Enrique's Journey Read online

  “Where are you coming from, you old bum?” Ana Lucía asks as Enrique walks in the door. “Coming home for food, huh?”

  “Be quiet!” he says. “I’m not asking anything of you.”

  “You’re a lazy bum! A drug addict! No one wants you here.” All the neighbors can hear. “This isn’t your house. Go to your mother!”

  “I don’t live with you. I live alone.”

  “You eat here.”

  Over and over, in a low voice, Enrique says, half pleading, “You better be quiet.” Finally, he snaps. He kicks Ana Lucía twice, squarely in the buttocks. She shrieks.

  His grandmother runs out of the house. She grabs a stick and threatens to club him if he touches Ana Lucía again. Enrique turns on his heel. “No one cares about me!” he says. He stomps away. Ana Lucía threatens to throw his clothes out onto the street. Now even his grandmother wishes he would go to the United States. He is hurting the family—and himself. She says, “He’ll be better off there.”

  GOOD-BYE

  María Isabel finds him sitting on a rock at a street corner, weeping, rejected again. She tries to comfort him. He is high on glue. He tells her he sees a wall of fire. His mother has just passed through it. She is lying on the other side, and she is dying. He approaches the fire to save her, but someone walks toward him through the flames and shoots him. He falls, then rises again, unhurt. His mother dies. “¿Por qué me dejó?” he cries out. “Why did she leave me?”

  Even Enrique’s sister and grandmother have urged María Isabel to leave Enrique, to find someone better. “What do you see in him? Don’t you see he uses drugs?” people ask her. Her uncle is also wary of the drug-addicted teenager. He and Enrique both work at the same mechanic’s shop, but the uncle never offers him a lift in his car to their job.

  María Isabel can’t leave him, despite his deep flaws. He is macho and stubborn. When they fight, he gives her the silent treatment. She has to break the ice. He is her third boyfriend but her first love. Enrique also provides a refuge from her own problems. Her aunt Gloria’s son is an alcoholic. He throws things. He steals things. There are a lot of fights.

  María Isabel loses herself in Enrique. At night, they sit on some big rocks outside his grandmother’s home, where they have a bit of privacy, and talk. Enrique talks about his mother, his life with his grandmother María and his uncle Marco. “Why don’t you leave your vices?” María Isabel asks. “It’s hard,” he answers quietly. When they walk by his drug haunts, she holds his hand tighter, hoping it will help.

  Enrique feels shame for what he has done to his family and what he is doing to María Isabel, who might be pregnant. María Isabel pleads with him to stay. She won’t abandon him. She tells Enrique she will move into the stone hut with him. But Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead. Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation. “If you had known my mom, you would know she’s a good person,” he says to his friend José. “I love her.”

  Enrique has to find her.

  Each Central American neighborhood has a smuggler. In Enrique’s neighborhood, it’s a man who lives at the top of a hill. For $5,000, he will take anyone to los Estados. But Enrique can’t imagine that kind of money.

  He sells the few things he owns: his bed, a gift from his mother; his leather jacket, a gift from his dead uncle; his rustic armoire, where he hangs his clothes. He crosses town to say good-bye to Grandmother María. Trudging up the hill to her house, he encounters his father. “I’m leaving,” he says. “I’m going to make it to the U.S.” He asks him for money.

  His father gives him enough for a soda and wishes him luck.

  “Grandma, I’m leaving,” Enrique says. “I’m going to find my mom.”

  Don’t go, she pleads. She promises to build him a one-room house in the corner of her cramped lot. But he has made up his mind.

  She gives him 100 lempiras, about $7—all the money she has.

  “I’m leaving already, sis,” he tells Belky the next morning.

  She feels her stomach tighten. They have lived apart most of their lives, but he is the only one who understands her loneliness. Quietly, she fixes a special meal: tortillas, a pork cutlet, rice, fried beans with a sprinkling of cheese. “Don’t leave,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “I have to.”

  It is hard for him, too. Every time he has talked to his mother, she has warned him not to come—it’s too dangerous. But if somehow he gets to the U.S. border, he will call her. Being so close, she’ll have to welcome him. “If I call her from there,” he says to José, “how can she not accept me?”

  He makes himself one promise: “I’m going to reach the United States, even if it takes one year.” Only after a year of trying would he give up and go back.

