Enrique's Journey (9 page)

This is his seventh try, and it is on this attempt that he suffers the injuries that leave him in the hands of the kind people of Las Anonas.

Here is what Enrique recalls:

It is night. He is riding on a freight train. A stranger climbs up the side of his tanker car and asks for a cigarette. The man moves quickly, but Enrique is not alarmed. Sometimes migrants riding on the trains climb from car to car, trying to move forward or backward.

Trees hide the moon, and Enrique does not see two men who are behind the stranger, or three more creeping up the other side of the car. Scores of migrants cling to the train, but no one is within shouting distance.

One of the men reaches a grate where Enrique is sitting. He grabs Enrique with both hands. Someone seizes him from behind. They slam him facedown. All six surround him. Take off everything, one says. Another swings a wooden club. It cracks into the back of Enrique's head. Hurry, somebody demands. The club smacks his face.

Enrique feels someone yank off his shoes. Hands paw through his pants pockets. One of the men pulls out a small scrap of paper. It has his mother's telephone number. Without it, he has no way to locate her. The man tosses the paper into the air. Enrique sees it flutter away.

The men pull off his pants. His mother's number is inked inside the waistband. But there is little money. Enrique has less than 50 pesos on him, only a few coins that he has gathered begging. The men curse and fling the pants overboard.

The blows land harder.

“Don't kill me,” Enrique pleads.

“Shut up!” someone says.

His cap flies away. Someone rips off his shirt. Another blow finds the left side of his face. It shatters three teeth. They rattle like broken glass in his mouth. The men pummel him for what seems like ten minutes. The robbery has turned into blood sport.

One of the men stands over Enrique, straddling him. He wraps the sleeve of a jacket around Enrique's neck and starts to twist.

Enrique wheezes, coughs, and gasps for air. His hands move feverishly from his neck to his face as he tries to breathe and buffer the blows.

“Throw him off the train,” one man yells.

Enrique thinks of his mother. He will be buried in an unmarked grave, and she will never know what happened. “Please,” he asks God, “don't let me die without seeing her again.”

The man with the jacket slips. The noose loosens.

Enrique struggles to his knees. He has been stripped of everything but his underwear. He manages to stand, and he runs along the top of the fuel car, desperately trying to balance on the smooth, curved surface. Loose tracks flail the train from side to side. There are no lights. He can barely see his feet. He stumbles, then regains his footing.

In half a dozen strides, he reaches the rear of the car.

The train is rolling at nearly 40 miles per hour. The next car is another fuel tanker. Leaping from one to the other at such speed would be suicidal. Enrique knows he could slip, fall between them, and be sucked under.

He hears the men coming. Carefully, he jumps down onto the coupler that holds the cars together, just inches from the hot, churning wheels. He hears the muffled pop of gunshots and knows what he must do. He leaps from the train, flinging himself outward into the black void.

He hits dirt by the tracks and crumples to the ground. He crawls thirty feet. His knees throb. Finally, he collapses under a small mango tree.

Enrique cannot see blood, but he senses it everywhere. It runs in a gooey dribble down his face and out of his ears and nose. It tastes bitter in his mouth. Still, he feels overwhelming relief: the blows have stopped.

He recalls sleeping for maybe twelve hours, then stirring and trying to sit. His mind wanders to his mother, then to his family and María Isabel, who might be pregnant. “How will they know where I have died?”

Enrique's girlfriend, María Isabel, is sure Enrique hasn't really left Honduras. This is all a joke. He has probably gone to visit a friend. He'll be back any day.

A couple of weeks after Enrique disappears, his paternal grandmother, María, traverses Tegucigalpa to talk to Enrique's relatives and María Isabel. Has anyone heard anything from Enrique, who came to bid her good-bye before leaving for the United States?

It is no joke.

María Isabel knows Enrique longed to be with his mother. He spoke often of going north to be with Lourdes. Still, how could he leave her? What if he is harmed or killed crossing Mexico? What if she never sees him again?

She cries and blames herself for Enrique's departure. Then she prays. “God,” she whispers, “grant me one wish. Get Mexican immigration authorities to catch Enrique and deport him back to Honduras. Send him back to me.” It is a well-worn prayer in Honduras, especially by children whose mothers have just left them to head north.

María Isabel doesn't feel well, forcing her to quit night school. She loses weight. What if she
is
pregnant and Enrique dies trying to make it to his mother?

