Darkening days in Juarez
Many fear Mexican city's drug violence puts nation at risk of collapse
By DUDLEY ALTHAUSCopyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Mexican troops patrol Ciudad Juarez, near the bridge that leads to El Paso, last year. In 2008, almost a third of the gangland murders in Mexico took place in Juarez.Resources
CITY UNDER SIEGE
Facts and figures about the violence plaguing the Mexican border city of Juarez:
80: Estimated number of murders in Juarez through the first three weeks of 2009.
10: Number of people found murdered in Juarez on one day (Jan. 14) of this year.
1,600:: Approximate number of murders in Juarez in 2008, almost one-third of the country’s 5,400 gangland-style slayings last year.
500: Estimated number of gangs in and around Juarez.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — In this carnage-racked border city of 1.3 million, more than 80 murders have been clocked in the past three weeks, and kidnappings, extortions, robberies and rapes further bedevil an already rattled population.
So far, the new year looks to be bringing as much, if not more, havoc than the last.
“Walking in the streets of Juarez is an extreme sport,” said political scientist Tony Payan, an expert on border violence, repeating a grim quip making the rounds.
Though little more than 1 percent of Mexico’s 105 million population lives in Juarez, it accounted for almost one-third of the country’s nearly 5,400 gangland murders last year, according to the federal government. And with President Felipe Calderon’s war on the country’s powerful drug syndicates unlikely to abate, this city bordering El Paso looks to remain a prime battleground.
Some U.S. security experts warn that Mexico teeters on meltdown — of being a “failed state.” Mexican leaders shrug off the notion, but Juarez’s criminal chaos wails like a siren before an approaching storm.
“Those of us on the border are evidence of how raw things can get,” said Lucinda Vargas, a former World Bank official who heads the Juarez Strategic Plan, a think tank. “There is not a corner of the city that escapes the effects of crime.”
Beyond gangsters
Once contained largely to the gangsters themselves, the mayhem has become generalized.
Consider Tuesday, alone:
• • Authorities recovered the decapitated head of a police chief from a town just downriver. Three other heads stuffed into a cooler were left on the steps of a city hall in a neighboring village.
• • Two state police detectives were shot to death in their patrol truck in a downtown Juarez parking lot.
• • A Juarez traffic police commander was kidnapped by unknown assailants.
And then consider that 10 people were killed the previous Wednesday, Jan. 14, including a 19-year-old law student who was a varsity baseball pitcher. He had been abducted 30 hours earlier from his family’s townhouse near the border.
The parents of the student, Jaime Irigoyen, said their son’s abductors wore army uniforms and spoke with southern Mexico accents, like many of the 3,000 soldiers patrolling the city’s streets.
A Mexican army statement denied soldiers were involved.
“That whoever deprived him of liberty were dressed in military-style uniforms in no way says they were soldiers,” the army said. “We call on the general public not to be fooled by criminal gangs.”
But members of the public said they saw men in uniform commit crimes. Witnesses said the eight gunmen who stormed a prayer service at a drug rehabilitation center last August and killed eight people were attired in military garb as well.
“They were dressed like soldiers,” Socorro Garcia, the Assemblies of God pastor who was leading the service, told reporters.
No arrests in deaths
As in most of the city’s more than 1,600 homicides last year, no one has been arrested for the clinic attack nor for the student’s killing.
“One can’t take refuge in a real rule of law, because it doesn’t exist here,” said Vargas, a Juarez native and reformer who nonetheless returns to El Paso each night.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Washington has made contingency plans to bolster U.S. border defenses if gangsters seize control of a city like Juarez.
And former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey recently warned that Mexico faces becoming a “narco state.” U.S. military planners have hypothesized that Mexico and Pakistan pose the greatest risk of sudden collapse.
Mexican officials have dismissed such talk as overblown.
“We are putting the house in order,” Calderon said in a recent speech. “Mexico has political stability.”
True enough, perhaps. People still line up to pay their taxes and vote at election time. Public utilities work much of the time. Police direct traffic, patrol neighborhoods.
Most of Mexico — and even much of Juarez — functions peacefully. But some fundamentals have gone dangerously awry.
Problems amid progress
International trade has built Juarez’s new highways, office towers and gated suburbs.
But too many of the city’s people watch that progress with their noses pressed to a window. Factory jobs start at less that $50 a week, and even that work is dwindling amid the global recession. Criminal enterprise — selling narcotics in the neighborhoods, or helping to smuggle drugs to U.S. consumers — pays far more.
Thousands of young men belong to the 500 street gangs that police estimate operate in Juarez.
The gangs ally with the larger drug syndicates and battle one another for turf.
“The young don’t have any long-range plans,” said sociologist Julia Monarrez, who studies the gender factors of Juarez’s violence, which also has claimed nearly 600 women since the early 1990s. “They are disposable.”
But amid the violence here, many Juarez residents with money and U.S. visas have slipped across the Rio Grande to El Paso.
As for those who remain, they shut themselves inside after sundown.
“In a micro sense,” Vargas said, “Juarez is a failed state.”
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
MEXICO
Juarez vigilantes: We'll kill a crook every day
By Angela Kocherga / 11 News
JUAREZ, Mexico—A vigilante group in Juarez is saying they plan to take out criminals themselves if the government can’t get the job done.
The group is calling themselves the Citizens Commando of Juarez.
They are promising to kill a criminal every 24 hours unless the government cracks down on the drug cartel violence that plagues the city.
Last year, hundreds of people perished because of the violence.
The Citizens Commando sent out a ten-part manifesto giving the government until July to take action.
The mayor of Juarez said he doesn’t know if the group will actually carry out their theat.
He is asking citizens to be patient with crime-fighting efforts.
By Angela Kocherga / 11 News
JUAREZ, Mexico—A vigilante group in Juarez is saying they plan to take out criminals themselves if the government can’t get the job done.
The group is calling themselves the Citizens Commando of Juarez.
They are promising to kill a criminal every 24 hours unless the government cracks down on the drug cartel violence that plagues the city.
Last year, hundreds of people perished because of the violence.
The Citizens Commando sent out a ten-part manifesto giving the government until July to take action.
The mayor of Juarez said he doesn’t know if the group will actually carry out their theat.
He is asking citizens to be patient with crime-fighting efforts.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
U.S. Marines tossed from Tijuana
LOS ANGELES — For tens of thousands of U.S. Marines in Southern California, new orders from the brass amount to: Baghdad si, Tijuana no.
Citing a wave of violence and murder in Mexico, the commanding officer of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Pendleton has made the popular military "R&R" destinations of Tijuana and nearby beaches effectively off-limits for his Marines.
The order by Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland restricts travel into Mexico by the 44,000 members of the unit, many of whom have had multiple tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and other combat zones under their belts — or are there now.
The limits were first put in place for the Christmas holiday. Last week the commander extended the order indefinitely, said Mike Alvarez, civilian public information officer for the unit at Camp Pendleton.
"The situation in Mexico is now more dangerous than usual," he said. "The intent is just to look out for the Marines' safety and well-being."
Citing a wave of violence and murder in Mexico, the commanding officer of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Pendleton has made the popular military "R&R" destinations of Tijuana and nearby beaches effectively off-limits for his Marines.
The order by Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland restricts travel into Mexico by the 44,000 members of the unit, many of whom have had multiple tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and other combat zones under their belts — or are there now.
The limits were first put in place for the Christmas holiday. Last week the commander extended the order indefinitely, said Mike Alvarez, civilian public information officer for the unit at Camp Pendleton.
"The situation in Mexico is now more dangerous than usual," he said. "The intent is just to look out for the Marines' safety and well-being."
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
El Tren de la Muerte
"El Tren de la Muerte" written by Megan Feldman originally appeared in the Dallas Observer, July 26, 2007.
Elias dangles the dead iguana by the tail. His friends close in around him, watching hungrily. With a knife he slices through scaly green skin and peels it back to reveal bloody meat, dark red and glistening in the sun. Working quickly, he carves the lizard into sections—head, front and back legs, upper and lower torso—and drops the parts in a pan. Then he places it over the fire they've made near the train tracks. Sweat trickles down his forehead, stinging his eyes. The men are quiet while they wait for the lizard to cook. Sometimes they sing and tell stories, but for now they're too hot and hungry. They sit and watch the fire.
For three days they've been camped here, in the jungle of southern Mexico, about 40 miles from the Guatemalan border in a town called Tenosique. Hundreds of people sprawl in the dirt along the tracks. Many are young men, shirtless in the sticky heat, wearing tattered Nikes and grimy backpacks. But there are women and children too, teenage girls with painted-on jeans and mothers balancing kids on their hips. They lounge on pieces of cardboard and plastic, squat on porches, smoke in the awnings of makeshift storefronts. They wait.
Elias, a 25-year-old with a boyish face and liquid brown eyes, is sick of waiting. In the past two weeks he's traveled some 400 miles from Honduras—from his parents and eight siblings, from debt, a failing business and a country where education seems a mockery because there are so few jobs. If he's lucky, he's a few weeks from Dallas, where his brother lives and where Elias hopes to find work. He wonders if he'll wind up spending another night in Tenosique. It's impossible to tell when the train will come, since there are no schedules, but he can't understand why it's taking so long. He pokes at the sizzling iguana with a stick. His stomach growls. And then he hears it. The whistle of a train. The men drop everything and run.
"¡El tren!" they yell. "¡Ya viene!" The train! It's here! Elias searches frantically for his backpack, which holds two changes of clothes and some food. He runs out of time and grabs the one thing he knows he can't afford to lose—a leather cattle lasso—and sprints toward the tracks. It's a stampede. Hundreds of Central Americans become a chaotic tangle of pumping legs and arms, a mass of humanity driven by the same insane goal: riding some 1,000 miles through Mexico on freight trains so dangerous they're known collectively as El Tren de la Muerte, the Death Train. They've all heard about the gangsters and bandits that lay in wait along the tracks, not to mention the corrupt federales known to beat and rob migrants, even throw them from the trains. But now, Elias' greatest fear is the train itself, La Bestia, as some call it. The Beast. Over the past few days, villagers have cautioned him. "Go back to your country," urged old men, shopkeepers, women selling tortillas. "It's too dangerous." They told of migrants decapitated, sucked under the train, limbs severed. "Se los comio el tren," they'd say, "The train ate them up."
Elias is terrified of losing a leg or, worse, getting cut in half. But the alternative is just as bad: going home empty-handed to face the bill collectors threatening to take everything he's worked for. No, he won't turn back. Not after busing through Guatemala and trekking through the jungles and mountains of southern Mexico. Not after the ordeal in Chiapas, on the path from La Arrocera.
