Enrique's Journey Part 3

The dealer mistakenly thinks that Enrique's cousin Tania Ninoska Turcios, eighteen, is his sister. Both girls are finis.h.i.+ng high school, and most of the family is away at a Nicaraguan hotel celebrating their graduation.

Enrique pries open the back door to the house where his uncle Carlos Orlando Turcios Ramos and aunt Rosa Amalia live. He hesitates. How can he do this to his own family? Three times, he walks up to the door, opens it, closes it, and leaves. Each time, he takes another deep hit of glue. He knows the dealer who threatened him has spent time in jail and owns a.57-caliber gun.

"It's the only way out," he tells himself finally, his mind spinning.

Finally, he enters the house, picks open the lock to a bedroom door, then jimmies the back of his aunt's armoire with a knife. He stuffs twenty-five pieces of her jewelry into a plastic bag and hides it under a rock near the local lumberyard.

At 10 P.M., the family returns to find the bedroom ransacked.

Neighbors say the dog did not bark.

"It must have been Enrique," Aunt Rosa Amalia says. She calls the police. Uncle Carlos and several officers go to find him.

"What's up?" he asks. He has come down off his high.

"Why did you do this? Why?" Aunt Rosa Amalia yells.

"It wasn't me." As soon as he says it, he flushes with shame and guilt. The police handcuff him. In their patrol car, he trembles and begins to cry. "I was drugged. I didn't want to do it." He tells the officers that a dealer wanting money had threatened to kill Tania.

He leads police to the bag of jewelry.

"Do you want us to lock him up?" the police ask.

Uncle Carlos thinks of Lourdes. They cannot do this to her. Instead, he orders Tania to stay indoors indefinitely, for her own safety.

But the robbery finally convinces Uncle Carlos that Enrique needs help. He finds him a $15-a-week job at a tire store. He eats lunch with him every day-chicken and homemade soup. He tells the family they must show him their love.

During the next month, January 2000, Enrique tries to quit drugs. He cuts back, but then he gives in. Every night, he comes home later. Maria Isabel begs him not to go up the hill where he sniffs glue. He promises not to but does anyway. He looks at himself in disgust. He is dressing like a slob-his life is unraveling.

He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he has to go find his mother.

Aunt Ana Lucia agrees. Ana Lucia is wound tight. She and Enrique have clashed for months. Ana Lucia is the only breadwinner in the household. Even with his job at the tire store, Enrique is an economic drain. Worse, he is sullying the only thing her family owns: its good name.

They speak bitter words that both, along with Enrique's grandmother agueda, will recall months later.

"Where are you coming from, you old b.u.m?" Ana Lucia asks as Enrique walks in the door. "Coming home for food, huh?"

"Be quiet!" he says. "I'm not asking anything of you."

"You're a lazy b.u.m! A drug addict! No one wants you here." All the neighbors can hear. "This isn't your house. Go to your mother!"

"I don't live with you. I live alone."

"You eat here."

Over and over, in a low voice, Enrique says, half pleading, "You better be quiet." Finally, he snaps. He kicks Ana Lucia twice, squarely in the b.u.t.tocks. She shrieks.

His grandmother runs out of the house. She grabs a stick and threatens to club him if he touches Ana Lucia again. Enrique turns on his heel. "No one cares about me!" he says. He stomps away. Ana Lucia threatens to throw his clothes out onto the street. Now even his grandmother wishes he would go to the United States. He is hurting the family-and himself. She says, "He'll be better off there."

GOOD-BYE.

Maria Isabel finds him sitting on a rock at a street corner, weeping, rejected again. She tries to comfort him. He is high on glue. He tells her he sees a wall of fire. His mother has just pa.s.sed through it. She is lying on the other side, and she is dying. He approaches the fire to save her, but someone walks toward him through the flames and shoots him. He falls, then rises again, unhurt. His mother dies. "Por que me dejo?" he cries out. "Why did she leave me?"

Even Enrique's sister and grandmother have urged Maria Isabel to leave Enrique, to find someone better. "What do you see in him? Don't you see he uses drugs?" people ask her. Her uncle is also wary of the drug-addicted teenager. He and Enrique both work at the same mechanic's shop, but the uncle never offers him a lift in his car to their job.

