Enrique's Journey (18 page)

“If you can't pay with cash,” one said, “you know how women pay.”

Angrily, Gabi refused.

Finally, four smugglers let them tag along with eighty migrants who Gabi learned had paid between $5,000 and $8,000 apiece. They put her up front to help cut a path in the dense vegetation. She rebuffed constant demands for sex. She tried to look as ugly as possible. She hardly slept, never smiled or combed her hair. Her legs turned black with ticks. She felt as though bugs were eating her alive, but she dared not lift her skirt to remove them. She kept repeating to herself, “I have to get to my mother.”

She and Lourdes switched to hitchhiking. But a
migra
agent caught them trying to walk around a checkpoint. The agent was a woman, Gabi says, who ordered her to strip and checked her clothing for hidden cash, then scolded her for having so little money that there was no way for her to release them.

“Please let us go,” Gabriela begged. “I'm going to help my mother.”

“
Váyanse.
Go!” the agent said.

Finally, Gabi and Lourdes made it to Nuevo Laredo. She tells Enrique she feels stuck here, too. Sometimes, she says, she wants to kill herself.

Another Honduran teenager at church dinners is Kelvin Maradiaga. He, too, lost the phone number and address of his mother, Adalinda, in New York during his journey. Running from Mexican officials in southern Mexico, he fell into a puddle. His mother's phone number, jotted down with a felt-tip pen, blurred into oblivion.

A man at a taco stand gave him a job washing dishes. He was able to buy a phone card to call Honduras to try to get his mother's phone number again. But the only phone in his small southern Honduran town, which belongs to an agricultural cooperative, had been disconnected.

After months of travel, Kelvin fears he has only one choice: to go back to Honduras, get his mother's phone number, and attempt the journey all over again. “She would tell me about her problems. I would tell her about mine. I need to see her. I want to see her,” says Kelvin.

Outside the church after dinner, many migrants engage in a crude kind of street therapy: Who has endured the worst riding the trains? They measure trips not in days but in shoes lost, beatings taken, belongings robbed. They show off scars. “I walked four days.” “I walked twenty-eight days!” They air feet covered in large blisters, toenails that have turned up from walking.

A young man sits on a green metal bench outside the church. He has been stuck here for weeks, and he trumps everyone. He slides up a leg of his black jeans and takes off a black, high-topped sneaker, then a prosthesis. His right calf tapers into a pink stump.

A SMUGGLER

For permission to stay in the relative safety of the river encampment, the leader, El Tiríndaro, who is addicted to heroin, usually wants drugs or beer. But he has not asked Enrique for anything. El Tiríndaro is a subspecies of coyote known as a
patero,
because he smuggles people into the United States by pushing them across the river on inner tubes while paddling like a
pato,
or duck. Others in the business keep clients in rented houses or hotel rooms. El Tiríndaro is small-time; he uses the camp. Enrique is a likely client.

In addition to smuggling, El Tiríndaro finances his heroin habit by tattooing people and selling clothing that migrants have left on the riverbank. In a pinch, he reverts to his previous profession, petty theft. One day, Enrique bumps into El Tiríndaro on the street. He has his arms around a live turkey he has stolen out of someone's yard.

The smuggler has a short fuse when he needs a fix. He shoots up constantly. Enrique stares as El Tiríndaro lies on a mattress, mixes Mexican black tar heroin with water in a spoon, warms it over a cigarette lighter, draws it into a syringe, and stabs the needle straight into a vein.

When the drugs take hold, El Tiríndaro hallucinates. He hears imaginary voices, crowds of people descending on the camp. Sometimes he is so slowed by heroin that he can barely get up or move. He can earn $2,000 to $3,000 in a single large smuggling operation but blow it in a day on heroin, which he likes to mix with cocaine. He shares his drugs with friends in a local mob called Los Osos, named after a billiard cantina where they drink.

Besides migrants, the camp has ten perpetual residents. Seven are addicts. They call heroin
la cura,
the cure.

A few at the campsite are Mexican criminals who have been deported by the United States. One is called El Lágrima, the Tear. He is tattooed with TJ, a symbol of the Mexican mafia; a teardrop, signifying a dead gang friend; and a spider-web, tucked next to his right eye.

