Enrique's Journey (15 page)

He let the migrant stay for an hour, until he was sure the coast was clear.

At María Auxiliadora, many church members, including its priest, have been intimidated by police officers for helping migrants. “If I see you doing this again, I'm taking you in,” the officers warn. “It is a crime to help Central Americans.”

Although humanitarian help is not against the law, this is not an idle threat, says Hernández, the church volunteer. Five church members have been arrested. None were charged, but that may have been due to their willingness to pay a bribe to buy their freedom, says Hernández. An entire family—a mother, father, and two sons—were taken in for giving three migrants a place to sleep. The police officers extorted 20,000 pesos from the family to set them free. Similarly, a church member, a taxi driver, gave five migrants a ride up the road. The state police freed him after he paid 30,000 pesos under the table, fearful that they might charge him with human trafficking.

Sometimes whole communities stand up to the police. Residents of El Campesino El Mirador, a railside hamlet nestled at the foot of a mountain, tell this story:

El Campesino El Mirador was policed by officers from nearby Nogales. One afternoon in late May 2000, a northbound freight train pulled onto a siding to let a southbound train pass. At that moment, police officers emerged from a bar by the tracks. Townspeople say the officers looked drunk. The police saw about fifty migrants on top of the stopped train and headed toward the freight cars to arrest them. Migrants jumped off and ran toward the mountain.

The police gave chase. Townspeople say the officers began to shoot. One bullet hit a Honduran girl, seventeen or eighteen years old, in the arm. She was eight months pregnant and said it was because she had been raped by a policeman in Chiapas.

The girl clawed her way up the mountain. After about one hundred yards, she reached a small concrete platform. On the platform stood a white cross. Panting and bleeding, she stopped, unable to go farther.

Three police officers caught up to her, grabbed her hair, kicked her, and beat her with their nightsticks.

“Leave me alone!” she cried. “You've already shot me. I'll lose this child.”

María Enriqueta Reyes Márquez, thirty-eight, of El Campesino El Mirador, climbed up to the cross. She says she could see that a bullet had splintered a bone in the girl's arm. “It's as if they were hitting a dog,” she recalls, her eyes brimming with tears. “They treat dogs better than that. They don't punish criminals, but they beat up these poor folks. Why? Why?”

Reyes says she demanded: “Stop hitting her.” She and about fifty other people encircled the girl and the cross. They turned on the officers. “Cowards!” “Why are you hitting her?”

Two of the officers ran down the hillside, away from the angry mob. Someone kicked the third in the buttocks until he ran as well.

Afterward, the townspeople found a local man dead in a ditch near the railroad tracks. They assumed that he had been killed when the officers began shooting. Now the people's rage boiled over.

The next day, five hundred residents of El Campesino El Mirador and two nearby towns marched to the city hall in Nogales, where all of the officers were from. They surrounded it. Some held rocks and sticks. They demanded the release of any migrants apprehended the day before—fifteen in all, some of whom were beaten.

Reyes, who had walked two and a half hours to Nogales, says she shouted at the mayor, “We are human. We should treat people in a humane way. It's okay to send people back. But they shouldn't shoot them, beat them this way.”

The people of El Campesino El Mirador told the mayor of Nogales to keep his police out of their town.

Samuel Ramírez del Carmen, director of the Red Cross in nearby Mendoza, Veracruz, confirms that his paramedics were sent to treat a pregnant migrant who had been shot by Nogales police officers and that protests did run the police out of town.

Local news reporter Julián Ramos Hernández says that eight police officers were ultimately fired over the incident. “The police were firing at the migrants,” Ramos says. “People were indignant.”

For a month, Reyes says, other migrants from the train stayed on the mountain, afraid to come down. Three times each day, people trudged up to the palm-studded ridge of the hill to bring them food and water. The police, she says, have not been back.

NEW CARGO

Enrique is hungry, but he fears that the half-dozen rolls from the food throwers might be all there is to his good fortune, so he stashes them for later. In little more than an hour, the train nears a town: Córdoba.

The cargo is beginning to change. It is valuable and more easily damaged—Volkswagens, Fords, and Chryslers. Security guards check the freight cars, catch every rider they can, and hand them over to the authorities. More important, says Cuauhtemoc González Flores, an official of the Transportación Ferroviaria Mexicana railroad, is the fact that if a migrant falls and is injured or killed, it costs $8 a minute to stop the train, often for hours, until investigators arrive.

