When President Clinton tours Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala early next month, he will promise continued U.S. support in the effort to rebuild after Hurricane Mitch, the region’s deadliest natural disaster this century. More than 9,000 were killed in the late-October storm, and by some estimates the damage tops $5 billion. Last week the White House announced an aid package of $1 billion–one of the largest relief efforts in history. But underneath the good will lies a worry that more Central Americans will attempt Ada’s journey. From November to the end of January, U.S. agents along the Texas border, where most of the migrants cross, caught 6,555 “other than Mexicans”–nearly all Central American–an increase of 86 percent from the same period a year ago; the aid package includes $80 million to create 3,000 more detention spaces for the new arrivals. “It’s really a very complex line that we’re walking,” said Doris Meissner, the INS commissioner. “On the one hand, we want to be as strongly in support of rebuilding as possible. At the same time, you can’t have open borders in response to the tragedy. The answer is in re-establishing a livelihood and an infrastructure where people live.”
The United States does not have to fight the battle against illegal immigrants alone. It has two partners trying to stop them before they even reach Texas. Since the storm, Mexico and Guatemala have turned back tens of thousands of migrants. “The inspiration,” says Oscar Gonzalez, a prominent human-rights advocate in Mexico, “is coming from the U.S. government.” True, in one recent case the United States helped pay to deport Mitch migrants from Guatemala. But officials in Mexico and Guatemala, worried that their countries could become bottlenecks of northern-bound Central Americans, are also acting in their own interests. The results are clear: the U.S. border, in effect, has been pushed south, the flow of Mitch migrants into the United States has so far been kept below the crisis level, and the journey from Central America to the United States is more difficult than ever.
Back in Honduras, in the northern county of Arizona, Elida Marino Fiallos, Ada’s mother, runs a small shop on a nameless street. The rickety display case is filled with clothes and metal pots, and rice and bean sacks line the shelves in the rear. Three years ago her husband ran into problems paying the mortgage on the store, so he went north to the United States. Now he lives and works illegally in North Carolina and sends home $100, sometimes more, every month. With business slumping after the hurricane, the money hasn’t been enough to take care of Ada’s six siblings, the cousins who congregate on the crumbling concrete porch and–since Ada departed–Yesenia, the 2-year-old daughter she left in her mother’s care.
Reaching the village where Ada once lived requires driving across several shallow rivers. The road was cut off when Mitch washed away the main bridge. Nearby fields where thousands used to work are graveyards of dead banana trees. Ada’s house, a one-room wood shanty with a dirt floor, once stood with at least a dozen others on a bank of the Mezapita River. Ada and Yesenia had lived there together since her husband was killed two years ago in what she describes as a bar fight. When the rains started, Ada fled to higher ground. After the flood waters receded, she couldn’t find her house. During Mitch, the river carved a new path, sweeping the house away and scattering boulders and uprooted trees along the shore. “I have nightmares,” says Lorenza Deras, a 65-year-old neighbor whose home barely survived. “The water carries me away.”
Ada had waited for nearly a month to see if international aid would reach her. With access to her village essentially cut off, it never did. Finally, one day in late November, she told her mother she was leaving, and that soon she, too, like her father, would be wiring home dollars. Her mother told her: “I’m going to pray to the Lord to get you across the border–and to get you a job in the United States.”
In normal times, the poorest of the poor rarely migrate. The trip requires money, if only to pay smugglers. Immigration experts say Mitch has created immigrants who are more desperate. They leave with almost nothing. And they become easy prey for corrupt police, bandits and more violent criminals. “Eighty percent of the women who pass through here have been raped in Mexico,” says Flor Maria Rigoni, a priest who runs shelters along the Mexican-Guatemalan border, where more than 1,500 Mitch migrants spent at least two nights in January. “The people heading for the United States say, ‘First we have to cross hell’.”
For 17-year-old Angel Javier Gutierrez, that meant losing part of his left leg. The storm destroyed his family’s house and stall at a market in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. In early January he left without telling his parents, bribed his way across Guatemala, sneaked across the border into Mexico and hitched freight trains north. But in Mexico City, he slipped under the wheels of a moving train car, and his leg had to be amputated. Now he is being held in a Mexican detention center with 200 other migrants–the largest number of them from Central America–while officials figure out how to fly him back to Honduras. “I wanted to send my family money from the United States,” he says. “Now I just want to go home.”
Ada at least had one advantage: a destination, her father in North Carolina. She reasoned that her journey would be easier than his had been. Word on the street in Honduras was that the United States had opened its borders to Mitch victims. The rumor was based on a misinterpretation of a U.S. moratorium–issued by President Clinton after the storm–on deportations of Hondurans and Nicaraguans living illegally in the United States. The wages they send home are the only part of their countries’ economies not touched by the storm. But the measure came with a catch: only immigrants who can prove they had arrived by Dec. 30 are allowed to stay. The United States has launched a publicity campaign in Central America to explain the law. But that was after Ada was gone.
She left on Nov. 25, with the equivalent of about $50 her family had borrowed from friends at their Pentecostal church. The next day she crossed the border into Guatemala and boarded a bus headed toward Mexico. But Guatemalan police stopped the bus and asked to see her passport. Like most Central Americans, she doesn’t have one. So the police plucked her out of the bus, detained her for a few hours and then told her she would have to return to Honduras. Undeterred, Ada hitched a lift in the back of a pickup to the Mexican border. Some street vendors told her which crossing point would give her the best chance of dodging the Mexican police on the other side.
