South of South of the Border

The deadly trek to El Norte starts far below Mexico

Only the thinnest ray of sun glints off the soldier's binoculars. So much leafy shade covers his position beside the brown Suchiate River along the southern border of Mexico that he and his half dozen comrades are hard to spot in their dark-green uniforms. From the Guatemalan side of the river, a dozen or so Hondurans and Nicaraguans try to figure out how long the soldiers will stay perched on boulders at the water's edge. As long as they do, the Central Americans are not getting across the river.

Also taking refuge in the shade from the July sun that keeps Ciudad Tecun Uman just below melting point, the Central Americans keep their voices low, conserving energy. What about crossing the Suchiate further upstream? someone asks. No, another replies, that area is crawling with bandits.

Standing nearby, a Nicaraguan who is two-thirds of the way through a bottle of aguardiente faces a different challenge: The soldiers are costing him money. A would-be migrant who went no further than this northeast corner of Guatemala, he lives by the river and makes his living as a coyote, ferrying more intrepid migrants into Mexico. As long as the border is unguarded, that is. Wearing only black briefs while his blue jeans dry from his last trip across the river, the Nicaraguan stares at the unblinking lenses of the binoculars. Then, he loses it. Standing up, he points to the soft bulge at his crotch and yells, "¡Mírame la verga!" Look at my dick!

Not everyone is so impotent. Suddenly, a group of nine people in their twenties, two women among them, appear on the riverbank. They look less travel-worn than the rest; even their backpacks look uncreased, the zippers still shiny. As soon as the group appears, a raft mounted on two truck inner-tubes pulls up, seemingly out of nowhere, and the nine clamber on. Five minutes later, the pilot has them on the other side, about 100 yards downstream. The shore bound migrants fan out along the river for a better view of the rafters' landing. The consensus: Now they're all going to be arrested. Instead, the men see a conversation between the raft captain and some of the soldiers. And then, the nine lucky travelers get into the three-wheeled bicycle taxis triciclos that ply both sides of the border. The group heads into the Mexican town of Ciudad Hidalgo to what is probably another jumping-off point for the trip further north.

The rickshaw ride might as w~ be a business-class flight to Los Angeles, as far as the guys on the riverbank are concerned. Door-to-door delivery from Central America to a destination in the United States costs somewhere between $3,000 and $7,000 per person these days. The Central Americans on the shore don't have anything close to that, and they're not willing to commit themselves to paying off a coyote debt. They've gotten this far by bus, some of them ripped off on the way, they say, by Guatemalan police.

And men in uniform aren't the only hazard. The day before yesterday, bandits armed with chimbas one-shot pistols made out of a short length of pipe robbed three migrants of money and their clothes at the exact spot where they are now standing, after the migrants had bathed in the river. Milton, a 24-year-old from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, even had to surrender his shoes.

He and his friends had to return to their free hostel, La Casa del Migrante, in their underpants.

Fortunately for the nearly naked Central Americans, the hostel was only 50 yards or so up the dirt path that leads to the river. There, at least, they were safe from danger and humiliation. They had extra clothing in the backpacks they had stashed there. And, had they attended the mass that was celebrated there two nights later, they would have heard a priest console them with the message that their troubles have an ancient lineage. Standing in a roofed section of the hostel's courtyard, the priest stands behind the folding table that serves as an altar, to tell a couple dozen migrants: "You are the people of Israel,"

The Rev. Ademar Barilli, a six-foot-two Brazilian with a thick black beard, is trying to tell the Central Americans that, like the Israelites who followed Moses out of Egypt, they haven't been forgotten. He doesn't mention that the Israelites wandered in the desert for years before arriving in the promised land.

In American popular culture, the Mexican side of the U.S. border stands for intrigue, corruption, and danger. From Orson Welles' Touch of Evil to Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, Hollywood revels in the dark mysteries that lie on the other side. But from the south bank of the Suchiate, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez look like Disney World. About half of Tecun Uman's streets are unpaved. Bar-brothels are the most viable business.

As far as personal safety is concerned, the Mexican side may not be much better. On both sides of the border, people advise against traveling at night on the roads closest to the frontier. Still, Mexican officials, when they speak of Tecun Uman named after a Mayan warrior who died fighting Spanish invaders descending on Guatemala from newly conquered Mexico -sound exactly like American functionaries talking about Mexican border towns. "The Mexican Consul told the Special Rapporteuur that because Tecun Uman is located on a border that is very easy to cross, it attracts criminal elements from both Guatemala and Mexico. Alcohol and drug abuse are rampant and the delinquency rate is high," wrote Ofelia Celcetas Santos, a UN special rapporteur, in an official account published in 2000 on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.

