Enrique's Journey Part 5

Here the locomotives accelerate. Sometimes they reach 25 miles per hour. Enrique knows he must heave himself up onto a car before the train comes to an orange bridge that crosses the Coatan River, just beyond the end of the cemetery. He has learned to make his move early, before the train gathers speed.

Most freight cars have two ladders on a side, each next to a set of wheels. Enrique always chooses a ladder at the front. If he misses and his feet land on the rails, he still has an instant to jerk them away before the back wheels arrive. But if he runs too slowly, the ladder will yank him forward and send him sprawling. Then the front wheels, or the back ones, could take an arm, a leg, perhaps his life.

"Se lo comio el tren," other migrants will say. "The train ate him up."

Already, Enrique has four jagged scars on his shins from frenzied efforts to board trains.

The lowest rung of the ladder is waist-high. When the train leans away, it is higher. If it banks a curve, the wheels kick up hot white sparks, burning Enrique's skin. He has learned that if he considers all of this too long, he will fall behind-and the train will pa.s.s him by. This time, he trots alongside a gray hopper car. He grabs one of its ladders, summons all of his strength, and pulls himself up. One foot finds the bottom rung, then the other.

He is aboard.

Enrique looks ahead on the train. Men and boys are hanging on to the sides of tank cars, trying to find a spot to sit or stand. Some of the youngsters could not land their feet on the ladders and have pulled themselves up rung by rung on their knees, which are bruised and bloodied.

Suddenly, Enrique hears screams. Three cars away, a boy, twelve or thirteen years old, has managed to grab the bottom rung of a ladder on a fuel tanker, but he cannot haul himself up. Air rushing beneath the train is sucking his legs under the car. It is tugging at him harder, drawing his feet toward the wheels.

"Pull yourself up!" a man says.

"Don't let go!" another man shouts. He and others crawl along the top of the train to a nearby car. They shout again. They hope to reach the boy's car before he is so exhausted he must let go. By then, his tired arms would have little strength left to push away from the train's wheels.

The boy dangles from the ladder. He struggles to keep his grip. Carefully, the men crawl down and reach for him. Slowly, they lift him up. The rungs batter his legs, but he is alive. He still has his feet.

GETTING ABOARD.

There are no women on board the train today; it is too dangerous. There are several children, some much younger than Enrique. One is only eleven. He is among the 20 to 30 percent of those boarding the trains in Tapachula who are fifteen or under, by estimate of Grupo Beta, a government migrant rights group in Chiapas. This eleven-year-old tells Enrique that he, too, was left behind with his grandmother in Honduras. He, too, is going alone to find his mother in the United States. He tells Enrique that he is frantic to see her.

Enrique has encountered children as young as nine. Some speak only with big brown eyes or a smile. Others talk openly about their mothers: "I felt alone. I only talked to her on the phone. I didn't like that. I want to see her. When I see her, I'm going to hug her a lot, with everything I have."

Enrique guesses there are more than two hundred migrants on board, a tiny army of them who charged out of the cemetery with nothing but their cunning. Arrayed against them is la migra, along with crooked police, street gangsters, and bandits. They wage what a priest at a migrant shelter calls la guerra sin nombre, the war with no name. Chiapas, he says, "is a cemetery with no crosses, where people die without even getting a prayer." A 1999 human rights report said that migrants trying to make it through Chiapas face "an authentic race against time and death."

All of this is nothing, however, against Enrique's longing for his mother, who left him behind eleven years ago. Although his efforts to survive often force her out of his mind, at times he thinks of her with a loneliness that is overwhelming. He remembers when she would call Honduras from the United States, the concern in her voice, how she would not hang up before saying, "I love you. I miss you."

Enrique considers carefully. Which freight car will he ride on? This time he will be more cautious than before.

Boxcars are the tallest. Their ladders do not go all the way up. Migra agents would be less likely to climb to the top. And he could lie flat on the roof and hide. From there he could see the agents approaching, and if they started to climb up, he could jump to another car and run.

