For Central American Women, Sexual Coercion Is Hazard on Route to U.S.

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

TECUN UMAN, Guatemala -- "If you come to my office and lie down with me, you can pass." That was the offer, Ileana Figueroa recalled, that taught her sex was the price of passage to the United States.

As she considered the Honduran border official's demand, Figueroa, 20, said she thought about her brother waiting for her in Miami, where he had promised she could earn unimaginable sums as a caretaker for the elderly. She thought, too, of how devastating it would be to return to her Honduran village and tell her family she had handed over their life savings to a smuggler for nothing.

So, the mother of two walked reluctantly into the checkpoint office on the Honduras-Guatemala border and shut the door. It was August 2003. "I didn't want to be a failure. I wanted to go to Miami," said Figueroa, her brown hair tied in a ponytail.

When the official was finished with her, Figueroa continued her journey north. But after just one week, she was caught in Mexico and deported, poorer than when she set out and too ashamed to return home. She ended up in this shabby but fast-paced town near the Mexico-Guatemala border, sleeping in the back of a saloon and selling her body for $6 a customer.

"What else can I do now?" she said.

Coerced into sex by smugglers, border officials, street gang members and others who control the underground route to the United States, many female migrants are paying an especially harsh price for a chance to land a job in the north, according to government and church officials.

The problem is particularly acute for Central American women without skills or legal documents, who must navigate 1,500 miles of Mexican territory to reach the U.S. border. Those who fall short of their destination, yet feel too ashamed to go home, often end up stranded in brothels along the way.

"Sex has become a negotiation mechanism. Many times it is the only way women can cross," said Rene Leyva, a public health researcher in Mexico.

The Rev. Ademar Barilli, a Catholic priest who runs a shelter for migrants in Tecun Uman and has spoken with hundreds of women who stay there, said he believed that "many more than half" are coerced into sex along the way. Sometimes, he said, men pretend to befriend them and offer them a place to sleep, only later adding the condition that they engage in sex.

Barilli said the church, from pulpits across Central America, has warned women of the dangers involved in traveling north, including rape and sexual extortion, and that some women have recently made the journey in groups. Despite the dangers, they still go.

"Those who have nothing to live for back in their home country decide to risk it anyway," he said.

No one knows precisely how many undocumented female migrants are trying to enter the United States, but more than 800,000 women have been deported by U.S. border officials since 2000. Nearly all were Mexicans and Central Americans who were caught and detained on the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican officials said that, over the same period, they had detained tens of thousands of Central American women heading north.

Hugo Eduardo Beteta Mendez, a Guatemalan academic and presidential adviser, said the stories of rape and extorted sex along the route are now so common that when women do not reach the United States, many cannot return to their villages because neighbors and parents assume that they, too, have become victims. Thus, some of the women see prostitution as their only option.

"It's a double tragedy," said Beteta. The map from Central America to the U.S. border, he added, is "full of pain."

A Limbo of Shame

Almost every bar on Third Street in Tecun Uman, from the Safary to the North Star, is a brothel with tiny numbered rooms occupied by women who tried to get to the United States and failed. About 1,000 women work as prostitutes here -- many hoping to earn enough money to head north again, according to church officials.

Thousands of Central American migrants pass through here each week. Those heading north walk to the edge of town and float across the narrow, muddy Suchiate River to Mexico in large inner tubes.

Laura Caravante, a Mexican immigration official, said Mexico deports 350 people every day to this steamy, lawless frontier town of 30,000, where gunfire crackles nightly. She said that 10 years ago it was rare to see women being deported, but now as many as four out of 10 deportees are female.

Once stranded in mid-journey, some take up prostitution temporarily, until they can save up for another attempt to reach a decent job in the United States, officials said.

"My brother made it to Miami. I want to go, too," said Figueroa, perspiring heavily in a yellow tank top and jeans as she sat in her sweltering room. "But for us, sex is an obstacle to getting there."

The cubicle was just big enough for a bed and a small table where Figueroa keeps medicine for her persistent, hacking cough. Aqua paint peeled off the walls, and an electric fan -- her only luxury -- whirred uselessly in a corner.

Figueroa said most men had already left her northern Honduran village, where there is little to do but grow beans and bananas and where the typical monthly salary is about $100. Across Mexico and Central America, hundreds of towns are bereft of working-age men, who are nailing plasterboard in Houston or washing dishes in Silver Spring.

Now, drawn by the same lures, young women are increasingly making the same, high-risk leaps. Their families save for years, borrow from every relative and even sell off land to finance their trips north.

Figueroa left her two small children with her mother, took the family savings and paid a smuggler a $2,000 down payment. The investment would have gone for nothing had she not submitted to the border official's demands.

"What choice did I have?" she asked.

Once out of Honduras and inside Guatemala, Figueroa boarded a bus and traveled 200 miles toward Peten, a wilderness area along the border with Mexico. Accompanied by her smuggler and a group of other migrants, she said, she walked six days and nights through canyons and into southern Mexico.

But when they arrived in the city of Villahermosa, the smuggler robbed the whole group and abandoned them. Before long, Figueroa was in a Mexican jail awaiting deportation back to Guatemala. Other women whispered that there was fast cash to be earned in a place called Tecun Uman, so that's where she headed. Now, after more than a year, she is still trapped in a limbo of shame and survival.

"I can't go home, and I can't tell my family where I am," she said.

Holding On to a Dream

As the United States ratchets up pressure on Mexico to arrest illegal Central American migrants before they reach the U.S. border, Mexican authorities have been arresting record numbers, often topping 1,000 a day. And as these deportations have risen, numerous red-light towns have sprung up along Mexico's southern border.

Another back-bar cubicle on Third Street is occupied by Caroline, 23, a chubby Nicaraguan who had hoped to reach Houston. Detained and deported en route, she was too embarrassed to go home to her old shrimp-packing job. Besides, she said, she can earn more in Tecun Uman and set off that much sooner again for Texas.

"The other night a man tried to strangle me," Caroline said, demonstrating how he grabbed her neck. "They said they called the police, but no police came."

A young woman sitting beside Caroline nodded tearfully as the Nicaraguan described the hardships of her attempt to reach the United States -- including her experience with the Mexican police officer who promised not to arrest her if she had sex with him. But despite everything, Caroline said, "The dream is still bigger than the risks."

Figueroa said she dreams every day about joining her brother in Miami and working in a home for senior citizens. And she is saving up, one customer at a time, for the journey. On a busy day, she calculated, she serves five customers and turns over half her earnings to the bar owner, pocketing $15.

As she spoke, sipping a cold soda at the bar, a man walked in and eyed her and several other deportees, each available for $6.

"This is not want I wanted in life," Figueroa said. "It's what I got."

© 2004