BajaNomad - Risking Death Crossing the Border

Risking Death Crossing the Border

CaboRon - 1-18-2009 at 11:44 AM

I found this to be an interesting story ...
CaboRon

Risking death crossing the Mexican border
Posted by: "BAJA DIGEST" so_of_the_bordermx@yahoo.com so_of_the_bordermx
Sat Jan 17, 2009 10:20 am (PST)
Risking death crossing the Mexican border

Every day 1,400 Mexican migrants risk death to reach the US. So why
would anyone make a game of it?

Chris Ayres

The gunshots I could deal with. Likewise the sirens and the megaphone
telling me to give myself up for my own sake. The darkness was more
of an issue - especially given that I was trying to edge my way along
a stony ledge, beyond which was a 20ft drop and a thundering river. I
had already made the mistake of shining my flashlight into the abyss,
which caused me briefly to lose feeling in both legs.

My biggest concern, however, was the man holding roughly on to my
arm, urging me to hurry in a mangled Mexican accent through the hole
in his balaclava helmet. "Move! Move! You wanna die tonight?" he kept
growling, as I again patted the zip-up pocket of my combat trousers
to make sure that my passport and US Green Card hadn't fallen out.
Not that I'd be needing them tonight. Oh no. There would be no
immigration officers where I was going.

Up there on that ledge, it was hard not to contemplate the idiocy of
a white man with a single-digit Spanish vocabulary venturing beyond
Mexico's tourist safe havens, especially these days. Paralysed by a
drugs war that has made kidnappings and mass beheadings a daily
occurrence - a situation worsened by the hopelessly corrupt
Government and an imploding economy - Mexico is experiencing an
almost total collapse of law and order. Yet there I was, three hours
north of Mexico City, in the company of an armed and masked man who
refused even to tell me his name.

"Just call me Coyote," he said.

His reticence was understandable: Coyote was a human smuggler, after
all.

Another gunshot. Somewhere above me a siren bloop-blooped. The jolt
of anxiety made me recall a statistic: of the estimated 1,400
Mexicans who cross the border into the US illegally every day, one
dies. Still, with 7,000 dead in two years from a drugs war that has
become almost a civil war - at a party on Mexico's Independence Day,
grenades were thrown into a crowd, killing seven and injuring 100 -
it is arguably no longer an unreasonable risk to take.

Meanwhile, most Americans remain none the wiser about this new
urgency for Mexicans to flee their homeland: they have the Great
Depression II to worry about. But with Mexican violence threatening
US border cities, and the Department of Homeland Security planning
a "surge" to contain it, that could soon change.

I checked my watch: midnight. I could feel mosquitoes feasting on my
forehead. I was aching, sweating, feeling alone and very foreign, and
cursing myself for having ever crossed paths with Coyote. "Move," he
hissed again, tugging at my arm. "You wanna die tonight?"

Still, matters weren't quite as bad as they seemed. For one
thing, "Coyote" was an actor. And the gunshots I kept hearing were
blanks. Oh, and the sirens weren't real, either. As for the US
border, it was 400 miles away. In fact, I was being treated to
nothing more dangerous than a theme-park experience near the Mexican
village of El Alberto, in Hidalgo state. Yes, you read that
correctly. A theme park.

Or a training ground, as critics would have it, teaching young
Mexicans how to escape their country. For 250 pesos (£12) you are
invited to embark on a five-hour trek in the middle of the night
through deeply inhospitable terrain, while being chased and
intimidated by armed men in pick-up trucks dressed as US Border
Patrol agents. It's by far the most popular activity on offer at
Parque EcoAlberto, a kind of adventure centre run by El Alberto's 500-
strong population of Hñahñu Indians, who guard the entrance with a
piece of rope hung across the road, and appear gloriously unaware of
the health and safety issues involved in pretending to kill tourists
with real guns.