But boxcars are dangerous. They have little on top to hold on to. Inside a boxcar might be better. But police, railroad security agents, or la migra could bar the doors, trapping him inside.

Another migrant, Darwin Zepeda Lopez, recounts what can happen in a locked boxcar.

Coyotes, or smugglers, mistook him for a paying customer and herded him along with their clients toward four boxcars, their doors open. Then they loaded him and about forty of the others into one of the cars. Zepeda, twenty-two, says he heard the metal doors slide, then clang shut. The smugglers locked them in from the outside, so the boxcar would not look suspicious. It was April 2000 in southern Mexico, and the outdoor temperature was climbing past 100 degrees. Inside, the car was turning into an oven.

As the train rolled north, the migrants drank their water bottles dry. The air in the car turned rank with sweat. Zepeda could hardly breathe. People began screaming and shouting for help. Some knelt and pleaded with G.o.d to stop the train.

Fistfights broke out in his boxcar as the riders jockeyed to suck fresh air through tiny rust holes over the doors. After four hours, he says, a woman with asthma begged for water, then slumped to the floor, unconscious. Others pried open her mouth and tried to give her the few drops they could find. Finally, they left her for dead. Some stood on her to reach the highest airholes.

In the next five hours, before immigration agents and Mexican soldiers stopped the train and opened the doors, Zepeda saw seven migrants fall to the floor. The boxcar, he says, looked like a rolling morgue.

Enrique looks elsewhere. A good place to hide could be under the cars, up between the axles, balancing on a foot-wide iron shock absorber. But Enrique might be too big to fit. Besides, trains kick up rocks. Worse, if his arms grew tired or if he fell asleep, he would drop directly under the wheels. He tells himself, "That's crazy."

He could sit on a round compressor at the end of some hoppers, his feet dangling just above the train wheels. Or stand on a tiny ledge, barely big enough for his feet, on the end of other hopper cars. His hands would turn numb and callous after hours of hanging on.

Enrique settles for the top of a hopper. He finds one that is full, making it more stable. He holds on to a grate running along the rim. From his perch fourteen feet up, he can see anyone approaching on either side of the tracks up ahead or from another car. Below, at each end, the hopper's wheels are exposed: shiny metal, three feet in diameter, five inches thick, churning. He stays as far away as he can.

He doesn't carry anything that might keep him from running fast. At most, if it is exceptionally hot, he ties a nylon string on an empty plastic bottle, wraps it around his arm, and fills the bottle with water when he can.

Some migrants climb on board with a toothbrush tucked into a pocket. A few allow themselves a small reminder of family. One father wraps his eight-year-old daughter's favorite hair band around his wrist. Others bring a small Bible with telephone numbers, penciled in the margins, of their mothers or fathers or other relatives in the United States. Maybe nail clippers, a rosary, or a scapular with a tiny drawing of San Cristobal, the patron saint of travelers, or of San Judas Tadeo, the patron saint of desperate situations.

As usual, the train lurches hard from side to side. Enrique holds on with both hands. Occasionally, the train speeds up or slows down, smashing couplers together and jarring him backward or forward. The wheels rumble, screech, and clang. Sometimes each car rocks the other way from the ones ahead and behind. El Gusano de Hierro, some migrants call it. The Iron Worm.

In Chiapas, the tracks are twenty years old. Some of the ties sink, especially during the rainy season, when the roadbed turns soggy and soft. Gra.s.s grows over the rails, making them slippery.

When the cars round a bend, they feel as if they might overturn. Enrique's train runs only a few times a week, but it averages three derailments a month-seventeen accidents in a particularly bad month-by the count of Jorge Reinoso, chief of operations for Ferrocarriles Chiapas-Mayab, the railroad. One year before, a hopper like Enrique's overturned with a load of sand, burying three migrants alive. In another spot, six hoppers tumbled over. One migrant was crushed between the train car and a bridge the train was crossing. Another migrant was found dead downstream. The cars' rusty remains are scattered, upside down, next to the tracks. Enrique was once on a train that derailed. His car lurched so violently that he briefly thought of jumping off to save himself. Enrique rarely lets himself admit fear, but he is scared that his car might tip. El Tren de la Muerte, some migrants call it. The Train of Death.

