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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2007 
Mexican Border Serves as Gateway to U.S.
 Matt O'Brien - Contra Costa Times
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 |  | Migrants have been part of the Chiapas landscape for more than a century. Some stay to legally work on local fields; others flee north from the poverty or violence of their homelands. |  | |
Part of the landscape for more than a century, some migrants stop if they find work; others continue on their journey north.
Comitan, Mexico - First they must get to Mexico and cross it.
In the roads, forests and papaya fields southeast of Comitan, in Mexico's southernmost Chiapas state, Alejandro Lopez Cadenas watched for them.
"I respect life more than anything," said Lopez Cadenas, a 35-year-old agent with Grupo Beta, the humanitarian, nonenforcement arm of Mexico's immigration patrol.
He was walking down a path behind a popular local recreation spot called the Lagos de Colon, an idyllic collection of small natural swimming holes, when he and his Beta partner, Ricardo Ley, spotted a group of migrants moving west from the nearby Guatemalan border.
Unarmed, wearing Grupo Beta's trademark orange shirts and just hoping to give them a safety lesson, Lopez Cadenas and Ley tried to flag down the men, but they sprinted away. They were probably Hondurans, Ley said.
"Normally, the Hondurans and the Salvadorans go running," Ley said. "The Guatemalans, no. They stop."
Migrants have been part of the Chiapas landscape for more than a century. Some stay to legally work on local fields; others flee north from the poverty or violence of their homelands. Lopez Cadenas remembers, as a child, when they regularly passed through his family's farm en route to somewhere else.
Guatemala's border with southern Mexico is 600 miles, or about one-third the length of Mexico's northern border with the United States. It is an unwieldy, porous and forested border that has long served as an illegal gateway for tens of thousands of Central Americans each year, as well as migrants from other countries and continents trying to find a back route into the United States.
Some cross by raft into Mexico over the Suchiate River and on toward the city of Tapachula. But the shutdown this year of the main freight train line on Mexico's Pacific Coast plain has left many migrants stuck in southern Chiapas. Others now skip this region entirely, heading to the northern, jungled reaches of Guatemala before crossing into Mexico.
Many still jump onto moving trains farther north, putting their lives and limbs in danger. Others face a different kind of gauntlet, hiding in buses and trucks and avoiding robbers, gangs, drug-runners, local police and federal immigration agents.
Newspapers in Chiapas frequently report on the biggest immigration catches - 69 Central Americans detained in a produce truck one day. An additional 213 caught stuffed in a trailer and sent back.
"There's days you don't see anyone and there's days you see 20, 30," Lopez Cadenas said. "We tell them about the dangers they're going to find. We ask them if they're OK, if they have any health problems, if they've been extorted by any authorities."
Most pass in the night, avoiding Mexico's immigration checkpoints on the daytime roads.
About a half-hour after Lopez Cadenas and Ley tried to flag down the group of migrant men, Lopez Cadenas spotted three Honduran women crossing cow pastures leading to a bubbling, shallow stream. One had a 3-year-old girl. Another had a baby with a cough.
Jackeline, 25, started to tear up when the agents stopped her. She thought it was over after all that work.
She said she was off to join her father in Florida. He left 20 years ago. Her mom died of lung cancer when she was 11. Jackeline was taking her 3-year-old and leaving her oldest child in Tegucigalpa, in the care of an aunt.
"He has never wanted me to go there," she later said of her father. "He doesn't know."
But that wasn't going to stop her any more than the three borders she had to cross.
Risky journey
The International Organization for Migration estimates that 6,000 to 12,000 Guatemalans enter the United States illegally through Mexico each year.
Not all stay for long. In a record year of deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled more than 21,000 Guatemalans.
Many more are deported by Mexican immigration enforcement, which reported ejecting more than 84,000 Guatemalans, along with 58,000 Hondurans and 27,000 Salvadorans, last year. |
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