out of fear of retaliation, the family asked
that the name of the smuggler not be published.

Leaving Honduras: Early June

The next time their families heard from the two Hondurans was in desperate phone calls: In a seemingly common trick, their smugglers were threatening to abandon
them unless they came up with more money.

In the first days of June, Avila called a cousin in New York, first from Tecuman, Guatemala, and later from Mexico City. At this point he was with a different coyote,
named Memo, who was demanding $1,500. The cousin wired $1,200 to Mexico City, promising to send the other $300 after he knew Avila was safely on U.S.
soil.

One of the village men traveling with Avila, 23-year-old Juan Alberto Ulloa, said the group's journey already had been dangerous: They had arrived in Mexico City
in the back of a closed banana truck, nearly suffocating along the way.

A few days later, the New York cousin received a third call from Avila. He was in a "safehouse" in Harlingen. Avila said he had arrived in the U.S. after several bus
rides to the border and then a late-night swim across the Rio Grande.

The cousin wired the final $300 via Western Union to the bank account of an "Alvaro Galicia" in Harlingen. Soon after, Avila called the cousin to say the money
arrived and that he would be leaving that night on a train to Houston.

A few days before, the other Honduran, Amador, had also made panicked calls to his family. He had arrived safely in Reynosa, Mexico, just across the border from
Harlingen, but said he could not reach his Miami friend and therefore needed money to proceed alone to the United States.

Two relatives in Texas told Amador they didn't have the money to help. That was the last time Amador's family heard from him.

Los Conos, Mexico: Early June

As the two Hondurans were nearing the U.S. border, the Esparza cousins and their friend Martinez were at home in Mexico readying for a trip that would link all
their fates.

Roberto Esparza had twice before been to the U.S., where he had a job in Sarasota, Fla., mowing lawns and building swimming pools. He had returned to
Honduras last spring to briefly see his year-old son, Roberto, for the first time.

Esparza was among hundreds of Mexicans from his home village of Los Conos--in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes--who had gone to live in Sarasota
over the years. Most went illegally.

Named for the cone-shaped earthen grain storage silos that mark the entrance to the village, Los Conos is a quiet, hardscrabble place with few jobs or other reasons
to keep young people at home. Esparza had told his two companions of the plentiful job opportunities as busboys and construction workers waiting in the upscale
waterfront community in Florida.

Esparza saw his trips as chances to make money so that he and his wife, Irene Godinez, could finish the cinder-block home they were building.

Martinez was one of Esparza's oldest childhood friends from the village. They met Esparza's younger cousin Omar only as they were planning the trip the week
before.

Omar Esparza was an active, fun-loving youth who liked skateboards and norteno music. His girlfriend had recently announced that she was pregnant. He worked at
a nearby tortilla factory and spoke of building another level onto the family's modest home so they could live near his parents.

"Look grandma, I'm going and when I get back, I am going to have a pickup truck just like my uncle," he told his grandmother the day he left, planting a kiss on her
cheek.

For the trip, the three young men had sought out Rogelio Hernandez, a well-known smuggler who lived in the neighboring village of Palo Alto, according to their
families. Hernandez had guided Roberto on his previous trip and apparently had ferried hundreds of Los Conos villagers to Sarasota since the late 1980s.

From years of stories, they knew the trip entailed no end of dangers such as drowning, abandonment or capture by "la migra," the immigration police. But they were
determined.

"You worry. The entire trip is filled with worry," Martinez said. "But I told myself two things: First, Rogelio knows what he's doing. Second, all of us know what
we've gotten ourselves into."

Each would pay Hernandez $1,400.

"I'm leaving now, mother. Give me your blessing," Roberto Esparza told Leticia Rico as they stood waiting for the bus on the highway outside Los Conos on the
morning of June 10.

The three took an overnight bus to Reynosa, where they spent the night in a hotel. The next morning, guided by one of Hernandez's associates, they floated across a
scraggy, weeded bend of the Rio Grande on inner tubes lashed together with rope. After changing into dry clothes on the U.S. bank, they walked an hour through
tall grass and trees before reaching a narrow road where another low-level coyote was waiting in a mini-van.