Others cast the train in a more positive light. They believe it has a n.o.ble purpose. Sometimes, the train tops are packed with migrants. They face north, toward a new land, a neverending exodus. El Tren Peregrino, they call it. The Pilgrim's Train.

Enrique is struck by the magic of the train-its power and its ability to take him to his mother. To him, it is El Caballo de Hierro. The Iron Horse.

The train picks up speed. It pa.s.ses a brown river that smells of sewage. Then a dark form emerges ahead. Migrants at the front of the train, nearest to the locomotive, call back a warning over the train's deafening din. They sound an alarm, migrant to migrant, car to car. "Rama!" the migrants yell. "Branch!" They duck.

Enrique grips the hopper. To avoid the branches, he sways from side to side. All of the riders sway in unison, ducking the same branches-left, then right. One moment of carelessness-a glance down at a watch, a look toward the back of the train at the wrong time-and the branches will hurl them into the air. Matilda de la Rosa, who lives by the tracks, recalls a migrant who came to her door with an eyeball hanging on his cheek. He cupped it near his face, in his right hand. He told her, "The train ripped out my eye."

A DREADED STOP.

Each time the train slows, Enrique goes on high alert for la migra. Migrants wake one another and begin climbing down to prepare to jump. They lean outward, trying to glimpse what is causing the train to change pace. Is it another false alarm? Sometimes, an oncoming train forces the engineer to pull off onto a siding. A migrant, moving from car to car, can inadvertently step on the pressurized brake line that runs the length of the train. Other migrants, frustrated by the train's pace, disconnect the brake line on purpose. The conductor must stop to fix the problem. A bad curve can also cause a train to slow. If the train speeds up again, everyone climbs back up. The movement down and up the ladders looks like a strangely ch.o.r.eographed two-step.

But slowing down at Huixtla, with its red-and-yellow depot, can mean only one thing: coming up is La Arrocera, one of the most dreaded immigration checkpoints in Mexico. Of the half-dozen checkpoints Enrique has eluded in southern Mexico, he fears La Arrocera most.

Immigration agents picked this place, named after two rice warehouses, because it is so isolated. There are acres of open cattle range and few houses or busy streets where migrants can hide. Usually, half of those aboard are caught by migra agents.

Enrique has defied La Arrocera before. On his last attempt, he lay flat on top of a hopper. It was night. Migra agents' flashlight beams danced over his car several times. Enrique held his breath. The train pushed forward.

This time, he arrives in the heat of noon. Tension builds. Some migrants stand on top of the train, straining to see the migra agents up ahead. The first migrants who spot twenty agents down the tracks scream a warning to the others: "Bajense! Get down!" As the train brakes, they jump.

The train lurches sideways. Enrique leaps from car to car, finally landing on a boxcar. The train stops. He lies flat, facedown, arms spread-eagle, hoping la migra won't see him. But several agents do.

"Bajate, puto! Get down, you wh.o.r.e!"

"No! I'm not coming down!"

There is no ladder all the way to the top. The only way up is to straddle their legs across two adjoining boxcars, using the horizontal ridges on the ends of the cars to inch higher. Maybe they won't come up after him.

"Get down!"

"No!"

The agents summon reinforcements. One starts to climb up.

Enrique scrambles to his feet and races along the top of the train, soaring across the four-foot gaps between cars. As he runs, three agents follow on the ground, pelting him with rocks and sticks, an experience many migrants say they have here. Stones clang against the metal. Enrique flees from car to car, more than twenty in all, struggling to keep his footing each time he leaps from a hopper to a fuel tanker, which is lower and has a rounded top.