A friend offers a solution. The two of them will journey to the United States together. Maybe, the friend says, they will find Enrique as they make their way through Mexico. María Isabel has no money. Her friend, who works at a clothing store, says she has cash. She has saved 10,000 lempiras, roughly $570. It's not enough to hire a smuggler. But if María Isabel will accompany her north, the friend says, she will share it. “We'll be happier there. There, we'll have everything,” the friend says.

María Isabel has decided. They set a date to leave. She will go and find Enrique.

A MISTAKE

Enrique falls back asleep, then wakes again. The sun is high and hot. Enrique's left eyelid won't open. He can't see very well. His battered knees don't want to bend.

He grabs a stick and pulls himself up. Slowly, barefoot, and with swollen knees, he hobbles north along the rails. He sees a rancher and asks for water. Get lost, the rancher says. Enrique grows dizzy and confused. He walks the other way, south along the tracks. After what seems to be several hours, he is back again where he began, at the mango tree.

Just beyond it, in the opposite direction, is a thatched hut surrounded by a white fence. It belongs to field hand Sirenio Gómez Fuentes, who watches as the bloodied boy walks toward him.

At the one-room medical clinic, Dr. Guillermo Toledo Montes leads Enrique from the outside porch, where patients wait to be seen, to an examination table inside.

Enrique's left eye socket has a severe concussion. The eyelid is injured and might droop forever. His back is covered with bruises. He has several lesions on his right leg and an open wound hidden under his hair. Two of his top teeth are broken. So is one on the bottom.

Dr. Toledo jabs a needle under the skin near Enrique's eye, then into his forehead. He injects a local anesthetic. He scrubs dirt out of the wounds and thinks of the migrants he has treated who have died. This one is lucky. “You should give thanks you are alive,” he says.

Sometimes the doctor hands the most difficult cases to a hospital in Arriaga, a town one and a half hours away. Arriaga's Red Cross workers retrieve, on average, ten migrants per month who have fallen or been beaten up by bandits or gangsters. “They threw me off the train,” they explain. Some have been shot. Others have had their hands cut open trying to protect themselves from machete blows. Injured migrants who land in isolated stretches of the tracks and cannot move wait one or two days until someone finally walks by.

In Las Anonas, the Red Cross retrieves a seventeen-year-old Honduran boy who lost his left leg. They come for a woman who is convulsing. She has not eaten for six days and has fallen off the train.

They pick up three migrants mutilated by the train in as many days. One loses a leg, another his hand; the third has been cut in half. Sometimes the ambulance workers must pry a flattened hand or leg off the rails to move the migrant. Other times, the migrant is dead by the time they arrive. They aren't supposed to transport dead people. Still, sometimes, they take the body away, so coyotes and vultures won't eat it.

The Arriaga hospital chronicles a parade of misery. Two weeks before Enrique's March beating, a Salvadoran was found crumpled and unconscious and by the tracks, his left arm broken. In April, a Honduran broke his foot falling from the train. Another, assaulted by someone wielding a machete atop the trains, arrived with the ligaments in his right hand severed. In May, a Honduran had a fractured right clavicle. In June, a Nicaraguan had a broken right rib. In July, a seventeen-year-old Honduran lost both legs. In August, a Salvadoran arrived with his leg hanging by a bit of skin and muscle. In October, two Salvadoran youths on top of a train were electrocuted by a high-tension wire. One had second-degree burns over 47 percent of his body. In December, a Honduran arrived with both legs and ankles broken. Most often, says social worker Isabel Barragán Torres, migrants lose their left legs to the train.

Some amputees stay in the area, too ashamed to go back and let their families see what has become of them. To the many injured who do return to Central America, the hospital social worker pleads, “Tell other people there not to travel this way.”

“Why don't you go home?” the doctor treating Enrique asks.

“No.” Enrique shakes his head. “I don't want to go back.” Politely he asks if there is a way that he can pay for his care, as well as the antibiotics and the anti-inflammatory drugs.

The doctor shakes his head. “What do you plan to do now?”

Catch another freight train, Enrique says. “I want to get to my family. I am alone in my country. I have to go north.”

The police in San Pedro Tapanatepec do not hand him over to
la migra.
Instead, he sleeps that night on the concrete floor of their one-room command post. At dawn, he leaves, hoping to catch a bus back to the railroad tracks. As he walks, people stare at his injured face. Without a word, one man hands him 50 pesos. Another gives him 20. He limps on, heading for the outskirts of town.