With $300 stashed in his shoes, he runs alongside the boxcars looking for a ladder. Men and boys are already hoisting themselves up onto the cars. He has to jump soon, before the train picks up more speed. Wait too long, and he could get yanked off balance and sucked underneath.
Gasping, he sprints harder and spots a ladder at the front end of a rounded black gasoline car. He reaches out with his left arm, then his right. He grabs a metal rung and pulls. At last, he says to himself, I'm going to El Norte.
Gloria Valdez Salas guns the engine of her orange Silverado pickup, speeding through ramshackle neighborhoods and onto the highway outside Tenosique. Salas is the local coordinator of Grupos Beta, a government safety patrol charged with protecting migrants. As a former army nurse and the Beta boss here, where Elias first jumped the train eight months earlier, she spends her time negotiating with authorities, chasing trains, responding to accidents that have left people dead or disfigured and handing out water to dehydrated migrants, many of whom are on their way to Texas.
When she pulls up alongside the train tracks on this June morning, I jump out of the back of the truck and follow her, grabbing my notebook and a bottle of water. I've come to Mexico to retrace parts of Elias' journey, to understand why massive numbers of migrants are willing to risk their lives in such a brutal way and to learn, if at all possible, what it means for Texas, the United States and immigration reform. Recent media reports suggest more people have been traveling north in the hope that Congress will pass a comprehensive bill. A few of the migrants I meet mention the legislative efforts. One Honduran 20-something tells me he is certain he will be able to live legally in the U.S. once he crosses the border. "George Bush," he says solemnly, "will sign his permission."
The train is barreling toward us now, blowing its horn. About 50 migrants run alongside it, and more than 100 are already riding. They sit on the tops of the cars, stand on ledges in between them and hang from ladders on the sides. On top of one black boxcar, a group of men have managed to erect a crude fort of branches covered with a tarp for shade. "Get down!" Salas hollers to the men, who are smiling and waving. She gestures wildly with her hands. "Get down low!" The rumbling is too loud, and they continue waving until the train is past. Salas shakes her head. "There are electric wires up ahead," she says. "We have to rescue people who get electrocuted all the time."
The train is moving too fast for new migrants to get on here, so they'll wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, more people are arriving, stumbling and exhausted after the two-to-five-day trek from Guatemala.
People say Mexico's border with the United States is porous, but it's nothing compared to Mexico's southern border, where political notions of national boundaries are, for all practical purposes, irrelevant. Instead of desert, there is jungle, a tangled blanket of dense foliage cloaking flatlands, rivers and mountains. And every day the verdant landscape is crawling with people. Most are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, but others have come even farther, from South America and even Asia. They walk along roads and on worn pathways, hacking through vines with machetes and sleeping on the moist earth under trees and bushes. They cross rivers and walk extra miles to avoid border checkpoints. Not that there's much to the border. At the El Ceibo crossing into Mexico from Guatemala, there's no checkpoint at all on the Guatemalan side and just a small Mexican immigration office with a few bored-looking agents outside.
By all accounts, the flow of migrants over Mexico's southern border has grown from a narrow stream 20 years ago to a mighty river, and while any numerical calculation undoubtedly falls short, official data from the Mexican government shows a 72 percent increase in the number of Central American migrants detained between 2002 and 2005. Each year nearly 300,000 Central Americans enter Mexico in an attempt to reach the U.S., according to the Mexican government's Center of Immigration Studies. About one-third of the migrants take the trains—the cheapest way to go, because bus travel requires money for tickets and a smuggler to pay off authorities along the way.
As financial distress increases in Central America, especially in Honduras, which wrestles with 25 to 30 percent unemployment, more people leave to join relatives or friends in the U.S. Of the migrants I meet in Mexico, at least 90 percent are Honduran, and many are headed to Houston and Dallas, drawn by Texas' booming economy. One Guatemalan man tells me he is on his way to Oak Cliff for a roofing job that is already set up. A middle-aged mother hiking through the jungle in a polyester blouse, skirt and black flats says she's left her five children with her mother and is headed to Houston to find work as a maid. Her name is Maria Gloria. As she speaks of leaving her children, ages 10 to 18, she fumbles with her hands, her face full of sadness. Since her husband left her she's been taking in laundry and cleaning houses, often the only option for women in Honduras because employers rarely hire women over 25. (They're considered too old and unattractive for retail jobs and not fast enough for factory work.) "You can't live on what you make there," Maria Gloria says in a soft voice. "I've heard lots of scary things about the trains, but I have to take the risk."
It's common for parents to leave children they can't afford to feed, promising to send money to the relatives caring for them. Others bring their children with them. I come across a couple with three kids, the youngest a boy who looks about 8 and wears a wooden rosary. Like a number of people I meet, they aren't sure where they are headed in the U.S. "Wherever God allows us to go," says the mother, a fair-skinned Honduran with a blond ponytail. I also meet a shy 21-year-old woman who looks about 16. She tells me she was nauseated on the long walk from Guatemala because she was three months' pregnant.
As the number of migrants on the trains has grown, so have the deaths, injuries and amputations, not to mention the violence unleashed against the foreigners by opportunistic bandits, corrupt authorities and vicious members of the Mara Salvatrucha, a Central American gang whose members have fled law enforcement crackdowns in their own countries and have set up bases in southern Mexico. When Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in January, he pledged to slow immigration across the southern border and stop the constant robberies, assaults, rapes and murders. Six months later, not much has changed.
I met Honduran newlyweds Giovani Acosta and Karla Hernandez at a migrant shelter in the church in Tenosique. They'd arrived early that morning and were resting on the floor after a harrowing night. As they walked through the jungle in the dark, out of water and drinking from cattle troughs along the way, three men in masks jumped out of the foliage. The men, holding guns and machetes, forced them to strip and lie face-down on the ground. They took the couple's last 100 pesos ($10), as well as their soap, cigarettes and even their shoes. The pair walked three hours barefoot until a storekeeper gave them sandals and some food. They were considering turning back. But Acosta, whose closely cropped curls and dashing smile make him look like a Latin Frank Sinatra, said he didn't know what he'd do if they went home. He's an electrician who struggles to find decent-paying jobs. "In Honduras, if you buy a pair of shoes, you go a day without food," he said. Hernandez, a short woman with full cheeks and dimples, knew she was lucky she wasn't raped. "When the man said go into the bushes and get down on the ground, I thought, 'Oh my God,'" she said.
Rape is so common on the migrant trail that many women making their way through Guatemala begin taking birth control pills or stashing condoms in preparation for what lies ahead. Salas, the Beta coordinator, says she once found a woman lying along the highway to Guatemala. The woman had resisted bandits who tried to rape her, and the men beat her, broke her left arm and used machetes to slash her legs to ribbons. In the end, she was raped anyway. Her friend, who didn't fight back, thought the woman might be dead and ran to town for help. "When we got there," Salas says, "she was in shock."
Salas has seen people lose both legs to the train—a teenager bled to death by the tracks in Tenosique just a couple of weeks earlier—but the memory of that poor woman has stayed with her. Along with the 6-foot-6 Honduran man whose legs were crushed by the train. He arrived with his friends at the Beta office in the back of a taxi. Salas opened the car door to find that they'd stuffed him in with his legs doubled over. "They were attached only by his pants and a bit of skin," she says. "I dragged him out, put him on the backboard—though he was too long for it—cut off his pants, pressurized the artery and got him to the hospital. He survived."
Driving with Salas along the highway from El Ceibo, we see a group of eight teenagers walking along the road ahead. When they see the truck, they duck under a barbed wire fence and sprint into a field, running for their lives. Salas pulls over and gets out. "Hey, we're Beta, we're here to help!" she calls after them. "Do you want some water?" The boys pause, then turn around and walk slowly back up to the road, out of breath.
They are Hondurans in their late teens, and they're on their way to Missouri. When I ask why, a tall guy with a blue bandanna around his head grins. "Because that's where all the pretty girls are!" His friends laugh. They take their water bottles and the pamphlets from Salas that list contact numbers for nonprofits, consulates and embassies, and keep walking.
When we get back into the truck, Salas is quiet for a long moment. She's still remembering the tall Honduran who lost his legs. "You see them in situations that should kill them," she finally says. "But they live a la fuerza—by force—by their determination to keep going."
Elias wakes to searing pain and the jarring metal-on-metal grind of the train. He'd used the lasso to lash himself to the ladder at the rear of the gasoline car, just above the steel connectors. Two nights of fitful sleep tied at the waist have left him with sharp aches in his back and neck. He's covered with mud churned by the whirring wheels below, and though some of the men riding nearby have shared water and food with him, there's no way to get rid of the grainy dirt that coats his mouth and sticks between his teeth. The temperature climbs to 95 degrees during the day, dressing him in a suit of sticky sweat and grime. His hair is matted in muddy clumps.
His mother would be horrified to see him now. He didn't even tell his parents he was leaving. When his brother left without saying a word three years earlier, Elias vowed he'd never end up in the same position. Unlike his younger brother, he had stayed in school. He planned to graduate and become an engineer. He never did, though. In Honduras, school isn't free, and attending requires money for supplies and uniforms. As he made his way through high school, he watched older friends with diplomas fail to find jobs in the fields they'd studied.
Elias ended up renting a stall in a local market and opening a cosmetics store, selling shampoos and lotions, ladies' face cream and Scope. He hired a woman to work the register, and for a while sales were good enough to begin building his own home, so he could move out of his parents' house. But then his luck turned. He'd just wanted a small house, but the men he hired built it way too big and spent too much money. Sales at the store started to tank; it seemed like all the small shops were going broke because they couldn't compete with the big stores. Soon Elias was drowning in debt. There was no way he'd be able to repay the $27,000 he owed with 12 percent interest—the bank would repossess everything. So he had one choice: Do what tens of thousands of Hondurans do each year—go north. When his friend Pedro, a truck driver in their hometown of Choluteca, asked him to come along and ride the trains, he said yes. It was the only way out, he thought, and besides, it would be an adventure.
Elias' mother cried and prayed for days after his brother, now a carpenter in Dallas, left for the U.S., so he told himself he'd call home when he was closer, past most of the danger. Now, tired and sore, he considers the irony of it all. He'd been sure he would show his parents and his nine siblings how successful he was, with his own house and business. And instead, here he is, bound like an animal to the ladder and praying that when night falls, he won't sleep through shouted warnings of a police checkpoint, or worse, fall prey to bandits or gang members. He prays he won't have to face another situation like the one he found himself in days before.