  Quietly, Enrique, the slight kid with a boyish grin, fond of kites, spaghetti, soccer, and break dancing, who likes to play in the mud and watch Mickey Mouse cartoons with his four-year-old cousin, packs up his belongings: corduroy pants, a T-shirt, a cap, gloves, a toothbrush, and toothpaste.

  For a long moment, he looks at a picture of his mother, but he does not take it. He might lose it. He writes her telephone number on a scrap of paper. Just in case, he also scrawls it in ink on the inside waistband of his pants. He has $57 in his pocket.

  On March 2, 2000, he goes to his grandmother Águeda’s house. He stands on the same porch that his mother disappeared from eleven years before. He hugs María Isabel and Aunt Rosa Amalia. Then he steps off.

  TWO

  Seeking Mercy

  The day’s work is done at Las Anonas, a railside hamlet of thirty-six families in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, when a field hand, Sirenio Gómez Fuentes, sees a startling sight: a battered and bleeding boy, naked except for his undershorts.

  It is Enrique. He limps forward on bare feet, stumbling first one way, then another. His right shin is gashed. His upper lip is split. The left side of his face is swollen. He is crying.

  His eyes are red, filled with blood. He dabs open wounds on his face with a filthy sweater he has found on the tracks. Gómez hears him whisper, “Give me water, please.”

  The knot of apprehension in Sirenio Gómez melts into pity. He runs into his thatched hut, fills a cup, and gives it to Enrique.

  “Do you have a pair of pants?” Enrique asks.

  Gómez dashes back inside and fetches some. There are holes in the crotch and the knees, but they will do. Then, with kindness, Gómez directs Enrique to Carlos Carrasco, the mayor of Las Anonas. Whatever has happened, maybe he can help.

  Enrique hobbles down a dirt road into the heart of the little town. He encounters a man wearing a white straw hat on a horse. Could he help him find the mayor? “That’s me,” the man says. He stops and stares. “Did you fall from the train?”

  Again, Enrique begins to cry. Mayor Carrasco dismounts. He takes Enrique’s arm and guides him to his home, next to the town church. “Mom!” he shouts. “There’s a poor kid out here! He’s all beaten up.” Lesbia Sibaja, the mayor’s mother, hears his urgent tone and rushes outside.

  Enrique’s cheeks and lips are swelling badly. He’s going to die, Carrasco thinks. Carrasco drags a wooden pew out of the church, pulls it into the shade of a tamarind tree, and helps Enrique onto it.

  The mayor’s mother puts a pot of water on to boil and sprinkles in salt and herbs to clean his wounds. She brings Enrique a bowl of hot broth, filled with bits of meat and potatoes. He spoons the brown liquid into his mouth, careful not to touch his broken teeth. He cannot chew.

  Townspeople come to see. They stand in a circle. “Is he alive?” asks Gloria Luis, a stout woman with long black hair. “Why don’t you go home? Wouldn’t that be better?” Other women press him to return to Honduras.

  “I’m going to find my mom,” Enrique says, quietly.

  He is seventeen. It is March 24, 2000. Eleven years before, he tells the townspeople, his mother left home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to work in the United States. She did not come back,
and now he is riding freight trains up through Mexico to find her.

  Gloria Luis looks at Enrique and thinks about her own children.

  She earns little; most people in Las Anonas make 30 pesos a day, roughly $3, working the fields. She digs into a pocket and presses 10 pesos into Enrique’s hand.

  Several other women open his hand, adding 5 or 10 pesos each.

  Mayor Carrasco gives Enrique a shirt and shoes. He has cared for injured migrants before. Some have died. Giving Enrique clothing will be futile, Carrasco thinks, if he can’t find someone with a car who can get the boy to medical help.

  Adan Díaz Ruiz, mayor of San Pedro Tapanatepec, the county seat, happens by in his pickup.

  Carrasco begs a favor: Take this kid to a doctor.

  Díaz balks. He is miffed. “This is what they get for doing this journey,” he says. Enrique cannot pay for any treatment. The migrants most badly mangled by the train run up bills of $1,000 to $1,500 each when they end up at a public hospital one and a half hours away. Why, Díaz wonders, do these Central American governments send us all their problems?