The pain is too great, so he flags down a car. “Will you give me a ride?”

“Get in,” the driver says.

Enrique does. It is a costly mistake. The driver is an off-duty immigration officer. He pulls into a
migra
checkpoint and turns Enrique over. You can't keep going north, the agents say.

Next time, he prays, he will make it.

He is ushered onto another bus, with its smell of sweat and diesel fumes. He is relieved that there are no Central American gangsters on board. Sometimes they let themselves be caught by
la migra
so they can beat and rob the migrants on the buses. They move from seat to seat, threatening the passengers with ice picks and demanding everything they have.

Enrique's bus picks up other deportees at
migra
stations along the way. As Mexican officials call out their names, the migrants step out of large cells, some with open-trench toilets brimming with feces and urine. They are handed their belongings. Apart from the clothes they wear, all that many have left are their belts.

Some migrants realize, sitting on the bus, that they can take no more. They are out of money. They have passed through cold, heat, hunger. They slump in their seats, weak. Often something tragic has broken their willpower: a violent assault, a rape, or a fall from a train. They no longer believe it's possible to reach America.

Others have been on the bus dozens of times. They vow to keep trying, no matter what. They rest on the bus, recharging for the road ahead. They plot how they will try again, using knowledge gained from previous attempts.

There are twenty migrants on Enrique's bus, and they are depressed. They talk of giving up, heading back to El Salvador or Nicaragua. For long stretches, the bus is quiet, save for the rattle of the muffler.

In spite of everything, Enrique has failed again—he will not reach the United States this time, either. He tells himself over and over that he'll just have to try again.

THREE

Facing the Beast

E
nrique wades chest-deep across a river. He is five feet tall and stoop-shouldered and cannot swim. The logo on his cap boasts hollowly,
NO FEAR.

The river, the Río Suchiate, forms the border. Behind him is Guatemala. Ahead is Mexico, with its southernmost state of Chiapas.
“Ahora nos enfrentamos a la bestia,”
migrants say when they enter Chiapas. “Now we face the beast.”

Painfully, Enrique, seventeen years old, has learned a lot about “the beast.” In Chiapas, bandits will be out to rob him, police will try to shake him down, and street gangs might kill him. But he will take those risks, because he needs to find his mother.

This is Enrique's eighth attempt to reach
el Norte.
First, always, comes the beast. About Chiapas, Enrique has discovered several important things.

In Chiapas, do not take buses, which must pass through nine permanent immigration checkpoints. A freight train faces checkpoints as well, but Enrique can jump off as it brakes, and if he runs fast enough, he might sneak around and meet the train on the other side.

In Chiapas, never ride alone. His best odds are at night or in fog, when Enrique can see immigration agents' flashlights but they cannot see him. Storms are best, even when they bring lightning and he is riding on a tank car full of gas; rain keeps immigration agents indoors.

In Chiapas, do not trust anyone in authority and beware even the ordinary residents, who tend to dislike migrants.

Once the Río Suchiate is safely behind him, Enrique beds down for the night in a cemetery near the depot in the town of Tapachula, tucking the
NO FEAR
cap beneath him so it will not be stolen.

On previous trips, Enrique slept close to the train station, which is several blocks from the cemetery. Once, he rested in a clump of grass next to the dilapidated depot. Another time, he found an abandoned house nearby. He lay down a scrap of cardboard and used another piece as a blanket to keep mosquitoes away. From there, he could watch for trains leaving for the north. Missing one meant waiting two or three days for the next train.

But Enrique has been caught twice near the depot in police sweeps. The officers seal off surrounding streets and leave little room for escape.

The cemetery, Enrique decides, is a better bet. He is close enough to hear diesel engines growl and horns blare whenever a train pulls out but far enough to avoid police who hover around the station looking for migrants. Enrique hopes there will be a train tomorrow. He stuffs a few rags under his head for a pillow and slips into sleep.

“Wake up.” The warning is only a whisper, but Enrique hears it. The words are from a gangster sleeping next to him, on top of a mausoleum.

Five pickups have coasted silently up to the cemetery with their lights out, filled with municipal police. Now, just before dawn, the officers start moving in. “Spread out!” They stride through a tangled maze of pathways, fanning out among the graves, carrying AR15 rifles, 12-gauge shotguns, and .38-caliber pistols.