Elias, Pedro and two other Hondurans had been wandering in the jungle, lost, trying to find the right place to get the train. They'd entered Mexico in Tapachula, on the Pacific side near Guatemala, but because the train tracks had been washed away by a hurricane, they wound up walking eight days toward the Gulf, to Tenosique. Before they found their way, they came to an adobe house on the outskirts of a little town in Chiapas called La Arrocera. Elias didn't know it, but the isolated cattle town is notorious. It's known to be inhabited by locals who help authorities catch migrants. The madrinas, or godmothers, as these predatory villagers are called, often pose as migrants themselves in order to beat, rape and rob, and they're permitted by crooked officials to keep part of what they steal. Elias asked an old rancher who stood outside the adobe house if he had any food to spare. The man shook his head. "No," he said. "But there's a woman up ahead who can help you. You'll come to two houses, each on a hill. One is bad, and one is good." Elias stared blankly for a moment. "Well, which one is good?" he asked. "One is bad, and one is good," the man said again. OK, Elias thought, hopefully God will lead us to the good one.
Just as the man said, up ahead were two little houses. A pretty woman, around 40, came out of the one on the right and called down to them. "Muchachos, venga," she said. "Come on, boys—you need something to eat?" Elias and the others followed her into the modest home, where she dished out generous portions of beans, eggs and rice. As they devoured the food, Elias noticed the woman's three sons watching them. The oldest, who looked about 20, offered one of the migrants a Mexican ID. As his friend looked at the card, Elias discouraged him in a whisper. "Who knows who that is?" he told him. "It's probably some criminal—don't buy it." His friend ignored him and paid for the ID. A few minutes later, the woman's three sons emerged from a bedroom wearing boots and walked out the door. "They're going for soda," the woman said. Yeah, right, Elias thought, feeling his stomach sink. After they paid 50 pesos each for dinner and walked outside, he voiced his suspicions. "Get some rocks," he said. "These guys are going to show up down the road."
Sure enough, a few minutes later, the three brothers leaped out of the brush. The oldest one had a .22, the next youngest a machete and the smallest a large stick. "This is a robbery!" the oldest yelled. He shot at the ground, spraying mud from the recent rains. The migrants dropped their rocks. "Line up!" the gunman ordered. The migrants obeyed. "Now, lie down!"
As the others complied, Elias stood rooted to the ground. He refused to give up his money—how would he eat?
"Get down and give me your money!" the gunman demanded.
"I don't have any," Elias replied.
"I know you have some, I saw it in the house," the gunman said. He smashed Elias over the head with the .22. "Get on the ground!"
This time, head throbbing, Elias did as he was told. The two younger brothers were already rifling through his friends' clothes looking for cash. The gunman kicked Elias hard in the ribs and back, then yanked off his Nikes and looked inside for money. Luckily, Elias had tucked it under the insoles. He felt the gun barrel press into his forehead. It seemed like his heart was beating clear up to his ears. Was this it? Was he going to die here, in the mud in the middle of nowhere, without ever speaking to his family again?
Just then, footsteps sounded on the path behind them. The bandit straightened. "How many people are behind you?" he asked.
"Six," Elias answered, making it up.
"Are there women?" the man asked.
"Yeah, there are women," Elias lied. The cold metal lifted from his head.
"Get out of here!" the bandit yelled. Elias jumped up and ran. Instead of six, a group of some 40 migrants rounded the corner. The youths tried to rob them, but it was too large a crowd, and the migrants all ran down the road and toward the trains.
Elias and his friends walked with the group for another few days before finally arriving in Tenosique. A family who lived near the tracks let the young Hondurans use their shower and sleep in the front yard. One afternoon, Elias was killing time near the tracks when he noticed a 40-ish man on crutches. He was missing a foot. Elias nodded in greeting. "Where you headed?" he asked. "Same place as you," the man said. It turned out he'd slipped while pulling himself onto a train. He thought he was fine and started to get up, he told Elias, but then he noticed the bloody stump where his foot had been. He later woke up in the hospital. The man was determined to continue his journey, insisting he would hop the train again, crutches and all.
After the third day of riding tied to the ladder, Elias can't stand it anymore. He wants to find his friend Pedro, so he unties himself and climbs to the top of the train. Crouching there, he takes a breath and steadies himself before stepping over to the platform. There he stands holding the railing, wind streaming past his face and through his dirty hair. This is much better.
He walks over the top of the car, slowly at first. He leaps from one car to the next and traverses nine before spotting Pedro. His friend is standing on the top rung of a side ladder near two other Hondurans. Pedro smiles, surprised to see him. "I thought you got left behind," he says. They sit together on top of the boxcar. To pass the time, Elias sings. A lot of the migrants carry small Bibles, or a few pages with scrawled verses. Most wear rosaries. But Elias just prays, often in song. "So much I have with my Lord, so much I owe to my savior," he sings. "If I could repay his loving grace, I would give all my soul."
Tenosique, a cattle town recently dubbed the "Trampoline to America" by a Mexican newspaper, is defined by the trains. They mark the passage of time, and not just for migrants attempting to jump them. For emergency rescue crews, the passing of a train is like the alarm at a firehouse, the signal to slide down the pole and run to work. For Father Blas, the calm and philosophical priest who runs the migrant shelter behind the church, the sound means the arrival of broken souls. And for residents like Celia Gutierrez, who cleans rooms at a local hotel, a train whistle on the first Saturday of the month is an opportunity to be a good Samaritan by running out to the tracks with sandwiches and tortillas for the people riding the trains.
Most locals I talked to say they feel sorry for the migrants. Many call them pobrecitos, poor things, and wonder how the poverty in Central America could possibly dwarf their own. "We don't really understand why they go through all this to leave home," said one elderly woman who lives by the tracks. She gestured toward a little plank shack and barren yard, where a couple of pigs rooted in the dirt. "I mean, we're poor, but this is our home."
Not everyone in Tenosique is destitute, however. A few hours after seeing the group of Honduran teenagers on the highway, we have dinner at a bright, clean restaurant called Café Leyra. Housed in a bubble-like structure with glass walls, the place is full of Mexican families out for a Saturday night on the town, eating enchiladas and burgers, sipping fruit smoothies and milkshakes topped with whipped cream and cherries. Through the glass, my photographer friend spots a group of what look like teenage migrants shuffling by outside, heads down and backpacks strapped to their shoulders.
Meanwhile, the restaurant's entertainer for the evening steps onto a small wooden stage in front of our table. A short, mustachioed man, he plows through songs and jokes while donning various costumes, including a flowered lounge jacket and a black mariachi ensemble. He makes frequent quips about the town's status as a gateway to the U.S. "Who's going to America?" he asks, perched at the edge of the stage, gazing out at the diners in mock seriousness. The room fills with laughter, and he raises his voice. "Vamos, all of us. Let's all go to America!"
Elias is waiting for another train. He and his friends are now a few hours from Mexico City—they've come almost 500 miles from Tenosique and nearly 1,000 from Honduras. He's exhausted after days of riding and from leaping off the last train to hike around a police checkpoint. He looks down the tracks, hoping to see lights. Then he scans the crowd and his eyes fall on a familiar face from Tenosique. The man with the missing foot. Elias can't believe he's made it this far. He's about to say hello when he notices the man's red eyes and listless movements—he's piss-drunk.
Elias and Pedro soon catch a passing train. A couple of hours later, after two long weeks on the train punctuated by the adrenaline rush of jumping off to avoid officials, they arrive in Lecheria. An important point in the journey, it's a gritty Mexico City suburb named for the dairy town it used to be, before the pulsing sprawl of the world's second largest metropolis devoured it. This is where they must change train lines to go to San Luis Potosi, a city in north central Mexico some 200 miles from Texas. Once there, Elias hopes to find a smuggler to guide him to the borderland, which is thick with security, and through the desert that claims hundreds of lives each year. He has traveled some 550 miles in two weeks on the railways; if he's lucky, he has about 230 miles left on the trains.
Migrants up ahead shout warnings that the Lecheria station is coming up; they have to jump before they're spotted by police or rail security. Even after weeks of plunging off moving trains, Elias hasn't gotten used to it. He forces himself to leap, clenches his jaws against the pain as he hits the ground and rolls roughly over dirt and rocks. Feeling the sting of skinned elbows, he stands and surveys the landscape. There are smoke-spewing factories, warehouses and squares of farmland full of green grass and munching goats. He finds his friends ahead, dusting themselves off, and together they walk along the street by the station, past bodegas and tire shops and bars. Within an hour, they're inside a store chatting with a tall, pleasant-faced man in his late 30s. His name is Martin, and as he polishes off a beer, he invites the Hondurans home for dinner and drinks. They're welcome to sleep in his yard, he says. Elias pauses. Since that day in Chiapas, each time someone offers help, his stomach tightens. He looks hard at the man. Martin seems genuinely friendly, and Elias has a good feeling about him. Despite his fear, he chooses to trust it.
Martin tells them he's a guide and can secure their passage to Texas for $2,100 each, $1,000 up front. He leads them to his house and asks them what size shirts and pants they wear—he's noticed the tears and stains and caked dirt. He leaves and returns with a pile of clothes, tossing Elias a white button-up and size 34 dress pants. Later, Martin takes them to a nearby store. Elias, who doesn't drink alcohol, selects a Coke while the others line up to buy bottles of Corona. A tough-looking Salvadoran man walks in. He isn't covered with tattoos like the gangsters Elias has seen before, but he looks just as mean. From the moment he walks up to the counter, it's clear he has nothing but bad intentions.
"All Hondurans are motherfuckers," the man declares to the Honduran store owner.
"We'll see about that," the owner, a burly man in his 40s, replies, narrowing his eyes.
"I'm Salvatrucha, motherfucker," the man says, referring to the Central American street gang.
Elias attempts to defuse the tension. "Don't fight," he says. "We're all Central American."
The Salvadoran turns and lifts his shirt to show a machete strapped around his waist. "I don't give a shit," he says. "If this fight were with you, I'd have already slit your throat."
Without warning, the petite woman who's married to the owner darts out from behind the counter and unsheathes the gangster's machete in one swift motion. "You won't be fighting in here!" she yells, holding the machete in the air. Her husband is beside her now. For a moment the young man's face registers shock and confusion, but he says nothing and turns to leave.
Elias can't believe it—how is it possible that this man, a member of the legendary Mara Salvatrucha, was just disarmed by a tiny shop owner's wife? And it's not over. The store owner grabs the gangster by the shirt and punches him repeatedly in the face. When the man's legs buckle he drags him out front by the collar and leaves him in the gutter, throwing a few last punches. "Don't you ever come back here," he says.
The migrants watch, holding their drinks in silence.
There's a Spanish expression: "Todo se compra, Todo se vende." "Everything can be bought or sold." Perhaps nowhere is it truer than along the human smuggling routes through Mexico. Migrants are routinely beaten and robbed by cops and extorted by immigration agents. And as much as migrants depend on smugglers for at least part of the journey, it's difficult to tell which ones they can trust.