A sewage stream appears by the tracks. Córdoba is getting close. The migrants finish their water, because it is hard to run fast holding bottles. They tie sweaters or extra shirts around their waists. Enrique grabs his bag of bread. About 10
P.M
., he smells a familiar cue: a coffee-roasting factory next to the red-brick station. As the train slows, he leaps and flees.

He eludes the station's security guards and eases to a walk. He sits on a sidewalk one block north of the station. Two police officers approach.

His odds are better if he does not bolt. He tucks his bread into a crevice. He swallows his fright and tries to look unconcerned.

The officers, in navy blue uniforms, walk straight up to him.

He does not move, even flinch. Cops can sense fear. They can tell if someone is illegal. You have to be calm, he says to himself. You can't look afraid or hide. You have to look right at them.

The police do not bear gifts. They pull out pistols. “If you run, I'll shoot you,” one says, aiming at Enrique's chest. They take him and two younger boys, sitting nearby, to a cavernous railroad shed, where seven other officers are holding twenty migrants. It is a full-scale sweep.

They line up the migrants against a wall. “Take everything out of your pockets.”

Only a bribe, Enrique knows, will keep him from being deported back to Central America. He has 30 pesos, about $3, that he earned lifting rocks and sweeping near the tracks in Tierra Blanca. He had briefly gotten off the train in Tierra Blanca, in part so he could earn enough to try to buy his freedom if he was caught by the police. Some officers will let you go for 20 pesos. Others demand 50—or more—and then turn you over to
la migra
to be deported anyway. Now he prays the coins he has will be enough.

One officer pats him down and says to empty his pockets.

Enrique drops his belt, a Raiders cap, and the 30 pesos. He glances at his fellow migrants. Each is standing behind a little pile of belongings.

“
¡Sálganse! ¡Váyanse, ya!
Get out! Leave!”

He will not be deported. But he pauses. He screws up his courage. “Can I get my things back, my money?”

“What money?” the officer replies. “Forget about it, unless you want to have your trip stop here.”

Enrique turns his back and walks away.

Even in Veracruz, where strangers can be so kind, the authorities cannot be trusted. The chief of state police in nearby Fortín de las Flores will not comment on the incident.

Exhausted, Enrique retrieves his bag of bread, climbs onto a flatbed truck, and sleeps. At dawn, he hears a train. He trots alongside a freight car and clambers aboard, holding his bread.

THE MOUNTAINS

The tracks, smoother now, begin to climb. It grows cooler. The train passes sixty-foot-tall stalks of bamboo. It crosses a long bridge over a deep canyon. It rolls through putrid white smoke from a Kimberly-Clark factory that turns sugarcane pulp into Kleenex and toilet paper.

As he pushes north, Mexico changes. In Oaxaca, he rolled through cattle country. It was so hot, the tracks behind him looked like a squiggly line, warped by heat. It was so humid that green moss balls grew on the electrical wires by the tracks. Enrique passed a river that was a block wide. He was drenched in sweat. When the train slowed, the smell of perspiration washed over him.

In Veracruz, he rode through rows of silvery pineapple plants and lush fields of tall, thin sugarcane stalks that brushed up against the train. He saw sugar mill smokestacks and homes where people put day-old tortillas on their tin roofs to dry. All around him were swamps and mosquitoes. He had to watch closely for bees. He had heard that many are Africanized bees, and when smoke from the locomotive angers them, they swarm and attack migrants on top of the cars.

As he pushes north, the trains keep changing, too. Tracks are fastened to concrete ties, welded, and better maintained. The freight trains are longer and seem to glide more smoothly, roll more rapidly, and derail less frequently. Because there are more trains and because so many migrants have been hurt or detained back in Chiapas, fewer riders are on board. On some trains, Enrique sees only a dozen others.

In Orizaba, the train changes crews. Enrique asks a man standing near the tracks, “Can you give me one peso to buy some food?” The man inquires about his scars. They are from the beating he got on top of the train, a little more than a week ago now. He gives Enrique 15 pesos, about $1.50.