When I arrived just before dusk I was directed to a smoothly paved
road that wound up into cabernet-

coloured mountains. If you didn't know you were in Mexico, you could
easily mistake the landscape for Arizona. A mile or so beyond the
entrance lies the main camping area, built around a swimming pool
(kept warm by natural hot springs) and featuring a rather confused-
looking gazebo with Grecian columns and a Spanish-tiled roof. Next to
the pool is a tuck shop and a little wooden hut, where I was
introduced to Purificación García, the 23-year-old park
administrator. "Most of the people who come here are tourists from
Mexico City," she said, a little defensively, as she collected my fee
(cash only). "They come here for the experience."

Unsurprisingly, the caminata nocturna (night hike) has attracted
plenty of interest since it opened, mainly because of those who
accuse it of doing exactly what Purificación so strenuously denies:
preparing people for the real thing.

The villagers scoff at this accusation. "The caminata nocturna is
nothing!" I was told by Pedro Bautista, a 35-year-old carpenter who
had just returned from a ten-year stint as an illegal worker in Las
Vegas. "It took me three days to get from Nogales (on the border) to
Tucson." He came home because of the construction industry downturn.
If the troubles get worse in Mexico, though, he won't hestitate to
pack up and head north again.

But if the caminata nocturna is no use as a training exercise, why on
earth do people sign up for it? The way the villagers tell it, it's
just a savvy way of packaging an outdoor adventure experience while
throwing in a topical theme of migrant solidarity. Besides, they say,
it has kept many of El Alberto's residents from starving over the
years: the park is run as a co-operative and has earned a lot more
money than their chilli crops ever did.

Having done the course myself, however, I suspect another motive:
that instead of trying to prepare young Mexicans to flee the country,
the villagers are in fact trying to do the opposite. They want them
to stay.

The caminata nocturna begins at 8pm every Saturday, which means 10pm
Mexican time. On the night I did it about 20 other people had signed
up - less impressive than the groups of 40 or 50 that I'd heard
about. No doubt the US recession, which led to a 12 per cent slump in
the "remittances" sent by migrants back to Mexico at the end of last
year, is doing its bit for the decline of the fake-border-crossing
leisure sector.

Most of my fellow night-hikers were in their twenties, and each
seemed to regard it slightly differently. Tábata Castellanos, a 24-
year-old anthropology and history student from Mexico City, told me
that she was doing the hike with her boyfriend on the recommendation
of one of her professors, who had said it was an excellent way to
understand how Mexican migrants suffer. "I told a lot of my friends
to come here but none of them showed up," she shrugged. "I don't
think they were very happy with the idea of a five-hour trek in the
dark."

Others seemed to regard it as a kind of extreme sport. "I want you to
take a picture of me when the border patrol throw me to the floor and
kick me in the ass!" roared Gamaliel Molina, a 23-year-old
construction worker from Mexico City. "I hope this thing is going to
be as close to reality as possible. I want the real experience."

When it finally began, we were corralled into two pick-up trucks and
driven at high speed - I almost fell out of the tailgate - to a
churchyard farther up the mountain. On the way I was introduced to
Coyote, who told me that when he did his first real-life border
crossing he had to hire a human smuggler for $75 (£51). "Coyote" is
the generic term for any professional migrant transporter. In those
days you simply took a taxi to America - it was that easy.

The next time Coyote crossed, it cost him $2,000. The time after
that, $3,000. As America's bubble economy inflated, so too did the
price and difficulty of access to all that easy money - billions of
dollars of which went to illegal construction workers. "Security has
been getting better all the time," said Coyote, referring to the
controversial border fence now being erected along the 1,952-mile US-
Mexico border, forcing more migrants to make the perilous trek
through the Sonoran Desert to Arizona.

Now, of course, Mexicans are not just crossing the border for
economic reasons: in some cases they are doing it to stay alive.
Which, on the whole, makes them try harder.

After climbing out of the pick-up trucks in the churchyard we formed
a circle and held hands. "When we emigrate we suffer," said Coyote,
addressing the group. "We hope there are no more walls, no more
border fences. We want to be better human beings, extraordinary human
beings." Then he told a dirty joke about his wife, after which
everyone sang a raucously tuneless version of the Mexican national
anthem.