In Tenosique, I meet a muscular man with tattoos on his arms and a rosary around his neck. The migrants call him Laredo, which is stitched in white letters on his navy baseball cap. When I ask if he's made this trip before, he nods indulgently, as if I've asked if he can ride a bike. "I've lived in Austin, Boston, Kansas. I've entered the country 20 times. Crossing here isn't hard, it's getting across the border up there," he says, leaning casually on a long machete. I wonder if he is a smuggler, and later, Salas, the Beta coordinator, confirms my suspicions. "Oh, yeah—it's obvious he's a pollero," she says, using a common term for coyote.
Smugglers often pay train conductors to stop for migrants, and Salas has had her fair share of confrontations with the train companies. "Two weeks ago a woman was standing by the tracks, handing her 4-year-old to someone on the train before getting on herself, and because she didn't have money to pay, the driver pulled out and left her," Salas tells me. The horrified mother told nearby villagers, who told Beta, and soon Salas and her agents were racing after the train to rescue the toddler. The driver finally stopped after several hours, she says, and they returned the child to the mother.
As I listen to these stories, the U.S. Senate is about to abandon the first major immigration overhaul in 20 years. And in Mexico, where people are willing to risk a half-dozen terrifying attempts to cross the country on the Death Trains, where coyotes make a profit and officials turn a blind eye, the policy debate seems meaningless. As long as hundreds of thousands of people are willing to risk losing their limbs and their lives to come to America each year, few changes on the U.S. border will make a difference without serious efforts to create jobs in Central America and Mexico.
In Central America "you have a situation where a few families live extremely well, spend little on education and health care, pay little tax, and basically have unfulfilled obligations to their downtrodden," says George Grayson, a Mexico expert who teaches at the College of William and Mary. "The absence of Mexico's border certainly makes life more difficult for the U.S. and its law enforcement agencies, but there are steps we should be taking. We can't simply abandon our border; otherwise you'd have 25 percent of the world in the United States."
Back in Tenosique, on a Monday a little after 7 a.m., Salas calls our hotel. "¡Viene el tren!" she says. Minutes later we're running along the tracks. We cross a bridge over a waterway and come face to face with the Honduran teens we met the day before. They greet us with smiles and pose for the camera with tough-guy stares. The train has rounded a corner and chugs toward us, its headlights resembling enormous glowing eyes. "¡Camello!" yells the tall man in the blue bandanna, the one looking forward to the pretty girls in Missouri. "Come over here! Five on this side, five on the other!" They split and wait on each side of the tracks. The train is almost here. "Be careful," warns an older migrant. "If it's going too fast, there will be others." Russet, gray and white boxcars glide past with hordes of people standing on top. When the train is past, the 10 guys remain on the tracks. "It went too fast!" one says. They take off in a run, hoping the train will slow. We sprint after them. "¡Se detuvo!" one screams. "It stopped!" Dozens of people clamber onto the caboose, and I realize it was likely Laredo who paid off the driver. "Hurry, hurry, get on!" one man standing on the train yells to the running Hondurans. They make it just in time. All 10 climb aboard and the train moves forward, inching toward El Norte. I lean on my knees, catching my breath, and watch the waving teenagers grow small in the distance.
"Are you OK?" Elias' mother asks him as he stands at a phone booth. Friends of his have told her where he has gone.
"Yeah, I'm fine," he says.
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm fine, Mamá."
"Why did you leave like Marvin did, without telling me?"
"I didn't want you to worry." She agrees to wire him the $1,000 deposit for Martin, the coyote. She'll take it from the cosmetics store, another addition to Elias' debt. He'll continue north without Pedro, who doesn't have enough money to pay a smuggler and plans to take his chances on the train all the way to Texas.
The rest of the journey seems endless. From the beginning the trip has depended on luck, but riding the trains required hustle and cunning as well. Now, Elias feels helpless, packed like a 2-by-4 into a covered pickup with a dozen other migrants, including a 17-year-old who joins Elias for laughter and a series of dirty jokes. After what seems like forever, they climb out of the vehicle and swim across the Rio Grande near Laredo, then file into a small house in the Texas desert. Martin went home before they crossed the river, so Elias is in the hands of the coyote's associates. Eight days pass with some 30 people stuffed in the little shack, sitting and sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the stifling heat. Once a day, a bowl of chicken is passed around as more migrants arrive and others are led out to traverse the desert.
Finally, just when Elias thinks he'll go mad from the heat and the stink and the anxiety, the coyote comes to get him. They set out at night in a group of 10, walking through the scrub brush on soft, dry sand that sinks under their feet. Even as his feet ache and his lungs strain in the cold November air, Elias marvels at the vast sky that shimmers with millions of bright white stars. The group walks mostly at night and tries to sleep during the day, taking cover in the low brush.
They're told they'll walk for two days, but on the third, they're not even close. The only food Elias has left is mayonnaise. That evening, they stop to sleep for a few hours, then wake in the middle of the night and set out again. Only after six hours does it dawn on Elias that they've forgotten the 17-year-old kid. He'd curled up to sleep apart from the rest of the group, and no one noticed they'd left without him. Turning back without supplies would mean risking their lives, so they continue. For the first time, and only for a moment, Elias wishes he never came. Later, when the sun is rising on its arc over the endless brown expanse, someone points out a helicopter touching down in the desert behind them. Elias prays that it saved the teenager. If not, he would surely die, alone in the desert.
Elias has heard stories about such migrants—people whose feet are so torn up they can't go on and are left behind, others who lie down to sleep and never wake up. If only the kid had slept a little bit closer. Soon, these anguished thoughts are drowned out by the pounding of his feet, the relentless sun overhead and the cold wind that blasts them with sand.
On the fourth day, a downpour interrupts the dryness. Elias' clothes are soaked, and after a few hours the chafing on his arms and legs grows so painful that he strips to his boxers. Soon he's shivering in the November chill.
They reach a road the next day and are finally picked up by a truck. Elias is loaded into a large metal toolbox in the back and told the drive will take a few hours. Eleven hours later, nearly frozen, he finds himself in Houston, where his cousins pick him up. They bring him home to Dallas, where he stays with them in Farmers Branch and attends church at Templo Cristo Rey. Through people he meets at church, he finds a drywall installation job that pays $8 an hour and begins working six 10-hour days a week.
When I meet him for the first time in May, he has been in Dallas for six months. "I love it here," he says, with a smile full of wonder. "It's clean, orderly. Our countries are chaotic." I mention that some Americans worry that immigrants are overcrowding the United States and making it more like Latin America. He nods. "I understand this isn't my country. I know I'm not a citizen, and I'm not asking to be one. I just want permission to work." He is dismayed to find out that his only chance at residency is marrying an American or getting sponsored by his boss. "The guy I work for is illegal too—how am I going to ask him for help?" he says, laughing. "We'll both get thrown out!" It's strange, he thinks, how so much is determined by where you're born. By luck.
He's grateful when he goes to bed at night, and he's grateful when he wakes at 7 a.m. for work. To him, there is something satisfying about hanging drywall—the precision of the corners, the spacing of the screws and nails. As he seals the seams with mud, using a taping knife to smooth the wet joint compound, he thinks about his journey, about the life behind him. He wonders what happened to Pedro. After Elias arrived in Dallas, his friend contacted him to say he'd been deported somewhere near the border. He recently made a third try on the trains, but the last Elias heard from him was weeks ago, when he called from San Luis Potosi. Elias has met migrants who have tried six, eight, 10 times to get through, and though he realizes how fortunate he is to have made it on the first attempt, he worries. About his girlfriend, Maribel, and whether she'll wait for him. About saving for a car and how he'll register it without legal residency. About when the boss will give him a raise and how he'll manage to save $40,000 to repay his debts and return to Honduras. As much as he likes it here, the steady pay, the way traffic lights work and cops are generally decent and women can walk down the street without drawing catcalls at every step, he yearns for home.
"I'm not going to be here forever," he tells me. "Maybe four years, with the grace of God." Then he pauses, knowing that this is what most people say when they get here, as unprepared for the realities of life in America as they were for the journey here. "Then again, my cousin said he'd only be here for two years, and he's already been here for eight," he says. "I guess you never know."
Elias dangles the dead iguana by the tail. His friends close in around him, watching hungrily. With a knife he slices through scaly green skin and peels it back to reveal bloody meat, dark red and glistening in the sun. Working quickly, he carves the lizard into sections—head, front and back legs, upper and lower torso—and drops the parts in a pan. Then he places it over the fire they've made near the train tracks. Sweat trickles down his forehead, stinging his eyes. The men are quiet while they wait for the lizard to cook. Sometimes they sing and tell stories, but for now they're too hot and hungry. They sit and watch the fire.
For three days they've been camped here, in the jungle of southern Mexico, about 40 miles from the Guatemalan border in a town called Tenosique. Hundreds of people sprawl in the dirt along the tracks. Many are young men, shirtless in the sticky heat, wearing tattered Nikes and grimy backpacks. But there are women and children too, teenage girls with painted-on jeans and mothers balancing kids on their hips. They lounge on pieces of cardboard and plastic, squat on porches, smoke in the awnings of makeshift storefronts. They wait.
Elias, a 25-year-old with a boyish face and liquid brown eyes, is sick of waiting. In the past two weeks he's traveled some 400 miles from Honduras—from his parents and eight siblings, from debt, a failing business and a country where education seems a mockery because there are so few jobs. If he's lucky, he's a few weeks from Dallas, where his brother lives and where Elias hopes to find work. He wonders if he'll wind up spending another night in Tenosique. It's impossible to tell when the train will come, since there are no schedules, but he can't understand why it's taking so long. He pokes at the sizzling iguana with a stick. His stomach growls. And then he hears it. The whistle of a train. The men drop everything and run.
"¡El tren!" they yell. "¡Ya viene!" The train! It's here! Elias searches frantically for his backpack, which holds two changes of clothes and some food. He runs out of time and grabs the one thing he knows he can't afford to lose—a leather cattle lasso—and sprints toward the tracks. It's a stampede. Hundreds of Central Americans become a chaotic tangle of pumping legs and arms, a mass of humanity driven by the same insane goal: riding some 1,000 miles through Mexico on freight trains so dangerous they're known collectively as El Tren de la Muerte, the Death Train. They've all heard about the gangsters and bandits that lay in wait along the tracks, not to mention the corrupt federales known to beat and rob migrants, even throw them from the trains. But now, Elias' greatest fear is the train itself, La Bestia, as some call it. The Beast. Over the past few days, villagers have cautioned him. "Go back to your country," urged old men, shopkeepers, women selling tortillas. "It's too dangerous." They told of migrants decapitated, sucked under the train, limbs severed. "Se los comio el tren," they'd say, "The train ate them up."