He is running out of train. He will have to go around La Arrocera alone. It may be suicidal, but he has no choice. More stones ping off the train. Enrique scurries down a ladder and sprints into the bushes.

"Alto! Alto! Stop!" the agents shout.

As Enrique runs, he hears what he thinks are gunshots behind him.

Except in extraordinary circ.u.mstances, Mexican immigration agents are barred from carrying firearms. According to a retired agent, however, most have .38-caliber pistols. Some of the shelter workers tell of migrants. .h.i.t by bullets. Others tell of torture. Before long, Enrique will meet a man whose chest is pockmarked with cigarette burns. The man tells him that a migra agent at La Arrocera branded him.

In the scrub brush, though, Enrique worries less about agents than about madrinas with machetes. The name for these men is a play on words: these civilians help the authorities, as a madrina, or G.o.dmother, would, and administer madrizas, or savage beatings. Human rights activists and some police agencies say the madrinas commit some of the worst atrocities-rapes and torture-and are allowed by authorities to keep a portion of what they steal.

Sometimes, a madrina rides the train and pretends to be a migrant. The madrina radios ahead to report how many migrants are aboard and where they are hidden so agents will know which cars to target when they stop the train. Migra agents wear green uniforms. Enrique can't distinguish madrinas, who wear plain clothes.

Enrique runs on. He crawls under a barbed-wire fence, then under a double strand of smooth wire. It is electrified. At night, Guillermina Galvez Lopez, whose wooden hut fronts the rails at La Arrocera, hears the trains and, not long afterward, the piercing screams of migrants, wet from the swampy gra.s.s, who run into the wire.

"Help me! Help me!" they wail.

Ten times in ten months, train riders have carried to her front door men and boys without arms, legs, or heads. Often they are injured as they try to outrun the agents and get onto and off of moving trains.

Migrants hide their money. Some st.i.tch it into the seams of their pants. Others put a bit in their shoes, a bit in their shirts, and a coin or two in their mouths. Still others bag it in plastic and tuck it into intimate places. Some roll it up and slip it into their walking sticks. Others hollow out mangoes, drop their pesos inside, then pretend to be eating the fruit.

Enrique figures he doesn't have enough money to bother.

Enrique knows he has plunged deep into bandit territory. At least three, maybe five swarms of robbers, some with Uzis, some on drugs, patrol the three-mile dirt paths that migrants must use to go around La Arrocera, authorities say.

Migrants describe similar experiences. "Don't run, or we'll kill you," bandits yell. Strip off your clothes. Lay facedown on the ground. Bandits edge their machetes against migrants' throats or ears as they disrobe. Keep quiet, they are told. Don't look up. One bandit splits open waistbands, collars, and cuffs looking for hidden money. They keep belts, watches, and shoes. Migrants who resist are beaten or killed. Everyone gets a final warning: "If you say anything to the authorities, we will find you and kill you." Local residents see groups of migrants walking down dirt roads naked, stripped of everything.

There's El Cantil, a tall, skinny man named after a particularly agile and poisonous snake. El Cochero leads ten bandits. La Mano de Seda, the Hand of Silk, is known for his mastery at robbing people. La Mara Valiente lives in the nearby town of Buenos Aires and operates where the tracks cross Reforma Ranch.

After the day's robberies, bandits retire to the neighboring town of Huixtla to drink and visit prost.i.tutes. At the Quinto Patio, with its hot pink facade, a sign beckons: LADIES DANCE. There are La Embajada nightclub, Los Pinos, Las Brisas, and the Bar El Noa Noa, which advertises pole dancers.

The bandits are so well known and seem to operate with such impunity that Mario Campos Gutierrez, a supervisor with Grupo Beta Sur, thinks the authorities collaborate. Many of the bandits, Campos says, are current or former police officers. If they are arrested, they pay bribes and are quickly released. Witness statements against them mysteriously disappear. Migrants can't wait around for months until the trial. Bandits long ago intimidated any La Arrocera residents who considered testifying.

