Enrique's Journey (12 page)

Some migrants, after days without sleep, nap on their feet, using belts or shirts to strap themselves to posts at the ends of the hoppers. Others get off the train and stretch out across the rails, using one as a footrest and the other as a pillow. They believe it is the only way to catch sleep and not miss the next train—they trust that the vibrations from the locomotive will wake them. Some also believe, mistakenly, that snakes cannot slither over the rails, so they sleep there for protection. Exhausted, many sleep so soundly they do not hear the trains bearing down on them: the earsplitting horn, the screaming brakes. They lose limbs and are sometimes decapitated. By the time they see the migrants on the rails, train drivers know they don't have enough distance to stop the train. Many say they simply ask God for forgiveness and drive on.

Enrique allows himself to doze only on trains farther north, where the gangsters no longer control the tops of the trains. There, he jams his body into the crevice on top of a hopper, next to the trapdoors used to fill the car. Or he waits until the train rounds a curve, giving him a good view of all of the cars. He spots a boxcar with its door open. When the train slows, he jumps off and races to the boxcar, jumping inside for a quick nap.

In Chiapas, most train riders struggle to stay awake. Dagoberto Hernández Aguilar uses the memory of his first train ride to stay up. Two teenagers on top of a nearby boxcar dozed. The train suddenly lurched forward. The two slid off. He is not sure if they survived. He chants one sentence to himself, over and over, as he rides north: “It could have been me.” Migrants take amphetamines, slap their own faces, do squats, talk to one another about how much money they'll make in the United States, tell jokes, pour drops of alcohol into their eyes, and sing. At 4
A.M
. the train sounds like a chorus.

Today, Enrique is terrified of another beating. Every time someone new jumps onto his car, he tenses. Fear, he realizes, helps to keep him awake, so he decides to induce it. He climbs to the top of the tank car and takes a running leap. With arms spread, as if he were flying, he jumps to one swaying boxcar, then to another. Some have four- to five-foot gaps. Others are nine feet apart.

The train passes into northern Chiapas. Enrique sees men with hoes tending their corn and women inside their kitchens patting tortillas into shape. Cowboys ride past and smile. Fieldworkers wave their machetes and cheer the migrants on:
“Qué bueno!”
Mountains draw closer. Plantain fields soften into cow pastures. Enrique's train slows to a crawl. Monarch butterflies flutter alongside, overtaking his car.

As the sun sets and the oppressive heat breaks, he hears crickets and frogs begin their music and join the migrant chorus. The moon rises. Thousands of fireflies flicker around the train. Stars come out to shine, so many they seem jammed together, brilliant points of light all across the sky.

The train nears San Ramón, close to the northern state line. It is past midnight now, and the judicial police are probably asleep. Train crews say this is where the police stage their biggest shakedowns. One conductor says the officers, fifteen at a time, stop the trains. They grab fleeing migrants by their shirts. The conductor has heard them say, “If you move, I'll kill you. I'll break you in two.” Then, “Give us what you've got, or we send you back.”

At nearby Arriaga, the chief of the judicial police, or Agencia Federal de Investigación, denies that his agents stop trains in San Ramón and rob migrants. The chief, Sixto Juárez, suggests that any robbing is done by gangsters or bandits who impersonate judicial officers.

Enrique has been caught here before. He had taken his shoes off to dry blistered feet. Barefoot, he couldn't outrun the police. Today, his feet are still damp from his race around La Arrocera. But he has left his shoes on, ready to bolt.

Enrique greets the dawn without incident. The stars recede. The sky lightens behind the mountains to the east, and mist rises off the fields on both sides of the tracks. Men trot by on burros with tin milk containers strapped to their saddles, starting their morning deliveries.

Enrique figures that one in ten migrants makes it this far. Mario Campos Gutiérrez, supervisor of Grupo Beta Sur, estimates that half eventually get here—after repeated attempts. One migrant says, “I've done the most difficult part.” Another: “When I get to this point, I begin to sing hallelujah.”

Enrique puts Chiapas behind him. He still has far to go, but he has faced the beast eight times now, and he has lived through it. It is an achievement, and he is proud of it.