Elias is terrified of losing a leg or, worse, getting cut in half. But the alternative is just as bad: going home empty-handed to face the bill collectors threatening to take everything he's worked for. No, he won't turn back. Not after busing through Guatemala and trekking through the jungles and mountains of southern Mexico. Not after the ordeal in Chiapas, on the path from La Arrocera.
With $300 stashed in his shoes, he runs alongside the boxcars looking for a ladder. Men and boys are already hoisting themselves up onto the cars. He has to jump soon, before the train picks up more speed. Wait too long, and he could get yanked off balance and sucked underneath.
Gasping, he sprints harder and spots a ladder at the front end of a rounded black gasoline car. He reaches out with his left arm, then his right. He grabs a metal rung and pulls. At last, he says to himself, I'm going to El Norte.
Gloria Valdez Salas guns the engine of her orange Silverado pickup, speeding through ramshackle neighborhoods and onto the highway outside Tenosique. Salas is the local coordinator of Grupos Beta, a government safety patrol charged with protecting migrants. As a former army nurse and the Beta boss here, where Elias first jumped the train eight months earlier, she spends her time negotiating with authorities, chasing trains, responding to accidents that have left people dead or disfigured and handing out water to dehydrated migrants, many of whom are on their way to Texas.
When she pulls up alongside the train tracks on this June morning, I jump out of the back of the truck and follow her, grabbing my notebook and a bottle of water. I've come to Mexico to retrace parts of Elias' journey, to understand why massive numbers of migrants are willing to risk their lives in such a brutal way and to learn, if at all possible, what it means for Texas, the United States and immigration reform. Recent media reports suggest more people have been traveling north in the hope that Congress will pass a comprehensive bill. A few of the migrants I meet mention the legislative efforts. One Honduran 20-something tells me he is certain he will be able to live legally in the U.S. once he crosses the border. "George Bush," he says solemnly, "will sign his permission."
The train is barreling toward us now, blowing its horn. About 50 migrants run alongside it, and more than 100 are already riding. They sit on the tops of the cars, stand on ledges in between them and hang from ladders on the sides. On top of one black boxcar, a group of men have managed to erect a crude fort of branches covered with a tarp for shade. "Get down!" Salas hollers to the men, who are smiling and waving. She gestures wildly with her hands. "Get down low!" The rumbling is too loud, and they continue waving until the train is past. Salas shakes her head. "There are electric wires up ahead," she says. "We have to rescue people who get electrocuted all the time."
The train is moving too fast for new migrants to get on here, so they'll wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, more people are arriving, stumbling and exhausted after the two-to-five-day trek from Guatemala.
People say Mexico's border with the United States is porous, but it's nothing compared to Mexico's southern border, where political notions of national boundaries are, for all practical purposes, irrelevant. Instead of desert, there is jungle, a tangled blanket of dense foliage cloaking flatlands, rivers and mountains. And every day the verdant landscape is crawling with people. Most are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, but others have come even farther, from South America and even Asia. They walk along roads and on worn pathways, hacking through vines with machetes and sleeping on the moist earth under trees and bushes. They cross rivers and walk extra miles to avoid border checkpoints. Not that there's much to the border. At the El Ceibo crossing into Mexico from Guatemala, there's no checkpoint at all on the Guatemalan side and just a small Mexican immigration office with a few bored-looking agents outside.
By all accounts, the flow of migrants over Mexico's southern border has grown from a narrow stream 20 years ago to a mighty river, and while any numerical calculation undoubtedly falls short, official data from the Mexican government shows a 72 percent increase in the number of Central American migrants detained between 2002 and 2005. Each year nearly 300,000 Central Americans enter Mexico in an attempt to reach the U.S., according to the Mexican government's Center of Immigration Studies. About one-third of the migrants take the trains—the cheapest way to go, because bus travel requires money for tickets and a smuggler to pay off authorities along the way.
As financial distress increases in Central America, especially in Honduras, which wrestles with 25 to 30 percent unemployment, more people leave to join relatives or friends in the U.S. Of the migrants I meet in Mexico, at least 90 percent are Honduran, and many are headed to Houston and Dallas, drawn by Texas' booming economy. One Guatemalan man tells me he is on his way to Oak Cliff for a roofing job that is already set up. A middle-aged mother hiking through the jungle in a polyester blouse, skirt and black flats says she's left her five children with her mother and is headed to Houston to find work as a maid. Her name is Maria Gloria. As she speaks of leaving her children, ages 10 to 18, she fumbles with her hands, her face full of sadness. Since her husband left her she's been taking in laundry and cleaning houses, often the only option for women in Honduras because employers rarely hire women over 25. (They're considered too old and unattractive for retail jobs and not fast enough for factory work.) "You can't live on what you make there," Maria Gloria says in a soft voice. "I've heard lots of scary things about the trains, but I have to take the risk."
It's common for parents to leave children they can't afford to feed, promising to send money to the relatives caring for them. Others bring their children with them. I come across a couple with three kids, the youngest a boy who looks about 8 and wears a wooden rosary. Like a number of people I meet, they aren't sure where they are headed in the U.S. "Wherever God allows us to go," says the mother, a fair-skinned Honduran with a blond ponytail. I also meet a shy 21-year-old woman who looks about 16. She tells me she was nauseated on the long walk from Guatemala because she was three months' pregnant.
As the number of migrants on the trains has grown, so have the deaths, injuries and amputations, not to mention the violence unleashed against the foreigners by opportunistic bandits, corrupt authorities and vicious members of the Mara Salvatrucha, a Central American gang whose members have fled law enforcement crackdowns in their own countries and have set up bases in southern Mexico. When Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in January, he pledged to slow immigration across the southern border and stop the constant robberies, assaults, rapes and murders. Six months later, not much has changed.
I met Honduran newlyweds Giovani Acosta and Karla Hernandez at a migrant shelter in the church in Tenosique. They'd arrived early that morning and were resting on the floor after a harrowing night. As they walked through the jungle in the dark, out of water and drinking from cattle troughs along the way, three men in masks jumped out of the foliage. The men, holding guns and machetes, forced them to strip and lie face-down on the ground. They took the couple's last 100 pesos ($10), as well as their soap, cigarettes and even their shoes. The pair walked three hours barefoot until a storekeeper gave them sandals and some food. They were considering turning back. But Acosta, whose closely cropped curls and dashing smile make him look like a Latin Frank Sinatra, said he didn't know what he'd do if they went home. He's an electrician who struggles to find decent-paying jobs. "In Honduras, if you buy a pair of shoes, you go a day without food," he said. Hernandez, a short woman with full cheeks and dimples, knew she was lucky she wasn't raped. "When the man said go into the bushes and get down on the ground, I thought, 'Oh my God,'" she said.
Rape is so common on the migrant trail that many women making their way through Guatemala begin taking birth control pills or stashing condoms in preparation for what lies ahead. Salas, the Beta coordinator, says she once found a woman lying along the highway to Guatemala. The woman had resisted bandits who tried to rape her, and the men beat her, broke her left arm and used machetes to slash her legs to ribbons. In the end, she was raped anyway. Her friend, who didn't fight back, thought the woman might be dead and ran to town for help. "When we got there," Salas says, "she was in shock."
Salas has seen people lose both legs to the train—a teenager bled to death by the tracks in Tenosique just a couple of weeks earlier—but the memory of that poor woman has stayed with her. Along with the 6-foot-6 Honduran man whose legs were crushed by the train. He arrived with his friends at the Beta office in the back of a taxi. Salas opened the car door to find that they'd stuffed him in with his legs doubled over. "They were attached only by his pants and a bit of skin," she says. "I dragged him out, put him on the backboard—though he was too long for it—cut off his pants, pressurized the artery and got him to the hospital. He survived."
Driving with Salas along the highway from El Ceibo, we see a group of eight teenagers walking along the road ahead. When they see the truck, they duck under a barbed wire fence and sprint into a field, running for their lives. Salas pulls over and gets out. "Hey, we're Beta, we're here to help!" she calls after them. "Do you want some water?" The boys pause, then turn around and walk slowly back up to the road, out of breath.
They are Hondurans in their late teens, and they're on their way to Missouri. When I ask why, a tall guy with a blue bandanna around his head grins. "Because that's where all the pretty girls are!" His friends laugh. They take their water bottles and the pamphlets from Salas that list contact numbers for nonprofits, consulates and embassies, and keep walking.
When we get back into the truck, Salas is quiet for a long moment. She's still remembering the tall Honduran who lost his legs. "You see them in situations that should kill them," she finally says. "But they live a la fuerza—by force—by their determination to keep going."
Elias wakes to searing pain and the jarring metal-on-metal grind of the train. He'd used the lasso to lash himself to the ladder at the rear of the gasoline car, just above the steel connectors. Two nights of fitful sleep tied at the waist have left him with sharp aches in his back and neck. He's covered with mud churned by the whirring wheels below, and though some of the men riding nearby have shared water and food with him, there's no way to get rid of the grainy dirt that coats his mouth and sticks between his teeth. The temperature climbs to 95 degrees during the day, dressing him in a suit of sticky sweat and grime. His hair is matted in muddy clumps.
His mother would be horrified to see him now. He didn't even tell his parents he was leaving. When his brother left without saying a word three years earlier, Elias vowed he'd never end up in the same position. Unlike his younger brother, he had stayed in school. He planned to graduate and become an engineer. He never did, though. In Honduras, school isn't free, and attending requires money for supplies and uniforms. As he made his way through high school, he watched older friends with diplomas fail to find jobs in the fields they'd studied.
Elias ended up renting a stall in a local market and opening a cosmetics store, selling shampoos and lotions, ladies' face cream and Scope. He hired a woman to work the register, and for a while sales were good enough to begin building his own home, so he could move out of his parents' house. But then his luck turned. He'd just wanted a small house, but the men he hired built it way too big and spent too much money. Sales at the store started to tank; it seemed like all the small shops were going broke because they couldn't compete with the big stores. Soon Elias was drowning in debt. There was no way he'd be able to repay the $27,000 he owed with 12 percent interest—the bank would repossess everything. So he had one choice: Do what tens of thousands of Hondurans do each year—go north. When his friend Pedro, a truck driver in their hometown of Choluteca, asked him to come along and ride the trains, he said yes. It was the only way out, he thought, and besides, it would be an adventure.
Elias' mother cried and prayed for days after his brother, now a carpenter in Dallas, left for the U.S., so he told himself he'd call home when he was closer, past most of the danger. Now, tired and sore, he considers the irony of it all. He'd been sure he would show his parents and his nine siblings how successful he was, with his own house and business. And instead, here he is, bound like an animal to the ladder and praying that when night falls, he won't sleep through shouted warnings of a police checkpoint, or worse, fall prey to bandits or gang members. He prays he won't have to face another situation like the one he found himself in days before.