"If you say anything, they kill you. Better to keep your mouth shut," says Antonio, a local elderly man, who is afraid to give his last name. An ice cream vendor near La Arrocera adds, "If you turn them in, they get out, and they come after you. They operate by light of day. There is no law here."

The last time Enrique sneaked past La Arrocera, he was lucky because he was careful. He stuck with a band of street gangsters. Bandits try to avoid gangsters, who are probably armed, preferring easier prey. Enrique and the gangsters ran past a group of Mexican men standing by the tracks, machetes at their sides. The men looked at them intently but did not move or attack.

This time he is alone. He focuses on the thought that will make him run the fastest: "I cannot miss the train."

If he misses the one he just left, he knows he will be a sitting duck, waiting for days in the bushes and the tall gra.s.s until another one comes.

Enrique races so fast he feels the blood pounding at his temples. The ground is wet, slippery. The gra.s.s, growing in three-foot tentacles, la.s.sos his feet. He stumbles, gets up, and keeps running. He pa.s.ses an abandoned brick house. Half the roof is gone.

The house is notorious. Not long before, Grupo Beta found a bed of bricks inside, covered with emerald green leaves from a plant that looked like a bird-of-paradise-and two soiled pairs of panties crumpled on the dirt floor. Women are raped here, most recently a sixteen-year-old a.s.saulted repeatedly over three days.

Many are gang-raped, including a Salvadoran woman, four months pregnant, who was a.s.saulted at gunpoint by thirteen bandits along the railroad tracks to the south. They arrive at local hospitals with severe internal hemorrhaging and long scratch marks on their b.u.t.tocks. Some get pregnant. A few go mad. In one Chiapas shelter, one raped woman paces, her arms tightly crossed in front of her, a blank stare on her face. At another shelter, a woman spends hours each day in the shower, trying to cleanse herself of the attack.

Nearly one in six migrant girls detained by authorities in Texas says she has been s.e.xually a.s.saulted during her journey, according to a 1997 University of Houston study. Some girls journeying north cut off their hair, strap their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and try to pa.s.s for boys. Others scrawl on their chests, TENGO SIDA. "I have AIDS."

Enrique does not stop. He reaches the Cuil bridge, where the railroad spans a forty-foot stream of murky brown water. This, migrants and Grupo Beta Sur officers say, is the most dangerous spot. El Cantil's group of bandits often lays in wait here. Bandits haul mattresses up into nearby trees, eat lunch, and wait for their prey. They use local children as lookouts, who race forward on their bicycles to tell the bandits when migrants are drawing near. As migrants cross the bridge, the bandits drop out of the limbs and surround them. Other robbers hide along the tracks above and below the bridge, which is thick with bushes and vines. One fishes in the river or cuts gra.s.s with a machete, like a fieldworker, and whistles to the others to set a trap.

Just a month before, bandits ambushed five Salvadorans as they crossed the bridge at 4 A.M. They tried to run. The bandits shot one in the back. Four months later, three Salvadorans and a Mexican, all in their twenties, were killed. The Salvadorans, their hands tied behind them, were shot in the head. The Mexican was stabbed. All they had left was their underwear. A local resident counts forty migrants felled here by bandits, some hacked to death with a machete.

Enrique dashes across the bridge and keeps running. Mountains stand to his right. The ground is so wet that farmers grow rice between their rows of corn. He can feel heat and humidity rising from the loamy earth. It saps his energy, but he runs on. Finally, he stops, doubled over, panting.

He is not sure why, but he has survived La Arrocera. Maybe it was his extra caution, maybe it was his decision to run, maybe it was his attempt to lie flat and hide atop the boxcar, which delayed his getting off the train and gave the bandits an opportunity to target migrants ahead of him.

He is desperate for water. He spots a house.