The cemetery is beautiful. The moon is yellow. The sky is midnight blue. Enrique can see stars around the ceiba trees shrouding the headstones. Crosses, entire crypts, are painted periwinkle, neon green, purple. Wind touches the tree branches, and they murmur in the gathering light. A bigger gust moves the vast limbs, and the sound builds slowly until the wind commands the branches to dance and the leaves to titter. The burial ground greets the sun with a symphony.

Police radios crackle. Enrique peeks over the edge of the mausoleum.

The graveyard might be beautiful, but it is filled with peril. A seventeen-year-old girl waiting for a train was dragged out among the headstones three years ago, then raped and murdered. The year before that, a young man's forehead was beaten in with a metal tube. Before that, a rag was stuffed into a young woman's mouth and she was raped, then beaten to death with stones.

But Enrique has found four members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, who use the graveyard as their hideout. On an earlier trip, he had met El Brujo, one of their comrades. They will provide protection, even in the darkest corners of this burial ground, where migrants pile excrement, old clothes, and sardine cans, where visitors leave candles burning on top of tombs, and where a witch comes to sacrifice chickens. Without these gangsters, Enrique would never venture here, behind the black iron gates.

In this migrant dormitory, he has washed his mouth with urine, a home remedy for his still aching, broken teeth. He has passed up graves covered by foot-high rectangular blocks, called
mesas,
with triangular headstones that would make good pillows. Instead, he has chosen the roof of the mausoleum, a one-room crypt holding the remains of four members of the Conchalitos family, the owners of a local restaurant. He and Big Daddy, fifteen, of the Mara Salvatrucha have settled on top. One stucco wall is tagged, in aerosol spray,
MARA SALVATRUCHA
and
EL YAGA
, a local leader.

But these words provide no protection against what he and Big Daddy see happening below. The police, in blue uniforms, are encircling them and thirty-odd additional migrants who have spent the night among the dead. Some of the migrants are trying to run, stampeding among the graves. Enrique knows that is futile; the last time he tried running from the police in the cemetery, he was caught and deported.

He and Big Daddy flatten themselves on the mausoleum roof.

Enrique tries not to breathe.

But some of the police look their way. Enrique and Big Daddy pretend that the officers do not notice them.

Then Big Daddy sees one of the policemen peer up over the edge of the crypt and straight at him. Big Daddy can't help himself. He giggles.

“Get down,” the officer says.

There is no escape. Enrique and the others are marched off to the Tapachula jail. “Name? Age? Where are you from?” They are led through four metal doors into a courtyard, then into three small cells. Stink wafts from toilet pits. Men and boys press against the metal bars, trying to get fresh air.

Finally, everyone is taken to a jail next door, run by
la migra.
The jail has several holding cells, rooms with concrete benches and iron doors. Each cell is packed. The agents take Enrique and about twenty others to a patio. As they mill about, a rumor circulates: a train is leaving at 10
A.M
.

“I can't miss it,” Enrique says to himself.

He sees an old bicycle leaning against the patio wall. Now he watches
la migra
carefully. When they are distracted, he climbs on top of the bicycle. Other migrants hoist him higher. He grabs a water pipe and pulls himself over the wall and onto the roof of an adjoining house. He jumps to the ground. His head pounds; it is still swollen from being battered.

But he is free.

Enrique runs back to the cemetery, a way station for migrants. At sunup on any given day, it seems as uninhabited as a country graveyard. But then, at the first rumble of a departing train and the hiss of air from its brake lines, it erupts with life. Dozens of migrants, children among them, emerge from the bushes, from behind the ceiba trees, and from among the tombs.

They run on trails between the graves and dash headlong down the slope. A sewage canal, twenty feet wide, separates them from the rails. They jump across seven stones in the canal, from one to another, over a nauseating stream of black. They gather on the other side, shaking the water from their feet. Now they are only yards from the rail bed.

On this day, March 26, 2000, Enrique is among them. He sprints alongside rolling freight cars and focuses on his footing. The roadbed slants down at 45 degrees on both sides. It is scattered with rocks as big as his fist. He cannot maintain his balance and keep up, so he aims his tattered tennis shoes at the railroad ties. Spaced every few feet, the ties have been soaked with creosote, and they are slippery.

Here the locomotives accelerate. Sometimes they reach 25 miles per hour. Enrique knows he must heave himself up onto a car before the train comes to an orange bridge that crosses the Coatán River, just beyond the end of the cemetery. He has learned to make his move early, before the train gathers speed.