DEVOURED

Many migrants who first set out on the train with Enrique have been caught and deported. Others have fared worse; they are left broken by Chiapas. These migrants don't talk of The Pilgrim's Train, or of The Iron Horse. They have another name for the train:
El Tren Devorador.
The Train That Devours.

At the rate of nearly one every other day, the Red Cross estimates, U.S.-bound Central American migrants who ride freight trains lose arms, legs, hands, or feet. The estimate, offered by Martin Edwin Rabanales Luttman, chief of training for the Red Cross ambulance corps in Tapachula, is for the Mexican state of Chiapas alone. It does not count those who die instantly when they are cut in half or decapitated.

They fall from the trains for a variety of reasons. Some fall asleep and roll off; others are thrown by the street gangs who control the train tops. Because the migrants try to fool authorities and pass themselves off as Mexican, they carry no identification. If they die, their bodies are lowered, nameless, into common graves. In Tapachula, they end up down a hole in the cemetery with fetuses and stillborn babies.

At Arriaga, in northern Chiapas, snapshots of the dead are placed in a black book on Police Chief Reyder Cruz Toledo's desk. Some pictures are so new that he hasn't pasted them in yet.

In most photos, the eyes are open.

The chief keeps the book handy, hoping someone will identify the bodies. No one, he says, ever comes to look.

Carlos Roberto Díaz Osorto, seventeen, of Honduras, had almost crossed Chiapas. Carlos lies in bed number 1 of the trauma unit at Hospital Civil in the town of Arriaga in southern Mexico. Four days before he was brought in, Carlos had seen a man get both legs cut off by a freight train. But he had pushed fear out of his mind. He was going to the United States to find work.

At a curve near Arriaga, where the trains brake, Carlos raced alongside, asking himself, “Should I get on or not?” His cousins grabbed on to the sixth car from the end. Carlos panicked. Would he be left behind?

The train came to a bridge. Carlos did not give up. He crossed the span, jumping from one railroad tie to another. His shoelaces were loose. His left shoe flew off. Then his right shoe. He reached for a ladder on a fuel tanker, but the car was moving too fast, and he let go. He grabbed a railing.

The tanker jerked hard. Carlos held on, but he could feel air rushing beneath the car, sucking his legs in, close to the wheels. His fingers uncurled. He tried to bounce his feet off the wheels and push away. But as he let go, the air pulled him in. The wheels flattened his right foot, then sliced through his left leg above the knee.

“Help me! Help me! It hurts!” he screamed. He began to pant, to sweat, to ask for water, not sure anyone could hear him.

Paramedics from the Mexican Red Cross found him lying by the tracks. He had lost nearly a third of his blood, but the hot rails had cauterized many of his arteries. The medics applied two tourniquets. A doctor cut his bones, then sealed each artery and vein. He stretched skin over the openings and sutured them shut. Sometimes there are no drugs available to stave off infection, but Carlos was lucky. The Red Cross located some penicillin.

Many migrants who lose limbs to the train end up back in Tapachula, a dozen blocks from the depot where they first boarded the train, at the Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd. The shelter director, Olga Sánchez Martínez, tries to heal migrants left deeply wounded by the beast.

Olga is a petite middle-aged woman with silky black hair that touches her hips and a simple white rosary strung around her neck. She is always in motion, impatient to find solutions to problems. She buys blood and medicine so migrants won't die. She nurses them until they can be taken back home. “No one tells me something can't be done. Everything can be cured. Nothing is impossible,” Olga says.

Says the hospital surgeon, José Luis Solórzano, “Without her, a lot of patients would have died.”

At the hospital, almost all tell Olga they wish the beast would have killed them rather than leave them like this. They seethe. They curse God. Why didn't he protect them? They curse Olga. Their eyes speak fear. Who will ever marry them like this? How will they ever work, much less till a field again? “Let me die,” they say, pushing Olga away. They tell her not to dress their stumps and wounds. They refuse to eat. Some try to hang themselves.

She perches on a corner of their hospital beds. She strokes their hair. She tells them that God has spared them for a reason. “If he wanted, he could have killed you. But he didn't. He left your eyes open,” she says. When you are in this much pain and despair, she tells them, there is only one place to find strength. “God has a plan for you,” she says. “You will learn to live—in a different way.”