Until 1996, migrants heading north through Tecun Uman had to sleep in the plaza if they didn't have enough money for lodging. Then, Bishop Alvaro Leonel Ramazzini of San Marcos -the department where Tecun Uman is located contacted Barilli. The border town of 25,000, unknown to few outside the Guatemala-Mexico frontier region, was becoming a major way station for Central Americans heading north. They often had to wait days before crossing into Mexico, but they didn't have even a roof over their heads. Barilli at the time was running a migrant shelter in Tijuana. Like the one he founded in Tecun Uman, it was a project of the Missionaries of St. Charles, better known as the "Scalabrinians," after Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, an Italian bishop who founded the order in the late 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of his compatriots were moving to the New World.

One day in the late 1880s, Bishop Scalabrini, the head prelate of Piacenza, traveled to the Milan railway station jammed with thousands of migrants waiting to journey to Genoa and other seaports where they would set sail for the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. At a time when people didn't go back and forth between continents and letters took months to deliver, Scalabrini worried that the weakening of ties to the homeland would lead to the erosion of religious faith.

In 1888, one year after founding his order, Scalabrini sent its first missionary priests to the United States and Brazil. In 1901, Scalabrini himself visited New York and Washington, meeting among others with President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom the bishop is said to have protested the conditions at Ellis Island, home of the Statue of Liberty and the official reception center for migrants (the place where a boy migrant named Vito Andolini gets a new last name, Corleone, in Godfather II).

Scalabrini aimed his mission at Italians, though he did ordain two Polish priests to minister to their compatriots who had flocked to the United States. And he left the problems of migrants within Europe to another tribe of missionaries headed by the bishop of Cremona. But in the 1920s, after the two bishops died, that outfit devoted itself so energetically to helping enemies of Mussolini find refuge that the fascist government shut it down, and the Scalabrinians took over that work as well.

In the Sixties, the Scalabrinians changed their focus to migrants of all nationalities and all religions. says the Rev. Joseph Fugolo, director of the Center for Migration Studies in Staten Island, New York, one of five research programs that operates in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The order's 700 priests and 850 nuns can be found allover the globe. "We care for the migrant in all his needs," Fugolo says. "We are for a world without frontiers."


 

Among the northern Italians who arrived in the New World were 8arilli's great grandparents. They moved to southern Brazil, where Barilli, 46, grew up on a farm in the town of Xarqueada before heading off to seminary and the Catholic University of Curitiba, where he majored in a combined philosophy/sociology/psychology program. But his approach to the phenomenon of mass migration, the human tide moving north from South and Central America toward the United States, reflects less of academic theory and a farmer's pragmatism.

"This is the Casa del Migrante, not your mother-in-law's house," Barilli tells a couple of guys at the front gate who are trying to overstay. Shortly after arriving, Barilli raised money from Catholic Charities and a German Catholic foundation to build the Casa, a walled compound with dormitories for migrants, quarters for volunteers and guests, a kitchen, dining hall, offices, and a meeting room, as well as the director's quarters where Barilli lives. But so many migrants pass through that each person is limited to three days maximum.

Barilli, wearing shorts, t-shirt, and a straw cowboy hat, stands in almost precisely the same spot where he preached the day before, this time at the head of a long wooden table, sawing a pig's head in half while a Mexican volunteer, 21-year-old Javier Camacho of Tepic, holds it by the ears. The rest of the 220-pound pig's parts are laid out on an improvised butcher's block. In one corner is a glass of aguardiente and campari on ice, which Barilli nips from time to time. Across the courtyard, chickens and turkeys chase each other around an open-air coop. Across the unpaved street from the hostel, amid banana and lime trees that Barilli tends, one of his helpers is starting a fire over which some of the pig will be cooked into lard.

Fifty migrants a day go through a lot of food, which is why Barilli is so focused on self-sufficiency. The foundations and aid agencies that pour so much money into Central America tend to favor projects fostering micro-enterprises in rural communities, say, or teaching conflict resolution but not day-in, day.out activities like feeding people. Meals at the Casa are not enormous breakfast is a cup of corn-meal drink, atole, but they make the difference between nourishment and hunger for many of the men.