Maria Isabel can't leave him, despite his deep flaws. He is macho and stubborn. When they fight, he gives her the silent treatment. She has to break the ice. He is her third boyfriend but her first love. Enrique also provides a refuge from her own problems. Her aunt Gloria's son is an alcoholic. He throws things. He steals things. There are a lot of fights.

Maria Isabel loses herself in Enrique. At night, they sit on some big rocks outside his grandmother's home, where they have a bit of privacy, and talk. Enrique talks about his mother, his life with his grandmother Maria and his uncle Marco. "Why don't you leave your vices?" Maria Isabel asks. "It's hard," he answers quietly. When they walk by his drug haunts, she holds his hand tighter, hoping it will help.

Enrique feels shame for what he has done to his family and what he is doing to Maria Isabel, who might be pregnant. Maria Isabel pleads with him to stay. She won't abandon him. She tells Enrique she will move into the stone hut with him. But Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead. Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation. "If you had known my mom, you would know she's a good person," he says to his friend Jose. "I love her."

Enrique has to find her.

Each Central American neighborhood has a smuggler. In Enrique's neighborhood, it's a man who lives at the top of a hill. For $5,000, he will take anyone to los Estados. But Enrique can't imagine that kind of money.

He sells the few things he owns: his bed, a gift from his mother; his leather jacket, a gift from his dead uncle; his rustic armoire, where he hangs his clothes. He crosses town to say good-bye to Grandmother Maria. Trudging up the hill to her house, he encounters his father. "I'm leaving," he says. "I'm going to make it to the U.S." He asks him for money.

His father gives him enough for a soda and wishes him luck.

"Grandma, I'm leaving," Enrique says. "I'm going to find my mom."

Don't go, she pleads. She promises to build him a one-room house in the corner of her cramped lot. But he has made up his mind.

She gives him 100 lempiras, about $7-all the money she has.

"I'm leaving already, sis," he tells Belky the next morning.

She feels her stomach tighten. They have lived apart most of their lives, but he is the only one who understands her loneliness. Quietly, she fixes a special meal: tortillas, a pork cutlet, rice, fried beans with a sprinkling of cheese. "Don't leave," she says, tears welling up in her eyes.

"I have to."

It is hard for him, too. Every time he has talked to his mother, she has warned him not to come-it's too dangerous. But if somehow he gets to the U.S. border, he will call her. Being so close, she'll have to welcome him. "If I call her from there," he says to Jose, "how can she not accept me?"

He makes himself one promise: "I'm going to reach the United States, even if it takes one year." Only after a year of trying would he give up and go back.

Quietly, Enrique, the slight kid with a boyish grin, fond of kites, spaghetti, soccer, and break dancing, who likes to play in the mud and watch Mickey Mouse cartoons with his four-year-old cousin, packs up his belongings: corduroy pants, a T-s.h.i.+rt, a cap, gloves, a toothbrush, and toothpaste.

For a long moment, he looks at a picture of his mother, but he does not take it. He might lose it. He writes her telephone number on a sc.r.a.p of paper. Just in case, he also scrawls it in ink on the inside waistband of his pants. He has $57 in his pocket.

On March 2, 2000, he goes to his grandmother agueda's house. He stands on the same porch that his mother disappeared from eleven years before. He hugs Maria Isabel and Aunt Rosa Amalia. Then he steps off.

TWO.

Seeking Mercy.

The day's work is done at Las Anonas, a railside hamlet of thirty-six families in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, when a field hand, Sirenio Gomez Fuentes, sees a startling sight: a battered and bleeding boy, naked except for his undershorts.

It is Enrique. He limps forward on bare feet, stumbling first one way, then another. His right s.h.i.+n is gashed. His upper lip is split. The left side of his face is swollen. He is crying.

His eyes are red, filled with blood. He dabs open wounds on his face with a filthy sweater he has found on the tracks. Gomez hears him whisper, "Give me water, please."

The knot of apprehension in Sirenio Gomez melts into pity. He runs into his thatched hut, fills a cup, and gives it to Enrique.

"Do you have a pair of pants?" Enrique asks.

Gomez dashes back inside and fetches some. There are holes in the crotch and the knees, but they will do. Then, with kindness, Gomez directs Enrique to Carlos Carrasco, the mayor of Las Anonas. Whatever has happened, maybe he can help.