Then she tells them a story about herself.

When I was seven, she begins, I had an intestinal disease that went untreated for lack of money to buy medicine. It wrecked havoc on my insides. From then, off and on, I was gravely ill. At eighteen, I temporarily went blind and mute and had boils on my arms. My hair fell out. For thirty-eight days, I lay in a coma—sixty-six pounds of skin and bones. A year later, when I was well enough to work at a tortilla factory, a machine tore two fingertips off my left hand. She holds out her hand to the migrant. Plagued by constant stomach pain, so weak I couldn't get out of bed for months at a time, she tells them, I tried to slit my wrists.

In 1990, a doctor told me I had cancer and months left to live. I had two small children who would be left with my husband, who was once a womanizing alcoholic.

I was never very religious, but that day I went to church. I kneeled. I prayed. “They say there is a God. Why don't you cure me? Let me see my children grow, if only a little bit?” I made a pact: heal me, and I will help others.

The migrants listen.

She tells them she studied the Bible. It told her to help the weak, the hungry. She began visiting patients at a local public hospital. One year later, she saw a thirteen-year-old Salvadoran boy who had lost both legs trying to board a train. She walked home in tears. How, she asked God, could he be so cruel? The hospital pushed the penniless migrant out before he was healed. Olga brought the boy to recuperate at her humble home. Three days later, there was another young Salvadoran at the hospital who had lost both arms. “Don't feel alone. I will help you,” she told him. She brought him home, too.

She taught herself, watching doctors, how to dress their wounds. Soon she had twenty-four migrants at home, so many she could barely open her front door. She moved the furniture outside so everyone could fit. Olga's husband helped dress and wash boys without arms. Olga begged money for food, medicine, and wheelchairs and to get migrants home. In 1999, she opened a shelter for injured migrants in a tiny former tortilla factory someone lent her.

As she finishes, she leans forward. She tells them she has never had a serious illness since she made her pledge in church that day. “God,” she says, “has never left me alone.”

She reaches out with her mangled hand. “God needs you. He doesn't need you with all your limbs. He needs your heart. You have much to give.”

She confesses it has not been easy. Each day, at least one new wounded migrant passes through the shelter's lime green doors. They are logged into an intake book with their names and notations on which body parts they are missing or how they were otherwise injured. She has treated more than 1,500 wounded migrants since the shelter opened. It is a never-ending stream. Those who don't fit in the four bedrooms' fifteen beds sleep in a long hallway on the floor.

She works for free, from dawn until late at night, seven days a week, to obtain money for food, units of blood, medicine, prostheses, and a scrap of land to build a permanent shelter. She sells tacos, pork rinds, cakes, chopped fruit, and donated bread in front of the hospital. Occasionally, a few churches in Chiapas let her solicit donations. She goes from car to car, begging, with a picture of a mutilated migrant she's trying to help and the prescription she must fill. People often tell her she's crazy to help foreigners who rob and murder and that she should help Mexicans instead.

Each Sunday she rises at 4
A.M
. to head up into the mountains to a spot near an outdoor market. There, she sells used clothes people donate. It is still dark when she arrives. She dumps six big bags of used clothes onto the narrow sidewalk. She neatly lines up little bags of beans, sugar, and laundry soap—items a local grocery store donates because the packages are damaged and cannot be sold. When customers pause by the big pile of clothes, Olga madly paws through it, holding up items, hoping something will catch their fancy.

“Clothes for one, two pesos!” she yells.

A ragtag group helps her: the owner of a local hotel, a fertilizer salesman, a woman who sells children's clothing, a hardware store operator. A recovering alcoholic drives her around in his rickety truck. Together, they take injured migrants back to their hometowns in Central America when going by bus isn't feasible. A private doctor donates his time to reconstruct a boy's foot if Olga provides the materials for the operation. Olga and a church friend, Marilú Hernández Hernández, beg outside seven churches in five different towns. If a migrant is bleeding to death and there is no money to buy blood, they go to the tracks, even in the middle of the night, and plead for migrants to give theirs for free.