Elias, Pedro and two other Hondurans had been wandering in the jungle, lost, trying to find the right place to get the train. They'd entered Mexico in Tapachula, on the Pacific side near Guatemala, but because the train tracks had been washed away by a hurricane, they wound up walking eight days toward the Gulf, to Tenosique. Before they found their way, they came to an adobe house on the outskirts of a little town in Chiapas called La Arrocera. Elias didn't know it, but the isolated cattle town is notorious. It's known to be inhabited by locals who help authorities catch migrants. The madrinas, or godmothers, as these predatory villagers are called, often pose as migrants themselves in order to beat, rape and rob, and they're permitted by crooked officials to keep part of what they steal. Elias asked an old rancher who stood outside the adobe house if he had any food to spare. The man shook his head. "No," he said. "But there's a woman up ahead who can help you. You'll come to two houses, each on a hill. One is bad, and one is good." Elias stared blankly for a moment. "Well, which one is good?" he asked. "One is bad, and one is good," the man said again. OK, Elias thought, hopefully God will lead us to the good one.
Just as the man said, up ahead were two little houses. A pretty woman, around 40, came out of the one on the right and called down to them. "Muchachos, venga," she said. "Come on, boys—you need something to eat?" Elias and the others followed her into the modest home, where she dished out generous portions of beans, eggs and rice. As they devoured the food, Elias noticed the woman's three sons watching them. The oldest, who looked about 20, offered one of the migrants a Mexican ID. As his friend looked at the card, Elias discouraged him in a whisper. "Who knows who that is?" he told him. "It's probably some criminal—don't buy it." His friend ignored him and paid for the ID. A few minutes later, the woman's three sons emerged from a bedroom wearing boots and walked out the door. "They're going for soda," the woman said. Yeah, right, Elias thought, feeling his stomach sink. After they paid 50 pesos each for dinner and walked outside, he voiced his suspicions. "Get some rocks," he said. "These guys are going to show up down the road."
Sure enough, a few minutes later, the three brothers leaped out of the brush. The oldest one had a .22, the next youngest a machete and the smallest a large stick. "This is a robbery!" the oldest yelled. He shot at the ground, spraying mud from the recent rains. The migrants dropped their rocks. "Line up!" the gunman ordered. The migrants obeyed. "Now, lie down!"
As the others complied, Elias stood rooted to the ground. He refused to give up his money—how would he eat?
"Get down and give me your money!" the gunman demanded.
"I don't have any," Elias replied.
"I know you have some, I saw it in the house," the gunman said. He smashed Elias over the head with the .22. "Get on the ground!"
This time, head throbbing, Elias did as he was told. The two younger brothers were already rifling through his friends' clothes looking for cash. The gunman kicked Elias hard in the ribs and back, then yanked off his Nikes and looked inside for money. Luckily, Elias had tucked it under the insoles. He felt the gun barrel press into his forehead. It seemed like his heart was beating clear up to his ears. Was this it? Was he going to die here, in the mud in the middle of nowhere, without ever speaking to his family again?
Just then, footsteps sounded on the path behind them. The bandit straightened. "How many people are behind you?" he asked.
"Six," Elias answered, making it up.
"Are there women?" the man asked.
"Yeah, there are women," Elias lied. The cold metal lifted from his head.
"Get out of here!" the bandit yelled. Elias jumped up and ran. Instead of six, a group of some 40 migrants rounded the corner. The youths tried to rob them, but it was too large a crowd, and the migrants all ran down the road and toward the trains.
Elias and his friends walked with the group for another few days before finally arriving in Tenosique. A family who lived near the tracks let the young Hondurans use their shower and sleep in the front yard. One afternoon, Elias was killing time near the tracks when he noticed a 40-ish man on crutches. He was missing a foot. Elias nodded in greeting. "Where you headed?" he asked. "Same place as you," the man said. It turned out he'd slipped while pulling himself onto a train. He thought he was fine and started to get up, he told Elias, but then he noticed the bloody stump where his foot had been. He later woke up in the hospital. The man was determined to continue his journey, insisting he would hop the train again, crutches and all.
After the third day of riding tied to the ladder, Elias can't stand it anymore. He wants to find his friend Pedro, so he unties himself and climbs to the top of the train. Crouching there, he takes a breath and steadies himself before stepping over to the platform. There he stands holding the railing, wind streaming past his face and through his dirty hair. This is much better.
He walks over the top of the car, slowly at first. He leaps from one car to the next and traverses nine before spotting Pedro. His friend is standing on the top rung of a side ladder near two other Hondurans. Pedro smiles, surprised to see him. "I thought you got left behind," he says. They sit together on top of the boxcar. To pass the time, Elias sings. A lot of the migrants carry small Bibles, or a few pages with scrawled verses. Most wear rosaries. But Elias just prays, often in song. "So much I have with my Lord, so much I owe to my savior," he sings. "If I could repay his loving grace, I would give all my soul."
Tenosique, a cattle town recently dubbed the "Trampoline to America" by a Mexican newspaper, is defined by the trains. They mark the passage of time, and not just for migrants attempting to jump them. For emergency rescue crews, the passing of a train is like the alarm at a firehouse, the signal to slide down the pole and run to work. For Father Blas, the calm and philosophical priest who runs the migrant shelter behind the church, the sound means the arrival of broken souls. And for residents like Celia Gutierrez, who cleans rooms at a local hotel, a train whistle on the first Saturday of the month is an opportunity to be a good Samaritan by running out to the tracks with sandwiches and tortillas for the people riding the trains.
Most locals I talked to say they feel sorry for the migrants. Many call them pobrecitos, poor things, and wonder how the poverty in Central America could possibly dwarf their own. "We don't really understand why they go through all this to leave home," said one elderly woman who lives by the tracks. She gestured toward a little plank shack and barren yard, where a couple of pigs rooted in the dirt. "I mean, we're poor, but this is our home."
Not everyone in Tenosique is destitute, however. A few hours after seeing the group of Honduran teenagers on the highway, we have dinner at a bright, clean restaurant called Café Leyra. Housed in a bubble-like structure with glass walls, the place is full of Mexican families out for a Saturday night on the town, eating enchiladas and burgers, sipping fruit smoothies and milkshakes topped with whipped cream and cherries. Through the glass, my photographer friend spots a group of what look like teenage migrants shuffling by outside, heads down and backpacks strapped to their shoulders.
Meanwhile, the restaurant's entertainer for the evening steps onto a small wooden stage in front of our table. A short, mustachioed man, he plows through songs and jokes while donning various costumes, including a flowered lounge jacket and a black mariachi ensemble. He makes frequent quips about the town's status as a gateway to the U.S. "Who's going to America?" he asks, perched at the edge of the stage, gazing out at the diners in mock seriousness. The room fills with laughter, and he raises his voice. "Vamos, all of us. Let's all go to America!"
Elias is waiting for another train. He and his friends are now a few hours from Mexico City—they've come almost 500 miles from Tenosique and nearly 1,000 from Honduras. He's exhausted after days of riding and from leaping off the last train to hike around a police checkpoint. He looks down the tracks, hoping to see lights. Then he scans the crowd and his eyes fall on a familiar face from Tenosique. The man with the missing foot. Elias can't believe he's made it this far. He's about to say hello when he notices the man's red eyes and listless movements—he's piss-drunk.
Elias and Pedro soon catch a passing train. A couple of hours later, after two long weeks on the train punctuated by the adrenaline rush of jumping off to avoid officials, they arrive in Lecheria. An important point in the journey, it's a gritty Mexico City suburb named for the dairy town it used to be, before the pulsing sprawl of the world's second largest metropolis devoured it. This is where they must change train lines to go to San Luis Potosi, a city in north central Mexico some 200 miles from Texas. Once there, Elias hopes to find a smuggler to guide him to the borderland, which is thick with security, and through the desert that claims hundreds of lives each year. He has traveled some 550 miles in two weeks on the railways; if he's lucky, he has about 230 miles left on the trains.
Migrants up ahead shout warnings that the Lecheria station is coming up; they have to jump before they're spotted by police or rail security. Even after weeks of plunging off moving trains, Elias hasn't gotten used to it. He forces himself to leap, clenches his jaws against the pain as he hits the ground and rolls roughly over dirt and rocks. Feeling the sting of skinned elbows, he stands and surveys the landscape. There are smoke-spewing factories, warehouses and squares of farmland full of green grass and munching goats. He finds his friends ahead, dusting themselves off, and together they walk along the street by the station, past bodegas and tire shops and bars. Within an hour, they're inside a store chatting with a tall, pleasant-faced man in his late 30s. His name is Martin, and as he polishes off a beer, he invites the Hondurans home for dinner and drinks. They're welcome to sleep in his yard, he says. Elias pauses. Since that day in Chiapas, each time someone offers help, his stomach tightens. He looks hard at the man. Martin seems genuinely friendly, and Elias has a good feeling about him. Despite his fear, he chooses to trust it.
Martin tells them he's a guide and can secure their passage to Texas for $2,100 each, $1,000 up front. He leads them to his house and asks them what size shirts and pants they wear—he's noticed the tears and stains and caked dirt. He leaves and returns with a pile of clothes, tossing Elias a white button-up and size 34 dress pants. Later, Martin takes them to a nearby store. Elias, who doesn't drink alcohol, selects a Coke while the others line up to buy bottles of Corona. A tough-looking Salvadoran man walks in. He isn't covered with tattoos like the gangsters Elias has seen before, but he looks just as mean. From the moment he walks up to the counter, it's clear he has nothing but bad intentions.
"All Hondurans are motherfuckers," the man declares to the Honduran store owner.
"We'll see about that," the owner, a burly man in his 40s, replies, narrowing his eyes.
"I'm Salvatrucha, motherfucker," the man says, referring to the Central American street gang.
Elias attempts to defuse the tension. "Don't fight," he says. "We're all Central American."
The Salvadoran turns and lifts his shirt to show a machete strapped around his waist. "I don't give a shit," he says. "If this fight were with you, I'd have already slit your throat."
Without warning, the petite woman who's married to the owner darts out from behind the counter and unsheathes the gangster's machete in one swift motion. "You won't be fighting in here!" she yells, holding the machete in the air. Her husband is beside her now. For a moment the young man's face registers shock and confusion, but he says nothing and turns to leave.
Elias can't believe it—how is it possible that this man, a member of the legendary Mara Salvatrucha, was just disarmed by a tiny shop owner's wife? And it's not over. The store owner grabs the gangster by the shirt and punches him repeatedly in the face. When the man's legs buckle he drags him out front by the collar and leaves him in the gutter, throwing a few last punches. "Don't you ever come back here," he says.
The migrants watch, holding their drinks in silence.
