Special report: Death on the road to the American Dream
By Christopher Parkes and Henry Tricks
The US economic miracle is founded on technology, ingenuity and, to an unknown extent, the labour of 6m illegal immigrants doing the jobs nobody else wants. They are poorly paid and mostly anonymous. But a tragic road accident which killed 13 Mexican migrants highlighted their plight. The Financial Times tracked down families of five of the dead and one survivor to a village in the south of Mexico, 4,000km from the site of the crash in the US. Their story helps explain why so many leave home to live dangerously in the shadows of the US economy.
Part 1: Where death is the price of fame
The grind of poverty and the random intrusions of its faithful disciple, death, have governed every aspect of life in Venustiano Carranza since times beyond memory.
Traces of the tyranny can be found on a hillock outside this luckless village in Chiapas, 25km from the line between Mexico and Guatemala. Here, not so long ago, children chanced on an ancient Mayan tomb to find only a skeleton furnished for eternity with nothing more than a charred clay cooking pot.
Rueful villagers talk of neighbours tumbling into lost graves and emerging with nothing but bruises. They tantalise themselves still with the belief that treasure is close at hand, though out of reach, in pre-Columbian cities lost in the rain-forested mountains of the border.
But serendipity is an art unknown in Venustiano Carranza, where the people are learning to console themselves with the conviction that dreams of gold can only be realised thousands of kilometres to the north in the farmlands, slaughterhouses and kitchen sinks of post-Columbian civilisation in the US.
Now the cost of that conviction can be reckoned in the village cemetery where flowers (pictured above) litter five fresh graves, all capped with rough cement tombstones, all bearing the same date: December 5 1999.
The name of 38-year-old José Antonio Morales is scratched in one slab. Brothers Noé and Neftalí López Vásquez lie side by side under another. Jesús Alonso García López has a plot to himself, marked with a small iron cross. There, too, are Wenceslao López López, known as Benji, and Jaime Calvo Hernández.
Friends, they set off together on November 12 and died together 22 days later, almost 4,000km away from home, on an icy road in New Mexico, USA. Just 40km east of Albuquerque, still 3,000km from its final destination in Florida, a Chevrolet van, stripped of its seats and packed with 17 illegal immigrants, barrelled into the back of a stationary truck on the Interstate 40, on the first snowy day of the winter.
Only four survived the devastation, among them 15-year-old Marco Antonio Romero, who today sits desolated at home in Venustiano Carranza, nursing a crushed pelvis, two broken legs and internal injuries mending beneath the line of stitches which reaches from his groin to his sternum.
Marco Antonio and his companions, destined for anonymity, lost in the crowd of an estimated 6m undocumented immigrants in the US, had gained an identity in the cruellest way: as victims.
December 5, the date on their gravestones, is the day the village heard of the accident by telephone. A local number had been found in the pocket of one of the dead. But it was not until 11 days later that a thumbprint from his corpse confirmed the death of José Antonio Morales for his mother, Reyna, father Mariano, his wife Patricia Calvo, and his disabled three-year-old daughter, Fany.
"He went away so excited," says the dead man's mother, handing round his faded photograph plucked from the lily-strewn altar erected for the wake in the main room of her two-room house on the poorest, outer-most fringe of the village. "But I cried when he left."
A carved statue of Saint Anthony, who finds things which are lost, looks down into a room where water stains from last year's floods still cling a metre up the walls. Coarse wooden benches line the room. A fertiliser bag covers the unglazed window opening.
The story of Antonio's plight and his quest is etched from this end of the village to the other, where the graves look out over some of the best land in the region. Naturally watered, and even now green with corn, beans, some sugar cane and cabbages, it yields two crops a year and costs $1,000 an acre.
>From birth to death, the lives of rich and poor alike are ruled by
the sway of the seasons which bring rain in summer and food for the
lean months at harvest. But last year there were no crops to speak
of, and no harvest festival. Unruly rains rotted the beans, drowned
the corn, and knocked down the adobe house Antonio had built for his
wife and daughter across the broken road from his father's. Only a
brick porch, the sole adornment on most of the houses in Carranza,
still stands.
It was the blow that drove him away from home for the first time at the age of 38, to earn dollars to build again and pay for medical treatment for his listless daughter.
"She has bad legs," murmurs her grandmother, but she is so stricken she cannot grasp a small doll handed to her. She burbles. "She is starting to talk," says her paternal grandfather, Mariano, delighted that he can make her laugh.
We are sorry we have made him cry. "Don't worry about that. I cry all the time," he says.
In the village centre, Flor García heaves with stoic determination to present her husband, Jésus Alonso, as she wants to remember him. "He was a worker, a fighter and he knew how to respect his wife," she says. "He would not have gone if it had not been out of necessity. But here it's crisis after crisis. It's never rose-coloured."
A few doors away, Antonia López Vásquez cannot contain her grief. Her five dusty children, aged 16, 14, 13, 12 and 4, flinch as she sobs. She told her husband Neftalí and his brother Noé of the risks, but, as she points out, the men make their own choices in "this nation of Chiapas" - the poorest state in Mexico.
According to Sin Fronteras, a farm workers' activist group with bases in Mexico and the US, three-quarters of Chiapanecos live below the poverty line, and almost 20 per cent have no cash income.
Although thinly peopled with only 4 per cent of the national population, it is Mexico's leading coffee exporter and third-largest maize grower. But most of the wealth and best acreage is concentrated in the hands of a clique of rich ranchers.