Enrique hobbles down a dirt road into the heart of the little town. He encounters a man wearing a white straw hat on a horse. Could he help him find the mayor? "That's me," the man says. He stops and stares. "Did you fall from the train?"

Again, Enrique begins to cry. Mayor Carrasco dismounts. He takes Enrique's arm and guides him to his home, next to the town church. "Mom!" he shouts. "There's a poor kid out here! He's all beaten up." Lesbia Sibaja, the mayor's mother, hears his urgent tone and rushes outside.

Enrique's cheeks and lips are swelling badly. He's going to die, Carrasco thinks. Carrasco drags a wooden pew out of the church, pulls it into the shade of a tamarind tree, and helps Enrique onto it.

The mayor's mother puts a pot of water on to boil and sprinkles in salt and herbs to clean his wounds. She brings Enrique a bowl of hot broth, filled with bits of meat and potatoes. He spoons the brown liquid into his mouth, careful not to touch his broken teeth. He cannot chew.

Townspeople come to see. They stand in a circle. "Is he alive?" asks Gloria Luis, a stout woman with long black hair. "Why don't you go home? Wouldn't that be better?" Other women press him to return to Honduras.

"I'm going to find my mom," Enrique says, quietly.

He is seventeen. It is March 24, 2000. Eleven years before, he tells the townspeople, his mother left home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to work in the United States. She did not come back, and now he is riding freight trains up through Mexico to find her.

Gloria Luis looks at Enrique and thinks about her own children.

She earns little; most people in Las Anonas make 30 pesos a day, roughly $3, working the fields. She digs into a pocket and presses 10 pesos into Enrique's hand.

Several other women open his hand, adding 5 or 10 pesos each.

Mayor Carrasco gives Enrique a s.h.i.+rt and shoes. He has cared for injured migrants before. Some have died. Giving Enrique clothing will be futile, Carrasco thinks, if he can't find someone with a car who can get the boy to medical help.

Adan Diaz Ruiz, mayor of San Pedro Tapanatepec, the county seat, happens by in his pickup.

Carras...o...b..gs a favor: Take this kid to a doctor.

Diaz balks. He is miffed. "This is what they get for doing this journey," he says. Enrique cannot pay for any treatment. The migrants most badly mangled by the train run up bills of $1,000 to $1,500 each when they end up at a public hospital one and a half hours away. Why, Diaz wonders, do these Central American governments send us all their problems?

Looking at the small, soft-spoken boy lying on the bench, he reminds himself that a live migrant is better than a dead one. In eighteen months, Diaz has had to bury eight of them, nearly all mutilated by the trains. Already today, he has been told to expect the body of yet another, in his late thirties.

Sending this boy to a local doctor would cost the county $60. Burying him in a common grave would cost three times as much. First Diaz would have to pay someone to dig the grave, then someone to handle the paperwork, then someone to stand guard while Enrique's unclaimed body is displayed on the steamy patio of the San Pedro Tapanatepec cemetery for seventy-two hours, as required by law.

All the while, people visiting the graves of their loved ones would complain about the smell of another rotting migrant.

"We will help you," he tells Enrique finally.

He turns him over to his driver, Ricardo Diaz Aguilar. Inside the mayor's pickup, Enrique sobs, but this time with relief. He says to the driver, "I thought I was going to die."

An officer of the judicial police approaches in a white pickup. Enrique cranks down his window. Instantly, he recoils. He recognizes both the officer with buzz-cut hair and the truck.

The officer, too, seems startled. Both stare silently at each other.

For a moment, the officer and the mayor's driver discuss the new dead migrant. Quickly, the policeman pulls away.

"That guy robbed me yesterday," Enrique says.

The policeman and a partner had seen Enrique and four other migrants drying off after bathing in a river five miles to the south. "Get over here," the buzz-cut officer barked, waving a pistol. One of the migrants bolted. Enrique obeyed, afraid of what might happen if he tried to run. The officers put the migrants in the back of their truck. They demanded 100 pesos to let them go. Enrique was relieved that one of the fellow migrants had the money and handed it over. "You won't tell anyone," the officer warned.

The mayor's driver is not surprised. The judicial police, he says, routinely stop trains to rob and beat migrants. The judiciales-the Agencia Federal de Investigacion-deny it.