There's a Spanish expression: "Todo se compra, Todo se vende." "Everything can be bought or sold." Perhaps nowhere is it truer than along the human smuggling routes through Mexico. Migrants are routinely beaten and robbed by cops and extorted by immigration agents. And as much as migrants depend on smugglers for at least part of the journey, it's difficult to tell which ones they can trust.
In Tenosique, I meet a muscular man with tattoos on his arms and a rosary around his neck. The migrants call him Laredo, which is stitched in white letters on his navy baseball cap. When I ask if he's made this trip before, he nods indulgently, as if I've asked if he can ride a bike. "I've lived in Austin, Boston, Kansas. I've entered the country 20 times. Crossing here isn't hard, it's getting across the border up there," he says, leaning casually on a long machete. I wonder if he is a smuggler, and later, Salas, the Beta coordinator, confirms my suspicions. "Oh, yeah—it's obvious he's a pollero," she says, using a common term for coyote.
Smugglers often pay train conductors to stop for migrants, and Salas has had her fair share of confrontations with the train companies. "Two weeks ago a woman was standing by the tracks, handing her 4-year-old to someone on the train before getting on herself, and because she didn't have money to pay, the driver pulled out and left her," Salas tells me. The horrified mother told nearby villagers, who told Beta, and soon Salas and her agents were racing after the train to rescue the toddler. The driver finally stopped after several hours, she says, and they returned the child to the mother.
As I listen to these stories, the U.S. Senate is about to abandon the first major immigration overhaul in 20 years. And in Mexico, where people are willing to risk a half-dozen terrifying attempts to cross the country on the Death Trains, where coyotes make a profit and officials turn a blind eye, the policy debate seems meaningless. As long as hundreds of thousands of people are willing to risk losing their limbs and their lives to come to America each year, few changes on the U.S. border will make a difference without serious efforts to create jobs in Central America and Mexico.
In Central America "you have a situation where a few families live extremely well, spend little on education and health care, pay little tax, and basically have unfulfilled obligations to their downtrodden," says George Grayson, a Mexico expert who teaches at the College of William and Mary. "The absence of Mexico's border certainly makes life more difficult for the U.S. and its law enforcement agencies, but there are steps we should be taking. We can't simply abandon our border; otherwise you'd have 25 percent of the world in the United States."
Back in Tenosique, on a Monday a little after 7 a.m., Salas calls our hotel. "¡Viene el tren!" she says. Minutes later we're running along the tracks. We cross a bridge over a waterway and come face to face with the Honduran teens we met the day before. They greet us with smiles and pose for the camera with tough-guy stares. The train has rounded a corner and chugs toward us, its headlights resembling enormous glowing eyes. "¡Camello!" yells the tall man in the blue bandanna, the one looking forward to the pretty girls in Missouri. "Come over here! Five on this side, five on the other!" They split and wait on each side of the tracks. The train is almost here. "Be careful," warns an older migrant. "If it's going too fast, there will be others." Russet, gray and white boxcars glide past with hordes of people standing on top. When the train is past, the 10 guys remain on the tracks. "It went too fast!" one says. They take off in a run, hoping the train will slow. We sprint after them. "¡Se detuvo!" one screams. "It stopped!" Dozens of people clamber onto the caboose, and I realize it was likely Laredo who paid off the driver. "Hurry, hurry, get on!" one man standing on the train yells to the running Hondurans. They make it just in time. All 10 climb aboard and the train moves forward, inching toward El Norte. I lean on my knees, catching my breath, and watch the waving teenagers grow small in the distance.
"Are you OK?" Elias' mother asks him as he stands at a phone booth. Friends of his have told her where he has gone.
"Yeah, I'm fine," he says.
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm fine, Mamá."
"Why did you leave like Marvin did, without telling me?"
"I didn't want you to worry." She agrees to wire him the $1,000 deposit for Martin, the coyote. She'll take it from the cosmetics store, another addition to Elias' debt. He'll continue north without Pedro, who doesn't have enough money to pay a smuggler and plans to take his chances on the train all the way to Texas.
The rest of the journey seems endless. From the beginning the trip has depended on luck, but riding the trains required hustle and cunning as well. Now, Elias feels helpless, packed like a 2-by-4 into a covered pickup with a dozen other migrants, including a 17-year-old who joins Elias for laughter and a series of dirty jokes. After what seems like forever, they climb out of the vehicle and swim across the Rio Grande near Laredo, then file into a small house in the Texas desert. Martin went home before they crossed the river, so Elias is in the hands of the coyote's associates. Eight days pass with some 30 people stuffed in the little shack, sitting and sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the stifling heat. Once a day, a bowl of chicken is passed around as more migrants arrive and others are led out to traverse the desert.
Finally, just when Elias thinks he'll go mad from the heat and the stink and the anxiety, the coyote comes to get him. They set out at night in a group of 10, walking through the scrub brush on soft, dry sand that sinks under their feet. Even as his feet ache and his lungs strain in the cold November air, Elias marvels at the vast sky that shimmers with millions of bright white stars. The group walks mostly at night and tries to sleep during the day, taking cover in the low brush.
They're told they'll walk for two days, but on the third, they're not even close. The only food Elias has left is mayonnaise. That evening, they stop to sleep for a few hours, then wake in the middle of the night and set out again. Only after six hours does it dawn on Elias that they've forgotten the 17-year-old kid. He'd curled up to sleep apart from the rest of the group, and no one noticed they'd left without him. Turning back without supplies would mean risking their lives, so they continue. For the first time, and only for a moment, Elias wishes he never came. Later, when the sun is rising on its arc over the endless brown expanse, someone points out a helicopter touching down in the desert behind them. Elias prays that it saved the teenager. If not, he would surely die, alone in the desert.
Elias has heard stories about such migrants—people whose feet are so torn up they can't go on and are left behind, others who lie down to sleep and never wake up. If only the kid had slept a little bit closer. Soon, these anguished thoughts are drowned out by the pounding of his feet, the relentless sun overhead and the cold wind that blasts them with sand.
On the fourth day, a downpour interrupts the dryness. Elias' clothes are soaked, and after a few hours the chafing on his arms and legs grows so painful that he strips to his boxers. Soon he's shivering in the November chill.
They reach a road the next day and are finally picked up by a truck. Elias is loaded into a large metal toolbox in the back and told the drive will take a few hours. Eleven hours later, nearly frozen, he finds himself in Houston, where his cousins pick him up. They bring him home to Dallas, where he stays with them in Farmers Branch and attends church at Templo Cristo Rey. Through people he meets at church, he finds a drywall installation job that pays $8 an hour and begins working six 10-hour days a week.
When I meet him for the first time in May, he has been in Dallas for six months. "I love it here," he says, with a smile full of wonder. "It's clean, orderly. Our countries are chaotic." I mention that some Americans worry that immigrants are overcrowding the United States and making it more like Latin America. He nods. "I understand this isn't my country. I know I'm not a citizen, and I'm not asking to be one. I just want permission to work." He is dismayed to find out that his only chance at residency is marrying an American or getting sponsored by his boss. "The guy I work for is illegal too—how am I going to ask him for help?" he says, laughing. "We'll both get thrown out!" It's strange, he thinks, how so much is determined by where you're born. By luck.
He's grateful when he goes to bed at night, and he's grateful when he wakes at 7 a.m. for work. To him, there is something satisfying about hanging drywall—the precision of the corners, the spacing of the screws and nails. As he seals the seams with mud, using a taping knife to smooth the wet joint compound, he thinks about his journey, about the life behind him. He wonders what happened to Pedro. After Elias arrived in Dallas, his friend contacted him to say he'd been deported somewhere near the border. He recently made a third try on the trains, but the last Elias heard from him was weeks ago, when he called from San Luis Potosi. Elias has met migrants who have tried six, eight, 10 times to get through, and though he realizes how fortunate he is to have made it on the first attempt, he worries. About his girlfriend, Maribel, and whether she'll wait for him. About saving for a car and how he'll register it without legal residency. About when the boss will give him a raise and how he'll manage to save $40,000 to repay his debts and return to Honduras. As much as he likes it here, the steady pay, the way traffic lights work and cops are generally decent and women can walk down the street without drawing catcalls at every step, he yearns for home.
"I'm not going to be here forever," he tells me. "Maybe four years, with the grace of God." Then he pauses, knowing that this is what most people say when they get here, as unprepared for the realities of life in America as they were for the journey here. "Then again, my cousin said he'd only be here for two years, and he's already been here for eight," he says. "I guess you never know."
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
WHITE FLAG THE DRUG WAR?
Has the time come to run up the white flag in the drug war? Would this surrender imply total capitulation and defeat to enemy narcolistas and drug states? Have we come to a point in our national experience that we should recognize that our culture today largely is a culture of drugs?
Not open to question is the fact that as a nation we have all been eyewitnesses to the war on drugs. This war has placed us all in the foxholes, on the front lines and in the midst of the battle. In one way or another we have all been wounded and many know personally someone who has perished. In some ways we are a Gold Star nation, mourning the deaths of so many sons and daughters to this omnipresent enemy. Granted, some have been closer to the battle than others but we all have been bloodied.
Look at the amount of money and resources we have plied into this effort. It costs each generation more and more to constantly fund a defensive line that seems to always be eroding. This example brings to mind the "Maginot Line" of the French prior to World War II. Instead of directly attacking that sturdy defense the Germans merely went around it. Today as we place one obstacle after another to stem the drug tide the tide merely seeks a different spot to pour through. Today we commit more resources than ever in this war and to show for it we seem to only have greater amounts of drugs available to those who seek them. There must be a better way. One with results or are we kidding ourselves.
Some may call for more money and resources to be drafted into the war on drugs. Case: Afghanistan. This southwest Asia country has been the center of the world's poppy cultivation for years. Under the Taliban production fell due to religious influence, forced influence we might add. Enter American, German, British, Australian troops and the Taliban is swiftly defeated. Sounds like a victory in the drug war. With all these western troops on the ground the poppy cultivation levels should continue to decrease. So why the record harvest we have today? The growers just decided to grow more. Our influence is minimal. The growers make the decisions. Production is controlled by the producer. They can shrink or grow their product, it appears almost at will, no matter what we through up against them.
This month in Colombia the head of that country's largest cocaine cartel was arrested by troops whose equipment and training is provided for by the United States. It has been reported that his organization controls 70% of the cocaine entering America. Does anyone believe that his absence as leader of the cartel will be reflected in a 70% decrease in cocaine shipments? Does anyone believe that this will effect the situation at all?
The exporting of cocaine from Colombia is not driven by personality, it is driven by the same demands that drive business. Imagine asking any oil rich nation to stop exporting oil. Ask the same of a narco-state. They will not and up to now cannot. These exports, illegal as they may be, fuel the economies of these states.