The U.S.-Mexico border

About 72 long hours after leaving their homes, the Los Conos group arrived in Harlingen, a small Texas border town about 30 miles west of Brownsville. It is a
place of strip malls and fast-food joints, considerably less Latino than other towns along the border.

Harlingen is an increasingly popular destination for illegal immigrants in recent years, largely because of Operation Rio Grande, a 5-year-old enforcement program by
the U.S. Border Patrol that has stepped up security near Brownsville and made river crossing far tougher there. In addition, a multitrack Union Pacific train yard
sprawls across 1 1/2 miles on the northern end of town, and long strings of boxcars and grain hoppers sit waiting for hookups and cargo before heading north.

While many of the trains arrive in Harlingen from Mexico, few immigrants enter the country inside them because of forbidding U.S. Customs Service inspections at
the border, including X-ray scans that are so powerful authorities have bragged that they would detect "even a rat." But once in the U.S., the trains are seen as one
way to get past numerous Border Patrol checkpoints on the highways headed to Houston.

Weedy lots and empty warehouses offer a thousand hiding places around the train yard. And neighbors say they often see illegal immigrants walking the streets or
begging for food. By the time they make it to the rail yard, they are often worn down, dirty, even more desperate.

"We find them breaking into our [unused] cottages," said Dora Trevino, 67, owner of a $185-per-month apartment complex across the street from the rail yard.
"We had one in here yesterday. You could see where he [urinated] on the floor."

Until a few years ago, Trevino's complex was a cheap hotel called Casa Blanca, known by Mexicans all the way to Aguascalientes as a safe hide-out in Harlingen.
Repeated raids by the Border Patrol put a stop to that, but the reputation still attracts some looking for a safe place to stay.

Harlingen safehouse: June 13

It was to a less notorious safehouse in Harlingen that the three young Mexicans were driven on June 13. Martinez--interviewed in Sarasota, where he has since
safely arrived--said he was amazed by what he saw at the crowded safehouse.

Twenty to 30 illegal immigrants of various nationalities, mostly Mexican and Central American, were lying about in dark, stuffy rooms with the shades drawn. Even
Chinese nationals were hiding there. The two doomed Hondurans, Avila and Amador, also had arrived.

No one was allowed to go outside, and everyone spoke in hushed tones. From time to time, coyotes would drop off food, and Martinez remembers how the smell
of fresh chili peppers would make his eyes water.

Now on U.S. soil, the illegal immigrants feared the Border Patrol might break down the door at any second. But there were moments of humor, such as when the
Chinese refused to eat any of the Mexicans' food or even the cans of instant soup the smugglers brought for them.

"Who will not eat even one taco if they are hungry?" Martinez said.

On the fateful night of June 15, the smuggler Hernandez came to the house and explained the plan to his clients. According to Martinez--who has also made a
statement under oath to U.S. officials--Hernandez said that they and about 20 others would board two hopper cars at the Harlingen rail yard and ride about an hour
to the north, where they would find a van waiting for them.

According to Martinez, Hernandez told them that two of his "employees" would ride in the train cars with them and open the hatches at the appropriate time.
Martinez did not know then that it is impossible to open the locked cars from the inside.

Avila, the despairing Honduran bean farmer, had decided to go along on the train ride. He would not be swayed, even though the three young men who had traveled
from his village with him decided it was too risky and backed out.

"He was very determined," said Ulloa, one of Avila's initial companions, who spoke to the Tribune at his tiny hilltop farm in Honduras. "I wanted to go with him, but
other friends told me that [the Border Patrol] sometimes stops the train and inspects it."

Into the train yard: June 15

It was about 10 p.m. when the group was driven across Harlingen to the train yard. There, they were told to line up single file next to the hopper cars: About nine of
them crawled into the second-to-last car on the train. Ten more climbed into the third-to-last car.

Four men, including the Esparza cousins and their friend Martinez, remained standing outside the train. The three had vowed not to be separated, but they had no
choice when a coyote ordered two of the remaining people into each hopper. The Esparzas boarded the last of the two cars; Martinez and the fourth man boarded
the other.