Also among the permanent campers are several migrants who are stuck. One, a fellow Honduran, has lived on the river for seven months. He has tried to enter the United States three times. Every time, he has been caught. He has descended into depression and a life of glue sniffing. Each time he tried to cross, he says, he went alone. Enrique listens. They call Enrique El Hongo, the Mushroom, because he is quiet, soaking everything in.

Enrique clings to the camp, where he is protected. Staying with El Tiríndaro means the Los Osos bandits, who rob people under a nearby bridge and along the river, won't target him.

Los Osos, once a group of neighborhood children who played along the river, became a band of forty men who move drugs and people across the Rio Grande. They began as
pateros.
Then they armed themselves with revolvers and knives. Anyone who wanted to cross this stretch of river had to pay Los Osos. Other
pateros
were threatened with death when they tried to cross clients in the area. Half of all migrants found “drowned,” autopsies reveal, died before ever entering the water, says Nuevo Laredo human rights activist Raymundo Ramos Vásquez.

Other smugglers undercut Los Osos's business in the 1990s by using different spots to cross migrants along the river. Los Osos turned to smuggling bales of marijuana. Turf gunfights broke out on the river with other local gangs—the Hommies, the Parque Morelos, Los Perros, the Chiquillos Boys, and Cuatro Vientos.

El Tiríndaro stuck with the less dangerous job of
patero.
Each week, he gives police officers who patrol the river a 10 percent cut of his earnings as a smuggler. The police show leniency toward anyone at the camp.

When the police arrive at the river, they ask Enrique for identification papers. They check his pockets for drugs. They help themselves to whatever change is there. Still, Enrique is spared the more severe shakedowns other migrants face. Leonicio Alejandro Hernández, thirty-three, says that four municipal officers approached him on the banks of the Rio Grande and said, “We charge a thousand pesos [$100] to cross this river.”

Hernández balked, and the officers lowered their price. “If you don't give us five hundred pesos, ten days in jail!” he says one yelled.

He says another warned, “Throw yourself into the river, and I'll kill you.”

Hernández says he paid them and swam away.

Octavio Lozano Gámez, the municipal police chief in Nuevo Laredo, acknowledges that of his 720 employees, “a small minority of police officers in the city have this problem of robbing people.” Lozano doubts, however, that even his corrupt officers would pick poor migrants to rob. “Any smart police would seek out someone with more money, gold chains, wristwatches.”

Because he is so young, everyone at the camp looks after Enrique. When he goes at night to wash cars, someone walks him through the brush to the road. When he leaves during the day, someone always yells, “Be careful.” They warn him against heroin. They offer tips on which parts of the city are thick with police, places he should not go. But leaving the camp scares him, and they give him marijuana to calm him down.

Car washing goes poorly. One night, he earns almost nothing.

At 9:15
P.M
., Enrique receives 2½ pesos for helping a woman in a small station wagon back up. Five minutes later, a woman in a blue dress arrives in a white Pontiac Bonneville.

“May I wash your windows?” She nods and walks toward the taco stand. Enrique wipes the front of the car, then the side windows, moving his hand, with its fingers splayed across the back of a rag, in quick, ever-growing circles. He walks around the car, wiping and wiping, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. He cleans inside, even the floorboards. The moon is out, but it is 90 degrees. Sweat trickles down his face. He must finish before the woman's tacos are ready. In minutes, he is done.

She returns, fumbles for her car keys, gets in, then puts two coins—3½ pesos—in his hand.
“Gracias,”
he says.

A man tips him for guiding him backward out of a parking spot. “I hope this helps you, boy.”

Enrique thanks everyone.

By 10
P.M
. he has accumulated only 10 pesos, about $1. He sits over the open top of his water-filled bucket to cool off. Between then and 4
A.M
., he scrambles after every car that pulls in. In eight hours, he makes 20 pesos.

The fifteen days on his meal cards pass quickly. Now he needs part of his money to eat. Every peso he spends on food cannot go toward the phone cards. He begins to eat as little as possible: crackers and soda.

