Cover
story Migrants: the word of God that walks
By PAUL JEFFREY
Tapachula, Mexico
José Rene Lopez waited
patiently on the tracks for the freight train that heads north from this
southern Mexico border city.
Surrounded by scores of other migrants hoping to get to the
other side, the 20-year-old Honduran nervously kept his eyes moving,
scanning for trouble -- namely Mexican police officers who regularly rob and
brutalize migrants on their way through. Yet as the evening hours passed slowly
without a throbbing whistle announcing the trains departure, Lopez
relaxed, especially when some fellow travelers urged him to sing as hed
done the evening before in Tapachulas Catholic shelter for migrants.
Translated from Spanish, the song says: Mexico is beautiful,
but how I suffered. To pass through without papers is difficult. There are
5,000 kilometers that I traveled, and I remember each and every one.
After zipping up his coat, slicking back his hair, and clearing his throat
several times to the cheers of migrants who gathered around, he continued.
When I left my native land with the intention of getting to
the United States, I knew I would need more than courage, that the best among
us would perish on the way, he continued. There are three borders I
had to cross, three times I crossed without documents, three times I had to
risk my life. Thats why I say Im three times a wetback.
The song is a popular ballad in Central America, where millions
have traveled the route the lyrics describe. Like Woody Guthries songs
about dust bowl migrants, it spins the experience of the poor into troubling
questions. After I crossed the Guatemalan-Mexican border, they made me a
prisoner, even though we share the same language and skin color, Lopez
sang. How is it possible for them to call me a foreigner?
While the song echoes the mistreatment of migrants in Mexico, it
also describes how a Mexican named Juan aided the sojourner in the
middle of the desert. Without his lending me a hand I would be
dead, Lopez crooned.
Along the tracks in Tapachula, the solidarity the song describes
was incarnated by neighboring Mexican families who shared conversation, coffee
and tortillas with the waiting migrants. One woman gave a pair of old shoes to
a woman migrant whose plastic thongs were broken. One family prayed over a
young Nicaraguan, urging him to put his faith in God, and to stay awake and not
let go of the boxcar. Many migrants slip as they climb onto the moving train
and lose a leg or two under the heavy steel wheels. Someone is injured or
killed just about every week climbing onto a train in Tapachula.
Others fall asleep after hours of riding the train, lose their
grip and fall to their deaths. The family brought cup after cup of steaming
coffee to the young man.
When the train whistle finally sounded just before midnight, Lopez
and his traveling companions got ready. As the massive train picked up speed,
they ran to grab hold, swinging their bodies up onto the ladders at the ends of
the boxcars, waving goodbye to their new Mexican friends, excited to be moving
toward their dream. Yet 20 minutes north of Tapachula, the train was stopped
and surrounded by immigration officials and police. Lopez dream would
have to wait for another day.
Treated as a terrorist
Geography makes this region of southern Mexico a key step in the
migrants journey. Essentially the narrow part of the funnel, the isthmus
has seen hundreds of thousands of migrants pass through every year. Some come
from as far away as Africa and China, but many of those can afford expensive
migrant smugglers. The poor who ride the cargo trains are usually Central
Americans, mostly Hondurans and Salvadorans, their hurricane- and
earthquake-ravaged countries offering little hope for a better life.
In the past, if they were grabbed by the Mexican police, they were
simply dumped back on the Guatemalan side of the border, from where they set
off again toward the north, often the same day.
Yet in July 2001, Mexican President Vicente Fox offered to tighten
his countrys southern border with Guatemala and Belize. In exchange, he
hoped to win amnesty for undocumented Mexicans inside the United States and
perhaps even convince President George W. Bush to approve a guest worker
program modeled on the infamous bracero program initiated during World
War II.
Known as the Plan Sur -- the Southern Plan -- the new
policy was politically important for Fox, who has seen his popularity slide
after breaking the seven-decade hold on power of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party. The remittances all those Mexicans in the United States
send home, $8 billion in 2001, are needed to continue propping up Mexicos
troubled economy. The deal looks good to Bush as well, as it could
substantially improve his chances of winning the next presidential election by
appealing to the Mexican vote, especially in California, where many of the more
than 3 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States are living.
Last Septembers terrorist attacks, which have given the Bush
administration an excuse to project U.S. borders deeper into the region,
emboldened supporters of the Plan Sur, which essentially moves the focus of
immigrant detection, detention and deportation hundreds of miles to the south
and casts migrants as threats to national security. The migrant is now
being treated as a delinquent, as a terrorist, said Ademar Barilli, a
Scalabrini priest from Brazil who helps migrants in Tecun Uman, a nearby
Guatemalan border town.
Critics like Barilli claim the tightening of Mexicos
southern border is forcing migrants to take greater risks to avoid capture,
including traveling further out to sea in overloaded boats that too often
capsize, every year drowning scores of migrants in the Pacific.