Inside, the hoppers were already hot to the point of suffocating. The insides were lined with a soft flour-like dust, and all the people slid against each other at the
bottom of the funnel-shaped rail car.

Contrary to what Hernandez had told his clients, Martinez said no coyote boarded the hoppers with them. But the young man said he was not worried because
Hernandez also had promised that if anything went wrong he personally would be waiting on the other end to open the hatch.

Along with his own prayers, Martinez heard other immigrants muttering Hail Marys and Our Fathers as the coyotes shut the hatch doors, leaving them in total
darkness.

Checkpoint: An hour later

With everyone breathing heavily and sweating profusely, the train suddenly lurched to a stop. The hatch opened, and a rush of fear ran through the hopper as a
flashlight pierced the dark compartment: It was the Border Patrol.

"What scared us most had happened," Martinez said. "But at that point, the trip had been so bad that we just said, `OK, we didn't make it. Just get us out of here
because we're so hot.'"

Outside the train cars, the Border Patrol agents lined up the would-be immigrants. But for the 20 minutes that he waited there before being hauled off to be
fingerprinted, photographed and sent back to Mexico, Martinez said he never saw anyone approach the hopper car where he knew the Esparzas were hiding.

Two thoughts kept running through Martinez's mind: One was that the Esparzas would escape detection in their hopper and eventually make it to Sarasota. The other
was that the coyotes had somehow sneaked them off the hopper and that they had run to safety in the woods nearby.

"Either way, I thought they were lucky and I was caught," Martinez said.

A few minutes later, the train lurched forward again, headed for Houston and then on to Oklahoma, where it would sit, uninspected, for almost four months.

Asked about that night, Border Patrol officials confirm they arrested people on a train. They say they often "rescue" people from trains but inspect only the cars that
arouse suspicion either because of noises from inside or an obviously tampered-with door hatch, or because sniffer dogs single them out.

"We can't armchair quarterback every one of [the agents] that night," said Ricardo Aguirre, chief of the Border Patrol's anti-smuggling unit in McAllen, Texas.

"We don't know the circumstances," he said. "One [agent] could have had nine people in custody and another could have had 10 people. Are you going to leave
those people alone there and go look for others?"

Back home: A grisly discovery

Twenty-two days after being deported to Los Conos, Martinez set out for the U.S. again with another coyote. This time he walked for five days across south Texas,
eventually getting a ride to Sarasota, where he spoke with the Tribune.

Ulloa, the Honduran who decided not to get on the train with Avila, hid in a trailer truck for a ride north a few days later. He was apprehended by the Border Patrol
and flown back to Honduras, where he is planning his next effort to enter the U.S.

As the weeks passed last summer and no one heard from the missing immigrants, their families began searching for them and asking the smugglers about their
whereabouts.

Roberto Esparza's family said the cousins' smuggler--Hernandez--told them he had no idea where the young men were. Other smugglers assured relatives that the
missing were probably in jail somewhere in the U.S.

Esparza's family members in Los Conos said they received a call from Hernandez on Oct. 15, the day after the bodies were discovered in Iowa. They said he asked
to speak "man to man" with Roberto Esparza's stepfather, Francisco Contreras, and that he cried and begged that the family not report him.

"He wanted our pardon and asked that we think about his family, but Francisco replied, `Did you think about our family?'" said Rico, Roberto Esparza's mother.

The two Mexicans' relatives have traveled twice to the U.S. in recent weeks to supply DNA samples and identify their dead.

Neither Hernandez nor any of the other coyotes could be found for comment. Some of the relatives said they did not blame the smugglers, because they believed
their loved ones knew the dangers of the trip beforehand.

Less forgiving were those who have tried to imagine the men's last moments, such as Omar's grandmother, Alicia Ortega Ortiz.

"We're all going to die, but how awful could it be like this, all closed in?" asked Ortega, 61. "Was it one by one, or all together? Were they hitting and kicking the
sides of the train car? I can imagine their shoes destroyed and the car filled with blood from their trying to get out or to make someone hear."

On Aug. 6, Omar Esparza's girlfriend gave birth to their son. The family named the baby Omar.