The people inside are not likely to give him any. Chiapas is fed up with Central American migrants, says Hugo angeles Cruz, a professor and migration expert at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Tapachula. They are poorer than Mexicans, and they are seen as backward and ignorant. People think they bring disease, prost.i.tution, and crime and take away jobs. At checkpoints, they bring gunfire, as well. Residents fear that the shots migra agents fire into the air to get migrants to surrender could fall on a child playing outside. Some migrants cannot be trusted. People in Chiapas talk of being robbed by migrants with guns and knives. They tell of an older woman who welcomed a migrant into her home and was beaten to death with an iron pipe. And of a man who sold chickens in a market and was kind to outsiders. He gave three Salvadorans a place to sleep and work killing and plucking birds. The Salvadorans robbed him and slit his throat.

Boys like Enrique are called "stinking undoc.u.mented." They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them. Some use slingshots. "Go to work!" "Get out! Get out!"

Drinking water can be impossible to come by. Migrants filter ditch sewage through T-shirts. Finding food can be just as difficult. Enrique is counting: in some places, people at seven of every ten houses turn him away.

"No," they say. "We haven't cooked today. We don't have any tortillas. Try somewhere else."

"No, boy, we don't have anything here."

Many La Arrocera residents lock themselves inside their homes when they hear the train coming. "I'm afraid," says local housewife Amelia Lopez Gamboa, who corrals her family inside her one-room brick house and bars the door.

Sometimes it is worse: people in the houses turn the migrants in.

Enrique sees another migrant who has managed to make it around La Arrocera. He, too, needs water badly, but he doesn't dare ask. He is afraid of walking into a trap. To migrants, begging in Chiapas is like walking up to a loaded gun.

"I'll go," Enrique says. "If they catch someone, it will be me."

Enrique also knows he is less likely to frighten people if he begs alone.

He approaches a house and speaks softly, his head slightly bowed. "I'm hungry. Can you spare a taco? Some water?" The woman inside sees injuries from the train-top beating he took during his last attempt to go north. "What happened?" she asks. She gives him water, bread, and beans. The other migrant comes nearer. She gives him food, too.

A horn blows. Enrique runs to the tracks. He looks all around, trying to spot migra agents, who sometimes race ahead in their trucks to catch migrants as they reboard. Other migrants who have survived La Arrocera come out of the bushes. They sprint alongside the train and reach for the ladders on the freight cars.

Sometimes, train drivers back up the locomotive and get a running start. They accelerate to prevent migrants from reboarding up ahead. This time, though, the train isn't going full throttle.

Enrique climbs up onto a hopper. The train picks up speed. For the moment, he relaxes.

A DECISION.

Back in Honduras, Maria Isabel is tense. She is bent on going to search for Enrique. Maybe she will find him along the way, in Mexico. If not, she will continue on to the United States. She and a friend have set a date to start the journey together.

Two days before the rendezvous, Maria Isabel confesses the plan to her aunt Gloria. She first gets Gloria's promise not to tell anyone, especially Maria Isabel's strict mother, Eva. "I'm going to the United States," Maria Isabel says.

Gloria finds a good-bye letter under Maria Isabel's mattress. "I'm leaving with a friend to find Enrique in Mexico," she writes. She bequeaths her stuffed toys to Gloria's fourteen-yearold daughter. The letter makes Gloria realize that Maria Isabel is serious.

That night, Gloria is so upset, her heart flutters. She can't sleep. The next morning, she confides in her daughter, Karla Yamileth Chavez. Karla immediately confronts Maria Isabel. "Are you crazy? You want to die along the way?" If you are pregnant, you could lose the child on the road, Karla says. She sends across town for Maria Isabel's mother.

Eva berates her daughter. "What are you thinking? If you have problems, come home. We'll manage."

Maria Isabel listens in silence. She is sorry she made the plan. When her travel companion arrives on the appointed day, Maria Isabel sends her away. But the reactions to her plan have only emphasized in her own mind how much danger Enrique is in.