All this took until just before midnight. Then, all of a sudden, we
were running aimlessly into the dark. After that: gunshots, sirens,
people squealing with delight and fear, Coyote saying to me, "hurry,
hurry, you wanna die tonight?" then a good hour or so spent hiding
amid marijuana plants and poison ivy while listening to the megaphone
of a fake US Border Patrol agent tell me that it was no use, I'd
never get into the US alive, I might as well give myself up. The
whole thing felt too manic, too physically uncomfortable, too
uncontrollable, to be anything approaching fun. The darkness was the
worst. The darkness made the journey across the ledge over the river
genuinely frightening. The darkness made me begin to wish, really
wish, that the whole thing had been organised by Disneyland.

After two more hours of this we emerged into a separate area of the
park. The mountain had been lit up by hundreds of tiny gas lights
placed strategically on ledges, and we drank hot, sweet coffee and
ate fresh bread and marmalade in a large cactus-thatched hut. It was
extraordinarily beautiful - enough to make you forget briefly about
Mexico's problems and wonder why so many choose to leave a country in
which such a paradisiacal setting is possible.

I asked Tábata Castellanos how she felt. "It was more difficult than
I imagined," she said. "You end up quite desperate to get home,
you're so tired. I would like it if all the pain that people have to
go through to cross the border was ended. I don't want anyone to go
through this, at least not for money. It's not worth it."

In the car on the way back to Mexico City, I listened to a report
about more severed heads being found in plastic bags in public areas.
It was followed by an update on the murder of a kidnapped teenage
boy - even after his father had paid the ransom. The kidnappers were
police officers, it had been revealed. Other police officers were
themselves being kidnapped and murdered. Meanwhile, families with
relatives in the US were also being kidnapped, because the
strengthening dollar meant that wire-transferred ransom payments from
the US were becoming very lucrative. It made me think again about the
caminata nocturna - a bizarre story of hope, of self-determination,
in a country where there is little of either to be found. It was
certainly enough to convince Tábata Castellanos not to leave her
country for the sake of an American wage. Would it be enough to stop
her fleeing for the sake of her life? I didn't have the heart to ask.

Park website (Spanish-language only) www.parqueecoalberto.com.mx

The Gull - 1-18-2009 at 12:30 PM

Boot camp for border crossers.

Bajahowodd - 1-18-2009 at 12:33 PM

There have been television reports about it.

BajaGringo - 1-18-2009 at 12:38 PM

Very interesting post Ron...

CaboRon - 1-18-2009 at 09:34 PM

Bajagringo,

What happened to your eyes :?:

CaboRon

Alan - 1-18-2009 at 09:53 PM

That picture was taken upon his RELEASE from the TJ Jail :lol:

I think his cell mate was named Bubba

Barry A. - 1-18-2009 at 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by CaboRon
Bajagringo,

What happened to your eyes :?:

CaboRon

----something is going on down where we can't see?????

Barry

BajaGringo - 1-18-2009 at 10:28 PM

Y'all jealous...

:lol:

DENNIS - 1-19-2009 at 06:50 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by BajaGringo
Y'all jealous...

:lol:

Quote:

Originally posted by Oso

"ya'll" is a contraction of "ya" and what? The simple and entirely grammatically correct contraction of "you" and "all" is spelled "y'all". Only an ignorant yankee would be guilty of such gross misplacement of the apostrophe. :lol:

You get a "A" for paying attention.

[Edited on 1-19-2009 by DENNIS]

I Helped Hijack My Own Thread

CaboRon - 1-19-2009 at 07:57 AM

Embaressing you know :lol:

.................................................

CaboRon

BajaGringo - 1-19-2009 at 08:30 AM

We promise we won't tell...

:lol:

DENNIS - 1-19-2009 at 09:03 AM

Worse things can, and do, happen, Ron. :lol:

elgatoloco - 1-19-2009 at 11:42 AM

"No doubt the US recession, which led to a 12 per cent slump in the "remittances" sent by migrants back to Mexico at the end of last year, is doing its bit for the decline of the fake-border-crossing leisure sector."

:lol:

BajaGringo - 1-19-2009 at 11:45 AM

I checked out the website - makes me think it would be interesting to check out. Might go my next trip to Mexico City. Have a couple of friends there as crazy as I am and would probably be up to joining me...