  Looking at the small, soft-spoken boy lying on the bench, he reminds himself that a live migrant is better than a dead one. In eighteen months, Díaz has had to bury eight of them, nearly all mutilated by the trains. Already today, he has been told to expect the body of yet another, in his late thirties.

  Sending this boy to a local doctor would cost the county $60. Burying him in a common grave would cost three times as much. First Díaz would have to pay someone to dig the grave, then someone to handle the paperwork, then someone to stand guard while Enrique’s unclaimed body is displayed on the steamy patio of the San Pedro Tapanatepec cemetery for seventy-two hours, as required by law.

  All the while, people visiting the graves of their loved ones would complain about the smell of another rotting migrant.

  “We will help you,” he tells Enrique finally.

  He turns him over to his driver, Ricardo Díaz Aguilar. Inside the mayor’s pickup, Enrique sobs, but this time with relief. He says to the driver, “I thought I was going to die.”

  An officer of the judicial police approaches in a white pickup. Enrique cranks down his window. Instantly, he recoils. He recognizes both the officer with buzz-cut hair and the truck.

  The officer, too, seems startled. Both stare silently at each other.

  For a moment, the officer and the mayor’s driver discuss the new dead migrant. Quickly, the policeman pulls away.

  “That guy robbed me yesterday,” Enrique says.

  The policeman and a partner had seen Enrique and four other migrants drying off after bathing in a river five miles to the south. “Get over here,” the buzz-cut officer barked, waving a pistol. One of the migrants bolted. Enrique obeyed, afraid of what might happen if he tried to run. The officers put the migrants in the back of their truck. They demanded 100 pesos to let them go. Enrique was relieved that one of the fellow migrants had the money and handed it over. “You won’t tell anyone,” the officer warned.

  The mayor’s driver is not surprised. The judicial police, he says, routinely stop trains to rob and beat migrants. The judiciales—the Agencia Federal de Investigación—deny it.

  Enrique has already had other run-ins with corrupt Mexican cops. Once, he was just fifteen miles inside Mexico, in Tapachula, when two municipal police officers grabbed him and put him in the back of their pickup.

  “Where are you from?” they demanded. “How much do you have on you? Give it to us and we will let you go.” They stole everything he had, $4.

  Four of five migrants who arrive at the Albergue Belén shelter in Tapachula have already been robbed, beaten, or extorted by police, says the shelter priest, Flor María Rigoni. At the Tapachula train station, fights break out between municipal and state police officers over who gets to rob a group of migrants. Migrants describe being locked up by police officers until a relative in the United States can wire the kidnapper’s fee and buy their freedom.

  For immigration agents, squeezing cash from migrants is central to day-to-day operations, helping underpaid agents buy big houses and nice cars. At highway checkpoints, agents charge smugglers $50 to $200 per migrant to pass through. The checkpoint boss typically gets half the take; his workers split the rest. Officials who try to stop abuses receive repeated death threats. One government worker in the Mexican state of Tabasco, who in 1999 denounced corruption by certain judicial police agents, was dead a few days later in a mysterious car accident. “If you speak out too much against police corruption, you wake up with a machete in your back,” says Father Rigoni.

  In San Pedro Tapanatepec, the driver seeking a doctor for Enrique finds the last clinic still open that night.

  PERSEVERANCE

  When Enrique’s mother left, he was a child. Six months ago, the first time he set out to find her, he was still a callow kid. Now he is a veteran of a perilous pilgrimage by children, many of whom come looking for their mothers and travel any way they can. The thousands who ride freight trains must hop between seven and thirty trains to get through Mexico. The luckiest make it in a month. Others, who stop to work along the way, take a year or longer.

  Some go up to five days without eating. Their prize possessions are scraps of paper, wrapped in plastic, often tucked into a shoe. On the scraps are telephone numbers: their only way to contact their mothers. Some do not have even that.

  None of the youngsters has proper papers. Many are caught by the Mexican police or by la migra, the Mexican immigration authorities, who take them south to Guatemala. Most try again.

  Like many others, Enrique has made several attempts.

  The first: He set out from Honduras with a friend, José del Carmen Bustamante. They remember traveling thirty-one days and about a thousand miles through Guatemala into the state of Veracruz in central Mexico, where la migra captured them on top of a train and sent them back to Guatemala on what migrants call El Bus de Lágrimas, the Bus of Tears. These buses make as many as eight runs a day, deporting more than 100,000 unhappy passengers every year.