Most freight cars have two ladders on a side, each next to a set of wheels. Enrique always chooses a ladder at the front. If he misses and his feet land on the rails, he still has an instant to jerk them away before the back wheels arrive. But if he runs too slowly, the ladder will yank him forward and send him sprawling. Then the front wheels, or the back ones, could take an arm, a leg, perhaps his life.

“Se lo comió el tren,”
other migrants will say. “The train ate him up.”

Already, Enrique has four jagged scars on his shins from frenzied efforts to board trains.

The lowest rung of the ladder is waist-high. When the train leans away, it is higher. If it banks a curve, the wheels kick up hot white sparks, burning Enrique's skin. He has learned that if he considers all of this too long, he will fall behind—and the train will pass him by. This time, he trots alongside a gray hopper car. He grabs one of its ladders, summons all of his strength, and pulls himself up. One foot finds the bottom rung, then the other.

He is aboard.

Enrique looks ahead on the train. Men and boys are hanging on to the sides of tank cars, trying to find a spot to sit or stand. Some of the youngsters could not land their feet on the ladders and have pulled themselves up rung by rung on their knees, which are bruised and bloodied.

Suddenly, Enrique hears screams. Three cars away, a boy, twelve or thirteen years old, has managed to grab the bottom rung of a ladder on a fuel tanker, but he cannot haul himself up. Air rushing beneath the train is sucking his legs under the car. It is tugging at him harder, drawing his feet toward the wheels.

“Pull yourself up!” a man says.

“Don't let go!” another man shouts. He and others crawl along the top of the train to a nearby car. They shout again. They hope to reach the boy's car before he is so exhausted he must let go. By then, his tired arms would have little strength left to push away from the train's wheels.

The boy dangles from the ladder. He struggles to keep his grip. Carefully, the men crawl down and reach for him. Slowly, they lift him up. The rungs batter his legs, but he is alive. He still has his feet.

GETTING ABOARD

There are no women on board the train today; it is too dangerous. There are several children, some much younger than Enrique. One is only eleven. He is among the 20 to 30 percent of those boarding the trains in Tapachula who are fifteen or under, by estimate of Grupo Beta, a government migrant rights group in Chiapas. This eleven-year-old tells Enrique that he, too, was left behind with his grandmother in Honduras. He, too, is going alone to find his mother in the United States. He tells Enrique that he is frantic to see her.

Enrique has encountered children as young as nine. Some speak only with big brown eyes or a smile. Others talk openly about their mothers: “I felt alone. I only talked to her on the phone. I didn't like that. I want to see her. When I see her, I'm going to hug her a lot, with everything I have.”

Enrique guesses there are more than two hundred migrants on board, a tiny army of them who charged out of the cemetery with nothing but their cunning. Arrayed against them is
la migra,
along with crooked police, street gangsters, and bandits. They wage what a priest at a migrant shelter calls
la guerra sin nombre,
the war with no name. Chiapas, he says, “is a cemetery with no crosses, where people die without even getting a prayer.” A 1999 human rights report said that migrants trying to make it through Chiapas face “an authentic race against time and death.”

All of this is nothing, however, against Enrique's longing for his mother, who left him behind eleven years ago. Although his efforts to survive often force her out of his mind, at times he thinks of her with a loneliness that is overwhelming. He remembers when she would call Honduras from the United States, the concern in her voice, how she would not hang up before saying, “I love you. I miss you.”

Enrique considers carefully. Which freight car will he ride on? This time he will be more cautious than before.

Boxcars are the tallest. Their ladders do not go all the way up.
Migra
agents would be less likely to climb to the top. And he could lie flat on the roof and hide. From there he could see the agents approaching, and if they started to climb up, he could jump to another car and run.

But boxcars are dangerous. They have little on top to hold on to. Inside a boxcar might be better. But police, railroad security agents, or
la migra
could bar the doors, trapping him inside.

Another migrant, Darwin Zepeda López, recounts what can happen in a locked boxcar.

Coyotes, or smugglers, mistook him for a paying customer and herded him along with their clients toward four boxcars, their doors open. Then they loaded him and about forty of the others into one of the cars. Zepeda, twenty-two, says he heard the metal doors slide, then clang shut. The smugglers locked them in from the outside, so the boxcar would not look suspicious. It was April 2000 in southern Mexico, and the outdoor temperature was climbing past 100 degrees. Inside, the car was turning into an oven.