If we cannot control the production and exporting of these drugs and our defenses are proven ineffective do we just say no to the drug war and wave the white flag? Is there any other way to meet the goals of the drug war? For that matter what are the goals of the drug war? It does appear that a major battle in the drug war may have been lost but is this cause for surrender? (To be continued)
Not open to question is the fact that as a nation we have all been eyewitnesses to the war on drugs. This war has placed us all in the foxholes, on the front lines and in the midst of the battle. In one way or another we have all been wounded and many know personally someone who has perished. In some ways we are a Gold Star nation, mourning the deaths of so many sons and daughters to this omnipresent enemy. Granted, some have been closer to the battle than others but we all have been bloodied.
Look at the amount of money and resources we have plied into this effort. It costs each generation more and more to constantly fund a defensive line that seems to always be eroding. This example brings to mind the "Maginot Line" of the French prior to World War II. Instead of directly attacking that sturdy defense the Germans merely went around it. Today as we place one obstacle after another to stem the drug tide the tide merely seeks a different spot to pour through. Today we commit more resources than ever in this war and to show for it we seem to only have greater amounts of drugs available to those who seek them. There must be a better way. One with results or are we kidding ourselves.
Some may call for more money and resources to be drafted into the war on drugs. Case: Afghanistan. This southwest Asia country has been the center of the world's poppy cultivation for years. Under the Taliban production fell due to religious influence, forced influence we might add. Enter American, German, British, Australian troops and the Taliban is swiftly defeated. Sounds like a victory in the drug war. With all these western troops on the ground the poppy cultivation levels should continue to decrease. So why the record harvest we have today? The growers just decided to grow more. Our influence is minimal. The growers make the decisions. Production is controlled by the producer. They can shrink or grow their product, it appears almost at will, no matter what we through up against them.
This month in Colombia the head of that country's largest cocaine cartel was arrested by troops whose equipment and training is provided for by the United States. It has been reported that his organization controls 70% of the cocaine entering America. Does anyone believe that his absence as leader of the cartel will be reflected in a 70% decrease in cocaine shipments? Does anyone believe that this will effect the situation at all?
The exporting of cocaine from Colombia is not driven by personality, it is driven by the same demands that drive business. Imagine asking any oil rich nation to stop exporting oil. Ask the same of a narco-state. They will not and up to now cannot. These exports, illegal as they may be, fuel the economies of these states.
If we cannot control the production and exporting of these drugs and our defenses are proven ineffective do we just say no to the drug war and wave the white flag? Is there any other way to meet the goals of the drug war? For that matter what are the goals of the drug war? It does appear that a major battle in the drug war may have been lost but is this cause for surrender? (To be continued)
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
DECISION MAKING COMMANDERS: A DYING BREED?
Boston, Massachusetts June 17, 1775
American patriots under the command of General Artemas Ward are being attacked by a numerically superior force of experienced British soldiers. Dug in atop Bunker Hill the patriots are running low on ammunition and supplies after several British attacks. Every shot the patriots make needs to count. As the British mass for a new assault the American commander sends a runner to seek permission from General Washington, miles away, to order his men not to shoot until they "see the whites of their eyes". Permission is granted but the word fails to reach the patriots in time.......and they run out of ammunition.
Off the coast of Scotland, September 23, 1779
John Paul Jones, the commander of fleet of American naval vessels faces a superior British fleet in numbers and armaments. Jones' own vessel is afire and badly damaged. The British naval commander offers to accept the American surrender. Admiral Jones mentions to his men that he has "not yet begun to fight" but defers to higher command the decision to do so. The British take advantage during this lull and triumph.
New Orleans, December, 1814
It is the waning days of the War of 1812 a major battle is shaping up between British and American forces south and east of New Orleans. The Americans are a motley crew of regular Army troops, volunteers and pirates commanded by Colonel Andrew Jackson. Again the British have an experienced force of professional soldiers led by seasoned officers. On the eve of one major encounter between the forces Colonel Jackson receives a report. He turns to his officers and says "the British are below, we must fight them tonight." He seeks permission from a higher command to join the British in battle. Unfortunately by the time his orders are confirmed the British break camp and move on. The Battle of New Orleans never occurs. The War of 1812 drones on for years.
Over the Solomon Islands April 18, 1943
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is on an aerial inspection over Bougainville Island. Ever since he masterminded the attack on Pearl Harbor and engineered the emergence of a modern Japanese Navy the United States targeted him. President Roosevelt himself told Secretary of Navy Frank Knox to "get Yamamoto."
On April 18, 1943 several Army Air Corps P-38's are in the air over the Solomon Islands searching for Japanese to prey on. Yamamoto's flight was intercepted by the American P-38's. Because of intercepted radio communication by the flight the American pilots felt that this Japanese aircraft might be carrying Admiral Yamamoto.
The lead airman immediately radios higher command to get permission to engage the enemy aircraft. However, due to atmospheric conditions radio traffic that distance was not possible. Not wanting to supersede orders the Japanese aircraft slips away and Yamamoto remains in command of his forces.
The War in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2007
We all know that the example cited above were not the way events played themselves out. At Bunker Hill (Breed's Hill, okay?) the commander did manage to conserve ammunition by only firing when the enemy was at close quarters. John Paul Jones did lead his fleet on to victory, his fight was not over with. Colonel Jackson did engage the British at New Orleans and the Americans prevailed. And finally, the aircraft carrying Admiral Yamamoto was shot down. Japan was headed for defeat.
These lapses did not occur for several good reasons. Paramount among these reasons is that fact that these commanders had decision making powers over their immediate tactical battlefield situation. Unfortunately, in the present day situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the decision making powers have been stripped from the battlefield commanders. Permission to engage the enemy has to be granted from higher up in many situations today to a laughable degree.
In Afghanistan, prior to Operation Anaconda in the Shiakot Valley, helicopter pilots had to ask permission from commanders, as far away as Dohar, Kuwait or Tampa, Florida to engage clear enemy targets. Also in Afghanistan, in late 2001 and early 2002, Usama bin Laden was able to escape because the ground commanders desire to use American forces in the battle were declined by higher ups in Washington D.C.
Remember the first battle of Fallujah in Iraq? The Marines were in battle with insurgents for several days and the enemy was about to end their resistance when Washington ordered the Marines to stand down for 2 days before resuming the battle....the insurgents used the 2 days to slip away. Examples no doubt abound indicating that the decision making powers of ground commanders have been greatly eroded.
I believe that stripping the ground commanders of the ability to make these battlefield decisions indicates that we have not made the decision to be victorious. If this is the case, why are we fighting?
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Monday, August 13, 2007
THE MYTH OF VICTORY
We often hear some talk of victory in Iraq while others will insist that cannot happen. Both sides of the discussion will offer up all the needed arguments to support their positions. Is it possible for us to achieve victory in Iraq? If victory is attainable what will it look like?
The United States was victorious in our war with England for independence. Victory was easy to describe for we had a nation to show for it. We even defended this victory with the outcome of the War of 1812 when England tried to reel us back in.
The Mexican War saw the United States victorious 30 years later. That victory was also easy to define and it stretched from Texas to California. Our battle with illegal immigration can be traced back to that event and earlier. One day history may even declare Mexico as the victors of that war.
The Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th Century also had the acquisition of territory as its gauge for victory. Ever hear of the Philippines or Cuba or Puerto Rico? The United States becomes larger with each battlefield victory. We still have claim Puerto Rico and a piece of Cuba, home for the huge Guantanamo Bay facility.
World War I saw us join other powers to battle a coalition of enemies. The Allies would fight the Axis powers until one side gave up or surrendered. We are victorious and require Germany to give up its army, navy and war making ability. Victory is ours. (Some parallels exist here in our disbanding of the Iraqi Army and I will visit that at another time.)
World War II coined the phrase unconditional surrender. Victory would be defined as the total capitulation of the Nazi's and their allies. We achieved this victory in Europe and Japan.
Was this our last victory? Korea and Vietnam do not seem to meet any criteria of victory. Even Panama seems to accept the possibility of Noriega returning. He is up for release soon. The First Gulf War sowed the seeds for a regional distaste for the United States and in the view of some the rise of Al Queda in Saudi Arabia. Most of the September 11th hijackers were Saudi. At best the First Gulf War was a queasy victory.
This brings us to Iraq. The United States does not want territory from this action or oil either. If we wanted the oil we would have already taken it. We do not want to destroy the Shia Madhi Army, we also could have done that. We are even now providing some Sunni groups with weapons that have already been shown to be used against our forces. We strive for little collateral damage in Iraq when during WW I and WW II collateral damage was a strategic part of our fight for victory.
Under today's political pressure, strict guidelines placed on out military, and no desire for the spoils of war, victory as we know it is probably unattainable in Iraq. So please someone describe for me what a "victory" in Iraq would look like.
The United States was victorious in our war with England for independence. Victory was easy to describe for we had a nation to show for it. We even defended this victory with the outcome of the War of 1812 when England tried to reel us back in.
The Mexican War saw the United States victorious 30 years later. That victory was also easy to define and it stretched from Texas to California. Our battle with illegal immigration can be traced back to that event and earlier. One day history may even declare Mexico as the victors of that war.
The Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th Century also had the acquisition of territory as its gauge for victory. Ever hear of the Philippines or Cuba or Puerto Rico? The United States becomes larger with each battlefield victory. We still have claim Puerto Rico and a piece of Cuba, home for the huge Guantanamo Bay facility.
World War I saw us join other powers to battle a coalition of enemies. The Allies would fight the Axis powers until one side gave up or surrendered. We are victorious and require Germany to give up its army, navy and war making ability. Victory is ours. (Some parallels exist here in our disbanding of the Iraqi Army and I will visit that at another time.)
World War II coined the phrase unconditional surrender. Victory would be defined as the total capitulation of the Nazi's and their allies. We achieved this victory in Europe and Japan.
Was this our last victory? Korea and Vietnam do not seem to meet any criteria of victory. Even Panama seems to accept the possibility of Noriega returning. He is up for release soon. The First Gulf War sowed the seeds for a regional distaste for the United States and in the view of some the rise of Al Queda in Saudi Arabia. Most of the September 11th hijackers were Saudi. At best the First Gulf War was a queasy victory.
This brings us to Iraq. The United States does not want territory from this action or oil either. If we wanted the oil we would have already taken it. We do not want to destroy the Shia Madhi Army, we also could have done that. We are even now providing some Sunni groups with weapons that have already been shown to be used against our forces. We strive for little collateral damage in Iraq when during WW I and WW II collateral damage was a strategic part of our fight for victory.
Under today's political pressure, strict guidelines placed on out military, and no desire for the spoils of war, victory as we know it is probably unattainable in Iraq. So please someone describe for me what a "victory" in Iraq would look like.
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