  The second: Enrique journeyed by himself. Five days and 150 miles into Mexico, he committed the mistake of falling asleep on top of a train with his shoes off. Police stopped the train near the town of Tonalá to hunt for migrants, and Enrique had to jump off. Barefoot, he could not run far. He hid overnight in some grass, then was captured and put on the bus back to Guatemala.

  The third: After two days, police surprised him while he was asleep in an empty house near Chahuites, 190 miles into Mexico. They robbed him, he says, and then turned him over to la migra, who put him, once more, on the bus to Guatemala.

  The fourth: After a day and twelve miles, police caught him sleeping on top of a mausoleum in a graveyard near the depot in Tapachula, Mexico, known as the place where a migrant woman had been raped and, two years before that, another had been raped and stoned to death. La migra took Enrique back to Guatemala.

  The fifth: La migra captured him as he walked along the tracks in Querétaro, north of Mexico City. Enrique was 838 miles and almost a week into his journey. He had been stung in the face by a swarm of bees. For the fifth time, immigration agents shipped him back to Guatemala.

  The sixth: He nearly succeeded. It took him more than five days. He crossed 1,564 miles. He reached the Rio Grande and actually saw the United States. He was eating alone near some railroad tracks when migra agents grabbed him. They sent him to a detention center called El Corralón, the Corral, in Mexico City. The next day they bused him for fourteen hours, all the way back to Guatemala.

  The bus unloaded him back across the Río Suchiate in the rugged frontier town of El Carmen. The river marks the Guatemalan border, just as the Rio Grande defines the Mexican border to the north. A sign in block letters on top of a hill says BIENVENIDOS A GUATEMALA.

  It was as if he had never left.

  He has slept on the ground; in a sewage culvert, curled up with other migrants; on top of gravestones. Once, on
top of a moving train, he grew so hungry that he jumped forward to the first car, leaped off, and raced to pick a pineapple. He was able to reboard one of the train’s last cars. Another time, he had gone two days without water. His throat felt as if it was swelling shut. There were no houses in sight. He found a small cattle trough. It was frothy with cow spit. Under the froth was green algae. Beneath the algae was stagnant, yellow water. He brought handfuls to his parched lips. He was so thirsty it tasted wonderful.

  Each time he is deported, Enrique knows he must quickly get back over the river, into Mexico, away from Guatemala’s lawless border towns. Once he was deported at 2 A.M. and spent the night cowering, sleepless, near the border guard station, afraid for his life.

  Migrants usually head to the border town of Tecún Umán to cross the river. Its lifeblood is trafficking in arms, drugs, and people. It teems with violence, prostitutes, and destitute migrants. They die at a rate of two or three a week. Tecún Umán is controlled by two rival gangs, both born in Los Angeles: the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street.

  In Tecún Umán, the river is wider, slower, easier to ford. A platoon of large passenger tricycles wheels migrants from the bus stop to the riverbank, swerving along the main, rutted, dirt road to avoid pigs and trash burning in the middle of the street.

  The bank’s muddy shores reek of sewage. Salsa music blares from restaurants that double as houses of prostitution. Some Central American children, penniless, get stuck here, turning tricks, doing drugs, and stealing, says Marvin Godínez, legal assistant at Tecún Umán’s Casa del Migrante shelter. Workers unload scores of tricycles piled high with toilet paper and Pepsi-Cola and load them onto rafts bound for Mexico. The rafts are a few planks of wood lashed on top of two tractor tire inner tubes. Dozens of the rafts crisscross the river. A man uses a long cane to push against the river bottom or ties himself to the front of the raft with a long rope and swims. Migrants prefer to pay to cross in a raft than risk the river alone.

  Enrique prefers to cross the river in El Carmen, where the bus leaves him, even though there are no rafts and the Río Suchiate is more narrow, fast, and rocky. The water is the color of coffee with too much cream. The nasty river reaches his chest. Each time he crosses, as the rainy season approaches, the river is higher and higher. He always crosses with one or two other migrants, in case he slips and starts to drown. Chin high, he staggers across, stumbling on the uneven riverbed, lurching into the hollows, straining against the current. Exhausted, he reaches the far bank.