Under the Plan Sur, many migrants detained in Mexico are being
transported back home to countries like Honduras and El Salvador aboard cushy
first-class buses. According to Fr. Florencio María Rigoni, a Scalabrini
priest from Italy who runs the Bethlehem House for Migrants in Tapachula,
removing them from the border area makes it more difficult and costly to
return.
It also makes it easier for some people to give up. For
those who have decided, for whatever reason, not to try again, it allows them
to go home, Rigoni said. And since many have no money at all,
its the only way they could get there. And they treat them well, give
them lunch, something to drink, put them on nice buses. They can return home
with their dignity intact, no matter that their dreams have turned to
ashes.
Mexican officials initially planned to send troops to seal off the
border. Yet that hasnt proved necessary. The corruption of Mexican
immigration officials and police, along with the arrival in the area of street
gangs that also prey on the migrants, mean the military simply isnt
needed.
Given the uniformed Mexico and the tattooed Mexico that
migrants encounter here, this filter of police and gangs that think its
open season on hunting and harassing migrants, no military force could close
off the border any better, Rigoni said.
Rigoni admitted that migrants are taking greater risks to avoid
detection, yet he said those migrants who get pushed the other way -- deeper
into the jungle -- are not necessarily facing greater risks. It takes
longer that way, and theres danger from some of the animals in the
jungle, he said. Yet the jungle also gives you water and food, and
it protects you from the criminals who prey on migrants. Moreover, the people
who live in the mountains are more hospitable, less suspicious, more willing to
share their tortillas with passing strangers.
The border of hell
Making it harder to get through also drives up the price charged
by the migrant smugglers who pull in an estimated $1 billion a year in Mexico.
Although more than 4,000 prisoners, many of them truck drivers caught carrying
what they jokingly call human bananas, are serving time in Mexican
jails for people smuggling, authorities say more than 100 criminal gangs keep
the business going.
Migrant smuggling has become more and more intertwined with drug
smuggling in southern Mexico. It costs a Mexican truck driver the same amount
in bribes to keep a truck from being searched, whether its transporting
cocaine or Hondurans. So the two types of contraband are increasingly being
combined, which observers report has exacerbated the violence already plaguing
the people-smuggling business.
About 80,000 migrants were detained and deported last year in this
border state of Chiapas, most of them Central Americans, and officials quickly
dubbed Plan Sur a success. Church officials at both ends of Mexico corroborated
the drop-off in the numbers of migrants passing through. The September
terrorist attacks in the United States reinforced the downward trend, as many
migrants paused for weeks while evaluating whether they wanted to go north to
the United States, where many Hispanics had lost their jobs in economically
vulnerable service industries. The number of migrants seeking shelter at the
Bethlehem House was down 70 percent last December compared with December of
2000. Yet by January they were on the move once again, and the number of
migrants passing through the house was up 30 percent over January of 2001.
Most of those migrating north are well aware of the dangers they
face. They know they have to confront the beast that is Mexico for
migrants. They know that by crossing the Suchiate River [the border between
Guatemala and Mexico] they are crossing the border of hell. Yet if their choice
is to die of hunger on their farm in Honduras, or to die in Mexico taking a
bold step toward a new horizon, they prefer the latter, Rigoni said.
I call these migrants the suicidas de hambre, people
driven by hunger to commit suicide. They come to throw themselves here,
preferring to die outside their country rather than face the shame of dying
defeated and broken on their land at home.
Rigoni said that while many Mexicans are hospitable to migrants,
the church in Mexico has yet to accept migrants as historical subjects. The
problem, he reported, is that Mexicans tend to see a migrant as someone
who goes away. Your kid who goes away, your neighbor. And when you leave the
boundaries of the church, you quit being a concern of the church.
The church in the United States, on the contrary, is more open to
migrants, Rigoni claimed. The U.S. church has done a better job of
reading its own story, of understanding that its a culture of migrants,
of different cultures. The church has rejected the paradigm of the melting pot
and embraced the experience of Pentecost, where you maintain your own identity
but still belong.
Southern Mexico, the priest argued, is a filter, a door,
from where we can see the future of humanity either as light or as chaos. I was
getting tired of my work here; its so depressing at times. But I confess
Ive fallen in love anew with it, because this migration is a sacrament,
its a living Eucharist of a humanity that wants to survive, that wants to
believe there is a future. Humanity is moving, and when humanity moves, all
borders move, borders that are economic, geographical, religious -- they all
move.
Migrants have long been seen by the church as an object of
evangelization or charity, Rigoni said. Yet thats changing. The
migrant has gone from being a problem to being a historical subject, the word
of God that walks, a face of God. If I want to know this God that moves, then
Ive got to know this face of God in the migrant.
Paul Jeffrey is a freelance writer who lives in
Honduras.
National Catholic Reporter, April 5,
2002
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