Barilli and his colleagues also reason that the migrants need some practical advice. It can be summed up in two words: Turn around. Seemingly odd coming from the Scalabrinians, whose Casas del Migrante run from Ocotepeque, Honduras to Guatemala City and Tecun Uman in Guatemala to Tapachula, Ciudad Juarez, Agua Prieta and Tijuana, Mexico. The priests know that their message to reverse course isn't popular, but they keep delivering it. "In Egypt the Israelites lived well; they had food, but no justice. You have the right to live well in your countries," Barilli says at mass. "If everyone moves to the United States, there will be no room for everyone. Where will you go then? To the North Pole, with the Eskimos?"

While Moses' people were fleeing slavery, Barilli says, the migrants are heading north to "work like slaves," He tells the travelers: "Here in Guatemala, people wail about their problems, but at ten in the morning they're stretched out on their hammocks. In the United States, someone who shows up five minutes late for work will find that someone else has taken his place,"

Actually, Barilli knows that once they're in the United States, migrants will do almost any job, under almost any conditions, for almost any amount of money. He spent four years in California's Imperial Valley, among Mexican farm workers whose miserable wages keep American food prices low. His commentary on work habits north and south of the border is really aimed at exploring one of the deepest questions in the north-south relationship: why do Latin Americans work so hard in another country? And why do their home countries, blessed with natural and human resources, fail at something so basic as keeping citizens at home?

You could fill a room -or maybe a building -with reports and studies and assessments by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank and a dozen think-tanks that all revolve around that question. Among the standard answers: unstable financial systems don't allow small and medium-sized businesses ready access to capital; environ-mental mismanagement creates vulnerability to "external shocks" like Hurricane Mitch; bloated public payrolls soak up too much of many countries' resources to allow the rest of the economy to function; some public employees spend most of their time taking bribes ... and so on.

All those answers boil down to a central ill that Barilli states during mass: "If we live badly, it's because we're badly governed,"


 

Hurricane Mitch tore through Honduras in 1998. In a country that was already one of the poorest in the Americas, three-quarters of the population lost homes or livelihood or suffered other damage. More than half the country's roads were washed out and water systems throughout the country were wrecked. Six years later, the country is still trying to recover.

"The business shut down," says Hector, 29, of San Pedro Sula, who had worked at the factory Ferreterfa Lacayo for nine years. Along with some 40 other men, Hector is taking it easy on a covered second-floor patio overlooking the central courtyard of the hostel. Some are lying on the concrete floor, dozing. Others sit on benches and talk quietly. Virtually everyone is wearing the standard migrant uniform of jeans, short-sleeved shirts, and sneakers.

The guys are divided into little groups who have joined forces along the way or who started out together, like three young cousins originally from Oropoli, in rural southwest Honduras. One of them, 23-year-old Holman, had been working as a cashier supervisor at the Banco de Occidente, making 2,500 Lempiras a month not quite $150. "You can't live on salaries that low," he explains.

Holman and his cousins seem to fit the classic migrant profile -young men whose drive and ambition have no outlet at home. Strikingly, though, at least half of the men on the patio are older and had made lives for themselves in their own countries, before the bottom fell out of the economy.

Milton, the fellow from Tegucigalpa who lost his shoes to bandits, is 28 years old -by Latin American working-class standards a few years too old to go adventuring. He has a two-year-old and a one-year-old to support, but found he was going broke building houses and crafting furniture the sort of basic products that thrive in even a minimally healthy economy. But the Honduran economy is not healthy.

At 44, Manuel is much older than most of the other guys resting on the patio. Like Milton and a few others, he reports that the Honduran construction industry has faded "There's not enough work." With three kids, age 17, 16, and 12, to support, Manuel found that the only place he could hope to get work was the United States.

Later, I run into Daniel, a beefy 38-year-old from Managua, Nicaragua who says that even his skills as an auto mechanic don't earn him a decent liVing in another of Central America's perpetually struggling economies.

In the big, imitation-leather-bound ledger book where all those who pass through the hostel register, a page picked at random shows ages ranging from 16 to 32, with most of the migrants in their 20s and early 30s. Since the Casa opened, it has sheltered some 800 to 1,000 migrants a month. The number dropped to the low end last year, but is back up again this year. During the first seven months, the hostel had taken in 6,874 migrants an average of 1,091 a month. Barilli has been hearing for months what I heard from migrants in the course of a couple of days. "Peoples' situations are getting worse," he tells me one morning, sipping on the big wooden mug of mate that gets him through the early part of the day.

