I began reporting on the Mexico-United States border and immigration in the late seventies. At the time, I was a reporter for the San Diego Union. Immigration was a major local story.
In later years, I covered immigration for Time and the Dallas Morning News. Before that, I wrote my master’s thesis on the newspaper reporting of irregular Mexican immigration. Surveying today’s border and immigration uproar, I see that this has long roots.
Here is an excerpt from my book.
In the summer of 2003, I reported on a heavily trafficked area of the Mexico-Guatemala border. One of my first contacts was Sergio Toledo, the district director of Mexico’s National Migration Institute. He watched bemusedly as dozens of Central Americans perched on inner-tube rafts floated leisurely across the Suchiate River, which divides Mexico from Guatemala, and stepped into Mexican territory.
“I would need 200 agents just to stop this,” he said. He made no move as the illegal entrants from Tecun Uman, Guatemala, hurried past him.
“I have twenty-six agents,” he said. “Including the other sector, we have just a little more than 200 officers to patrol 500 kilometers. In Mexico City, they say the army is supposed to be helping us.”
Some 100 yards downriver, ten Mexican soldiers washed clothes, ignoring the steady raft traffic.
Most of those who were sneaking into Mexico were headed for the United States, and Mexican officials, responding to heightened US concerns about terrorism, vowed to reinforce their border security. But Mexico’s southern frontier was as porous then as it had been when I first visited twenty years earlier.
“We have not found any terrorists coming in,” said Roberto Espinoza, chief of immigration enforcement for the border between Guatemala and the Mexican state of Chiapas. “But we can’t say for sure that none are coming in.” Noting that much of the frontier is covered by dense tropical vegetation, he added, “It is dangerous for us to go in there. We are unarmed, and there are armed gangs all over who rob and kill anyone, especially the migrants.”
There were some one hundred criminal bands in the area, ranging from large smuggling operations to robbers who preyed on immigrants, according to Mexican officials. They said that even modest smuggling rings depended on a network of guides, corrupt officials, and safe houses that reached into the United States.
While the US-Mexico border was studded with motion detectors, imposing fences, spotlights, night-vision cameras, aircraft, and all-terrain vehicles, Mexican officials had only pickup trucks and raw manpower. Meanwhile, the number of illegal immigrants deported from Chiapas–almost all Central Americans–had risen ten percent, to about 62,400, from the same time in 2002. But there had been no corresponding increase in the number of immigration agents assigned to Chiapas, said Espinoza.
“We conduct joint operations with the federal police and the army,” he said, “but those are not frequent. The truth is that with the little equipment and manpower we have, we are being overrun.” Plainly, the unregulated immigration flow was a problem many years in the making. Even in 2003, economic conditions deteriorated sharply in the Northern Triangle…
Inside the House of the Good Shepherd, Alma Cruz, 30, of Tegucigalpa, smiled wanly at the sight of children playing in the dimly lit shelter for injured migrants. Ms. Cruz’s experience graphically underscored the hazards of riding a freight train. On the night of February 8, 2003, she and scores of other migrants sought to board The Beast, the freight train that runs north. Cruz said her hands slipped from the slick iron ladder at the rear of a box-car.
“I felt a very hard blow, but I couldn’t tell where I had been hit,” she said. “I was on my back, and then suddenly, I felt the worst pain you can imagine. That is when I saw that my legs were gone. The train took them.”
Bystanders drawn by her shrieks rushed to her aid and then flagged down a car. “I never lost consciousness. I was just consumed by pain and the terror that I would die and leave my little girls,” said Cruz, who had two daughters, ages 5 and 2, left with her mother in Tegucigalpa. Cruz was waiting in hopes of receiving prosthetic legs. The shelter depends entirely on donations.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 