The states of Jalisco, Michoacán and Guanajuato in the west-central region have traditionally been the main sources of migrant labour to the US. But now travellers are being drawn from all over the country, with more than half the current flow made up of workers from industry and services.
Typically travelling in groups, and staying close when they arrive in the US, they offer a tenuous home from home community for others from their towns and villages. The more enterprising, such as the mysterious Cristóbal, from Venustiano Carranza - now living in Florida - may act as hiring agents for their employers.
Part 2: Story of a journey
The people of Chiapas are accustomed to travelling to earn cash for luxuries such as concrete blocks to build a durable house, a cement threshing floor, an ox cart or even a used car. The newest home in Venustiano Carranza belongs to a young man just back from Cancun, 800km away, where he prospered in the tourist trade.
Neftali, 39, had worked in Mexico City, but had been unable to earn enough to sustain himself and the family he left behind.
He had been to the US once before, in late 1998, but fell sick and came home after two months. Then came the tempting call from Cristóbal which sent the news racing around the village of jobs to be had in the Florida orange groves.
"We were half-way through," says his widow. She and her lost husband had needed only a few more years for the children to grow, complete their education and help provide.
Benji López, 33, was also on his second trip, less worried than on his first, solitary, expedition because he was travelling with his friends. He came back early last time because he missed his son, Oscar. This time he was set on spending a year, hoping to help the 13-year-old, who sits across the room watching educational programmes on a tiny TV set. Stricken with typhoid at the age of seven, Oscar has not walked since. He cannot read and cannot go to school because there are no facilities for the disabled. Nor can he work the fields.
Flora, Benji's wife, sets aside her work - sewing children's dresses - and explains she is working extra hard to keep busy rather than for the $1.50 she gets for each little frock. She had not wanted him to go, but he left her with a promise: "He said, 'If I go and don't succeed, I'll never go again. But I need to do it for my child'."
Young Marco Antonio Romero has already resolved he will not return. But as he admits, going to the US had been a lifelong dream. His cool barbershop haircut and the fashionable clothes of his elder brother - whose economic success in el norte he hoped to emulate - suggest ambition and necessity will see him tempted to the road again.
Although returnees from past expeditions insist they can take it or leave it, America will continue to exercise its fatal attraction for the poor of this community who eat what they grow and earn $2.50 a day for jobs which are often available only two or three days a week. Marco Antonio shares with many American boys of his age a desire to get on with life, to get rich, and a belief that getting educated takes too long.
He wants to get ahead, and even now, broken as he is, it is hard to believe he will willingly continue life at the pace of Venustiano Carranza, where he quit school and started working in the fields - breaking with a hoe the clods left by an ox-drawn plough - at the age of eight.
Marco Antonio was asleep at the time of the crash, and remembers nothing of it. But his memory of the events leading up to the catastrophe is immaculate, related with almost laconic familiarity.
When he left the village on November 12, he was the youngest in a band of 17. Travelling by bus via Mexico City they arrived in Altar, northern Sonora, 90km south of the border.
A busy terminus, its churchyard is daily crowded with frightened-looking men, each with a small knapsack. Across the street, more press around a prosperous-looking shop offering long distance phone services. Beer is flowing, stiffening resolve.
A cryptic hand-drawn sign nearby reads: "We want you to travel SAFELY to the US. We can offer it."
According to local schoolchildren, the strangers are always there. No, they usually do not talk to them, but they have seen some of them before. "I have seen him many times in the past days," says one, pointing out an abject figure asleep, nursing a Tecate beer can.
>From here, the travellers will take the excruciating dirt road north
on the last leg to the wire. Strewn with the pathetic detritus of
lightened loads, the track weaves through arid ranch land dotted with
the signposts of the coyotes who direct the foot traffic across the
border. White plastic bags tied to roadside bushes shine brightly in
van headlights to mark the smugglers' pick-up points. At one junction
there are the remains of campfires, more beer cans, eggshells and a
large canister of gasoline barely concealed behind a clump of cactus.
This is the road to El Sásabe, a fly-blown hamlet, its rutted streets occupied by edgy travellers drinking beer, where the men of Venustiano Carranza gathered in late November. It sits in a hollow, out of sight of the Border Patrol watchmen waiting for the evening rush hour around Sasabe, only metres away in Arizona.
Marco Antonio tells how he and his 16 companions each paid their coyote $40 and slipped at night under the razor-wire fence. Heading north on foot across the silent savannah-like terrain, they walked for 15 breathless hours until the clatter of a Border Patrol helicopter forced them to a halt.
Seven ran for it. Ten were captured. Held for three hours, then shuttled back into Mexico at Nogales, 60km to the east, they were quickly back under the wire. This time they made their run close to Agua Prieta and its US companion town, Douglas, Arizona, about 180km east of El Sásabe. They reached a van arranged by their coyote, and made it to Phoenix, only to be pulled over by the "Migra", officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Another round with the Border Patrol processors and they were back in Mexico.
It was to be third time lucky, but only for three of the group who went their separate ways after breaching the border. The seven remaining climbed wearily into a van with 10 strangers for the last leg. One group was to go to Kentucky - a place none of the survivors had even heard of - before the van turned south with the rest to Florida.
While they slept, exhaustion overtook the 20-year-old driver. Police believe he fell asleep at the wheel: how else to explain the collision with the truck, stopped, with its warning lights flashing because of an accident just ahead?
Parts 3 and 4 of this special report will appear on FT.com on Wednesday