But she couldn’t avoid them the next day, Dec. 2. They raided the spot in the Chiapas mountains where she had planned to spend the night with other Hondurans heading north. “The people who helped us cross were collaborating with the police,” Ada says. She was interviewed, photographed and detained overnight in a room filled with women and suitcases. The next morning the authorities fed her a breakfast of beans and eggs, loaded her on a bus with about 30 other Central Americans and drove her back to Guatemala. Two days later she crossed into Mexico again. For the next two weeks Ada slept under a tarp in roadside forests. She hitched rides instead of taking public buses, which had become targets for police stings. But on Dec. 17, she was riding in the back of a pickup near Veracruz when it came to a police roadblock. Once again, she was bused back to Guatemala. “I didn’t expect this,” she says. “I thought I could just make my way across Mexico.”
But what happened? Guatemala was once easy to navigate. Because of a regional agreement, citizens of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua were allowed to freely cross Guatemala’s borders with only an identity card. But two weeks after the storm, Guatemala angered its neighbors by cutting off access to the Mexican border for people without a passport. Guatemalan officials say too many migrants were congregating on the border, creating a security threat. Demetrios Papademetriou, an immigration expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has another explanation: “They’re buckling under pressure from the United States. There is no other compelling reason for Guatemala to stop people from crossing its territory.” Certainly U.S. officials don’t want the migrants getting closer. On Dec. 12, Guatemalan authorities rounded up 600 illegal immigrants in states bordering Mexico and loaded them on 10 rented buses to El Salvador and Honduras. INS officials acknowledge that the U.S. government paid the bill for the buses.
Long before Mitch, U.S. immigration officials have provided training for and traded intelligence with their Central American counterparts. The INS helped craft a law that recently went into effect in Guatemala–cracking down on human smugglers–as well as similar legislation that is expected to be passed soon in El Salvador. The U.S. relationship with Mexico over immigration has been more contentious. Mexican officials are wary of being seen as enforcers of U.S. policy, but they have at times helped their northern neighbor when the migrants are not Mexicans. For example, in the mid-1990s several boats loaded with Chinese were headed for California. Rather than risk clogging its courts with the Chinese cases, the United States paid for Mexico to divert the boats to Mexican territory and quickly deport most of the passengers. And over the last decade, Mexico has beefed up patrol of its own border with Guatemala. To get a visa to Mexico, Central Americans must show a passport and prove that property and bank accounts remain back home–the same sort of requirements the United States has for Mexicans.
In the case of Hurricane Mitch, Mexico found itself allied to the United States. The influx of migrants has overwhelmed the 800 immigration agents stationed throughout Mexico. As a result, state and federal police have been playing a greater role in apprehending illegal immigrants, which worries human-rights advocates. Between Nov. 1 and Jan. 31, Mexico caught and expelled 31,995 migrants from its five busiest immigration stations–more than a 70 percent increase over the same period a year ago. Mexican officials say they have no other choice but to crack down on Central Americans. “If we are not strict on our southern border then we wind up with lots of Central Americans unable to get into the United States, living as undocumented immigrants,” says Alejandro Carillo Castro, head of the National Migration Institute, Mexico’s version of the INS. He also points out the difference between U.S. and Mexican treatment of migrants: “In our country it is not a crime to be an undocumented immigrant. It is an administrative violation that is sanctioned accordingly.” That sanction is a brief detention and a bus trip back to the Guatemalan border, usually within 24 hours.
Then, usually, they try again. Ada, broke and discouraged from being sent back twice, decided to go back to Honduras and spend Christmas with her family before moving north again. She set out in early January, this time with slightly more money and three companions–her uncle, his wife and their 16-year-old daughter. “The first time I spent all the money helping others,” she says. This time she stretched it out over the month, living on about $2 a day, begging for cookies and sodas from shops along the highways. The three reached the border on Jan. 31, and slightly before dusk crossed the river and climbed a grassy bank onto Texas soil. They didn’t try to run when the Border Patrol car arrived. Instead, they remembered the radio reports back home, promising help for immigrants who arrived in the United States. They thought of the agents as their welcoming committee and gladly climbed into the back of the car.
To protect her father, Ada never told the authorities about him. That may have cost Ada her freedom. Even before Mitch, the INS faced a shortage of jail space for illegal immigrants–and so for several weeks was releasing thousands of Mitch refugees on their own recognizance. Those immigrants with children, as well as those who could provide the address of a relative living in the United States, got priority. Ada’s aunt and her daughter were freed immediately and, traveling with other Hondurans, made their way across the United States and eventually to New York City, where they are looking for work. Her uncle was released soon after. They will later be expected to appear at deportation hearings but, like many illegals who are released, will most likely skip court.
Ada will probably not have that choice. Deportations of Hondurans are likely to begin this week. Ada is a prisoner in the INS detention center in El Paso, Texas, and deportation proceedings against her have begun. “I hope the judge will have pity on me so I can stay in the country,” she says. And if she is deported? “I will probably try again.” So will thousands more victims of Mitch–and the authorities of Guatemala, Mexico and the United States will be waiting for them.
