It is not an easy choice to make!
Chronic unemployment has left millions of Central Americans & Mexicans poor, hungry and desperate for a better life.
What does it take to cross the border?
They are not all Mexicans....they come from all over Belize · Costa Rica · El Salvador · Guatemala · Honduras · Nicaragua · Panama...people from these countries must first illegally cross the Mexican border before trying to come to the U.S.
The wide and shallow Suchiate River separating Mexico & Guatemala is no barrier
Men with rafts will take anything or anyone across it for about a dollar.
Each year hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America, most hoping to make it to the United States, cross the river on huge innertubes and enter Mexico on the easiest part of an often-hellish journey.
The southern border has become a no-man's land for Central American immigrants. In crossing, they are run over by trains, stabbed by bands of delinquents, robbed by police and Army personnel. Many women are raped and killed. Families are split up.21 Some 100 bands of smugglers operate in the Mexico-Guatemala border zone, charging migrants for getting them a little closer to their destination of the United States. They call it El Tren de la Muerte or La Bestia, The Beast. For Central Americans who cannot pay thousands of dollars for a coyote to smuggle them accross Mexico to the US border, this freight train offers a free ride. But it's a perilous journey, that many wind up paying for with their lives.
In 2005, hurricane Stan wiped out the railroad tracks along the southern border, so now migrants have to walk about 150 miles to the nearest train depot in Arriaga to hop a train north. They usually walk along the abandoned train tracks to avoid the gauntlet of checkpoints along the main road.
With little money to cross the length of Mexico, just a small percentage of the illegal migrants reach their goal of working in the United States.
El Tren de la Muerte
For Central Americans traversing the unforgiving border region, Grupo Beta is often their only friend. Grupo Beta's job is to protect migrants along the border, not arrest them, sites are marked with blue flags and pennants to signal that water is available
Lost Limbs and broken dreams: migrants who lost limbs trying to ride the train to El Norte
Unlike Mexican immigrants, who are deposited on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border, Central Americans face deportation back to homelands thousands of miles away.
The number of persons who died along the U.S.-Mexico border came to 250 from September 2002 to September 2003, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. Of the persons who died from January to November 2003, 146 perished when attempting to enter the United States through the desert in western Arizona (a record figure for Arizona), another 70 died in the Imperial Valley in California, and the rest in other sectors of the 2,500-kilometer border. The victims have died of asphyxiation, as the result of hypothermia and/or dehydration, or as the result of accidents or drowning when trying to cross inaccessible zones in desert canyons and gullies, and mountainous areas. In one of the most serious incidents, 19 persons died of asphyxiation in a container of a cargo truck in Victoria, Texas, 370 kilometers from the border in May 2003. The authorities reported that more than 100 persons were traveling in the container. From 1994 to 2002, 2,200 persons perished trying to cross the border into the United States. During the year 2000, a record 491 persons died in the border area.
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| BORSTAR agent Gary Widner treats the blistered feet of a 53-year-old man who walked more than 12 hours. He was transported to a hospital. |
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