Sometimes Enrique does not eat at all. He feels weak. Occasionally, local fishermen give him a fish they have caught. Friends at the camp share their meals. They offer scrambled eggs or a bowl of chicken soup. One teaches him to fish with a line coiled on a shampoo bottle. The line, fitted with a hook, has three spark plugs at the end to sink it. Enrique swings the spark plugs around his head, then casts toward the middle of the Rio Grande. The line whirs as it spools off the bottle. He hauls in three catfish.

Even El Tiríndaro is generous; the sooner Enrique can buy a phone card and call his mother, the sooner Enrique will need his services. When one of Enrique's meal cards is stolen, El Tiríndaro gives him the unexpired card of a migrant who has crossed the river successfully.

He knows that Enrique cannot swim, so he paddles him back and forth on the water in an inner tube to quiet his fears. When the river level drops, it exposes the lower branches of willows lining the banks. They are festooned with clothing that the migrants discard as they begin to wade out. Plastic bags, shorts, and underwear hang from the boughs like tattered Christmas ornaments. El Tiríndaro takes Enrique on the inner tube along the bank as he collects the clothing. They wash the clothes in the river, then sell them near the taco stand and hawk any inner tubes they find for 15 pesos apiece at a tire store. El Tiríndaro lets Enrique keep a T-shirt they find.

Enrique learns that El Tiríndaro is part of a smuggling network. He has partners in three safe houses on the U.S. side of the river, people who will hide migrants if Border Patrol agents are in pursuit. A middle-aged man and a young woman, both Latinos, meet him and his clients after they cross the river. Then they all drive north together, and El Tiríndaro walks his clients around Border Patrol checkpoints, giving wide berth to the agents. After the last checkpoint, El Tiríndaro returns to Nuevo Laredo, and the couple and others in the network deliver the clients to their destinations. The price is $1,200.

El Hongo listens as his campmates talk about dos and don'ts: Find an inner tube. Take along a gallon of water. Learn where to get into the river, where not. They talk about the poverty they came from; they would rather die than go back. Enrique tells them about María Isabel, his girlfriend, and that she might be expecting.

Enrique talks about his mother. He says he is extremely depressed. “I want to be with her,” he says, “to know her.”

“If you talk, it's better,” a friend says.

But it gets worse. He fears being attacked by bandits outside his circle of friends. He hears of atrocities: knives, a rifle to the chest, beatings with tree limbs, demands for shoes and money.

Migrants huddle around the San José church like cattle pressed up against a barn seeking protection from a cold winter chill. They share experiences. Gonzalo Rodríguez Toledo, twenty-three, from Nicaragua, was approached by two middle-aged men on the river by Enrique's camp. They put a knife to his chest and robbed him. Oscar Vega Ortiz, twenty-six, saw a man on a mule appear as he and four other migrants got ready to cross the river. The man pointed a rifle at his chest. “Your money or your life,” he told Vega.

Manuel Gallegos prepares to have his last meal at the church before returning home to Mexico City. That morning, he took most of his clothes and shoes off to cross the river. Bandits spotted him. Gallegos ran, but the bandits, cursing, caught up to him and beat him with a small tree trunk. Gallegos's breathing is labored. He hikes up his shirt. His back is red and raw. Several ribs are broken. He will not try to cross again.

One gang, Enrique knows, wants to harm him. Salvadorans with MS tattooed on their foreheads, the sign of the Mara Salvatrucha, hang out like dogs at the San José church, sniffing out robbery prospects. Unlike migrants, they wear new black Nikes. “I'll pass you across the river. Give me two hundred pesos,” they say to the unwary; then they take their clients to the riverbank and assault them. After robbing them, they tell the migrants to keep mum about what has happened or they will hunt them down and rape them.

The glue sniffer at camp tangles with them, and Enrique steps in. One Salvadoran covered in tattoos threatens to thrash Enrique. He is spared only by the intervention of a migrant MS from his old neighborhood back home.

But his luck with the authorities runs out. One afternoon
migra
agents come to the camp. They ask Enrique where he is from.

“I'm from Oaxaca,” Enrique says in the accent he learned as he passed through.

The agents pause. “What are you doing here?”

“Fishing,” Enrique says, trying to stay calm.

“You can't fish here. You have to leave. Get out of here.”