Some migrants never make it further north than Tecun Uman. With the exception of the drunk Nicaraguan at the Suchiate, most of these are women who are brought to the town to work as prostitutes, or who fall into the life once they get here. Like seaports and frontiers the world over, Tecun Uman, nourishes a thriving sex trade. According to an organization that tries to talk women into abandoning prostitution, Tecun Uman alone has 67 brothels. At an average of 10 women per establishment (some have half a dozen, some have 20 or more), that's 670 prostitutes in one town alone -plus an unknown number of others in brothels that don't operate openly, as the bars do.

At midday on a late July weekday, Lesbia Carolina Salazar and I take a triciclo to the street where the town's 19 whorehouses that operate from bars are located (the rest of the establishments are in hotels or other businesses). Salazar is a 31-year-old social worker who moved to the borderlands from Guatemala City when she married; she spends a lot of time in the bars, always early in the day, when the women aren't busy with customers.

The half-dozen establishments we visit all feature green-painted wooden walls, tin roofs, and beer-company calendar pictures of bathing beauties. Usually, the juke box is pumping out salsa . Despite the early hour, one or two of the places have customers, most of them guys in their 30s who look to have started drinking at breakfast. Everywhere we go, Salazar gets smiles and hugs and news. Usually it's bad news. We hear of a 19-year-old guy who was murdered; no one seems to know why. Elsewhere, we hear that a woman in her 20s is dying; Salazar guesses that the cause is AIDS.

In another bar, she is told she ought to speak to an 18-year-old Honduran girl who caught a stray bullet in the leg on the street outside. We sit down at a table bearing the Gallo beer logo and the girl comes over on her crutches, wearing a red top and shorts, an outfit that's no more daring than any young woman would wear on a summer day in the tropics. But she's not working for now. She has a bandage around her right knee.

The girl has been going to a doctor her treatment paid for by the brothel owner — who told her that the bullet couldn't be removed without damaging tendons and bone.

"¿Estas vendida?," Salazar asks Have you been sold? That's a way of asking if the girl owes money to the brothel-keeper that she'd have to payoff in order to leave. The girl shakes her head, though Salazar is skeptical. In any event, the girl shows no enthusiasm for Salazar's advice. You need to see a specialist, Salazar says. A general practitioner doesn't know enough about bullets and bones. You can move out of here and we'll pay for medical treatment.

The girl's replies are brief and delivered in a flat monotone. /'11 be all right. The doctor said it'll just take a little more time.

Salazar urges her to think some more about the offer. Though the girl didn't exactly leap at the chance to leave the bar life behind, she did seem to be interested in the possibility. But as Salazar walks away from the club, she predicts that the girl will remain in the brothel, at least for now. In fact, though the girl later said she'd like to leave, she changed her mind. A few weeks later, she was still living at the bar.


  

With a year and a half of such encounters behind her, Salazar has learned that victories are few and far between. Last year, she and her colleagues helped 25 women abandon the brothels -out of the approximately 600 with whom Salazar and the others stay in touch.

Salazar works for the Hermanas Oblatas del Santfsmo Redentor -- yes, the Catholic Church again. In a place like Guatemala, where the social services system is rudimentary (the Social Welfare Department was going to open a home for former prostitutes near Tecun Uman, but couldn't come up with $50,000 to renovate the place), the Church often makes the difference between some help for the otherwise unprotected, and no help at all.

The trio of Central Americans stuck at the river make it across the next day. At least, I think they do. I get to the river five minutes behind them and they are gone. There were still some soldiers on the Mexican side, so the chances are that the migrants found a safer crossing point.

Another possibility is one I'd rather not dwell on. Both Barilli and his colleague across the river in Tapachula, the Rev. Florenzo Rigoni, have been calling attention for years to the fact that an unknown number of migrants are killed by bandits. Lush and overgrown, the border region offers hundreds of places to dump a body. Every now and then, Barilli will get a call or a visit from a family that's trying to trace a migrant who was never heard from after he left home.

Those who stay behind, and those who haven't left yet, are aware that not everyone survives the trek north. Earlier this year, I heard a member of the community of Los Duraznales, in the western Guatemalan highlands tell a meeting organized by the Guatemala City branch of the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty that 17 migrants from the village (population: 1,806) had died while migrating or in the United States.

But the migrants keep flooding into Tecun Uman. "There's no indication that the situation of Central Americans will improve," Barilli told me. "I don't believe I'm going to see the end of migration to the United States."