Enrique has already had other run-ins with corrupt Mexican cops. Once, he was just fifteen miles inside Mexico, in Tapachula, when two munic.i.p.al police officers grabbed him and put him in the back of their pickup.

"Where are you from?" they demanded. "How much do you have on you? Give it to us and we will let you go." They stole everything he had, $4.

Four of five migrants who arrive at the Albergue Belen shelter in Tapachula have already been robbed, beaten, or extorted by police, says the shelter priest, Flor Maria Rigoni. At the Tapachula train station, fights break out between munic.i.p.al and state police officers over who gets to rob a group of migrants. Migrants describe being locked up by police officers until a relative in the United States can wire the kidnapper's fee and buy their freedom.

For immigration agents, squeezing cash from migrants is central to day-to-day operations, helping underpaid agents buy big houses and nice cars. At highway checkpoints, agents charge smugglers $50 to $200 per migrant to pa.s.s through. The checkpoint boss typically gets half the take; his workers split the rest. Officials who try to stop abuses receive repeated death threats. One government worker in the Mexican state of Tabasco, who in 1999 denounced corruption by certain judicial police agents, was dead a few days later in a mysterious car accident. "If you speak out too much against police corruption, you wake up with a machete in your back," says Father Rigoni.

In San Pedro Tapanatepec, the driver seeking a doctor for Enrique finds the last clinic still open that night.

PERSEVERANCE.

When Enrique's mother left, he was a child. Six months ago, the first time he set out to find her, he was still a callow kid. Now he is a veteran of a perilous pilgrimage by children, many of whom come looking for their mothers and travel any way they can. The thousands who ride freight trains must hop between seven and thirty trains to get through Mexico. The luckiest make it in a month. Others, who stop to work along the way, take a year or longer.

Some go up to five days without eating. Their prize possessions are sc.r.a.ps of paper, wrapped in plastic, often tucked into a shoe. On the sc.r.a.ps are telephone numbers: their only way to contact their mothers. Some do not have even that.

None of the youngsters has proper papers. Many are caught by the Mexican police or by la migra, the Mexican immigration authorities, who take them south to Guatemala. Most try again.

Like many others, Enrique has made several attempts.

The first: He set out from Honduras with a friend, Jose del Carmen Bustamante. They remember traveling thirty-one days and about a thousand miles through Guatemala into the state of Veracruz in central Mexico, where la migra captured them on top of a train and sent them back to Guatemala on what migrants call El Bus de Lagrimas, the Bus of Tears. These buses make as many as eight runs a day, deporting more than 100,000 unhappy pa.s.sengers every year.

The second: Enrique journeyed by himself. Five days and 150 miles into Mexico, he committed the mistake of falling asleep on top of a train with his shoes off. Police stopped the train near the town of Tonala to hunt for migrants, and Enrique had to jump off. Barefoot, he could not run far. He hid overnight in some gra.s.s, then was captured and put on the bus back to Guatemala.

The third: After two days, police surprised him while he was asleep in an empty house near Chahuites, 190 miles into Mexico. They robbed him, he says, and then turned him over to la migra, who put him, once more, on the bus to Guatemala.

The fourth: After a day and twelve miles, police caught him sleeping on top of a mausoleum in a graveyard near the depot in Tapachula, Mexico, known as the place where a migrant woman had been raped and, two years before that, another had been raped and stoned to death. La migra took Enrique back to Guatemala.

The fifth: La migra captured him as he walked along the tracks in Queretaro, north of Mexico City. Enrique was 838 miles and almost a week into his journey. He had been stung in the face by a swarm of bees. For the fifth time, immigration agents s.h.i.+pped him back to Guatemala.

The sixth: He nearly succeeded. It took him more than five days. He crossed 1,564 miles. He reached the Rio Grande and actually saw the United States. He was eating alone near some railroad tracks when migra agents grabbed him. They sent him to a detention center called El Corralon, the Corral, in Mexico City. The next day they bused him for fourteen hours, all the way back to Guatemala.

The bus unloaded him back across the Rio Suchiate in the rugged frontier town of El Carmen. The river marks the Guatemalan border, just as the Rio Grande defines the Mexican border to the north. A sign in block letters on top of a hill says BIENVENIDOS A GUATEMALA.

It was as if he had never left.