Enrique runs to buy soda and cheese to go with his bread. He looks north. Beyond a range of verdant mountains he sees the snow-covered Pico de Orizaba, the highest summit in Mexico. Now it will turn icy cold, especially at night, much different from the steamy lowlands. Enrique begs two sweaters. Before the train pulls out, he runs from car to car, looking into the hollows at the ends of the hoppers, where riders occasionally discard clothing. In one, he finds a blanket.

As the train starts, Enrique shares his cheese, soda, and rolls with two other boys, also headed for the United States. One is thirteen. The other is seventeen. Silently, Enrique thanks the food throwers again for the bread.

He relishes the camaraderie: how riders take care of one another, pass along what they know, divide what they have. Migrants will often designate one person to look out for trouble while the others rest. They give one another advice. In spots along the route where the train slows and migrants sprint from the shadows to board, reaching for the ladders, migrants riding atop the cars shout out if the train is going too fast.

“Don't do it! You'll get nailed!” they yell.

When Enrique lands an extra shirt or a tip about where to avoid the police, he shares. Other migrants have been generous with him. They have told him Mexican words they have learned. One offered a bit of soap when Enrique slipped into a shallow green river to bathe.

Enrique realizes that the friendships will be fleeting. Very few who set out together, including brothers, end up together. Often, migrants abandon an injured member of their group rather than risk being caught by the authorities. As he waits in Veracruz for a train to leave, a thirty-one-year-old Salvadoran recalls how he recently watched a man get his right leg cut off as he was trying to elude
la migra
at a train stop. The Salvadoran stripped off his shirt and used it to wrap a tourniquet around the leg. Then he ran away, fearful
la migra
would arrest him.

“Don't leave me!” the injured man cried out. The authorities said the man died later that day.

Often, between train rides, Enrique prefers to sleep alone in a tall clump of grass, away from other migrants, knowing it will make him less of a target. Still, camaraderie often means survival. “I could get to the north faster alone,” he figures, “but I might not make it.”

The mountains close in. Enrique invites the two boys to share his blanket. Together they will be warmer. The three jam themselves between a grate and an opening on top of a hopper. Enrique stuffs rags under his head for a pillow. The car sways, and its wheels click-clack quietly. They sleep.

The train enters a tunnel, the first of thirty-two in the Cumbres de Acultzingo, the Peaks of Acultzingo. Each tunnel is named for a state in Mexico. Migrants tick off the states they have passed—and the many they still have to go. Outside is bright sun. Inside is darkness so black that riders cannot see their hands. They shout,
“¡Ay! ¡Ay! ¡Ay! ¡Ay! ¡Ay!”
and listen for the echo. Sometimes the tail of the train hasn't left one tunnel before the locomotive dives into another. The freight cars creak as they turn the curves. Enrique and his friends sleep on. Back in the daylight, the train hugs a hillside. Below, a valley is filled with fields of corn, radishes, and lettuce, each a different hue of green.

El Mexicano is the longest tunnel. For eight minutes, the train vanishes inside. Black diesel smoke rises, hugging the tops of the cars.

It burns the lungs and stings the eyes. Some of the migrants bolt down the ladders, trying to escape the noxious haze. Enrique's eyes are closed, but his face and arms turn gray. His nose runs black soot. Engineers fear El Mexicano. If a locomotive overheats, they must stop. Riders spring for the arched exits, gasping for clean air.

Back outside, ice forms on the train cars. Migrants huddle between the cars or with strangers, seeking protection from the biting wind. Riders ache and shiver. Many don't have a blanket or a sweater. Some wear T-shirts. Their lips crack, and their eyes grow dull. They hug themselves. Three cram into the hole at the end of a hopper. To fit, they must sit on one another, hands across the chest, heads down. They pull their shirts over their mouths to warm themselves with their breath. When the train slows, they jog alongside to ward off the cold.

Some risk moving forward to the last of the train's three locomotives to press against the engine. Some stand in the warm plumes of diesel smoke. Others jump inside hoppers full of sand or grain, but only if they can find cars that are full enough that they will be able to crawl out. As night falls, some of the older migrants drink whiskey. Too much, and they tumble off. Others gather old clothing and trash and build fires on the ledges over the wheels of the hoppers. They hold their hands close to the fire, then press their palms to their frigid faces.