Honduran Andres Fuentes convalesces in a migrants’ shelter in this border town after falling off a train and losing the lower part of one leg while trying to reach the United States. In the background is an image of Mexico’s patroness, the Virgin of Guadalupe, bearing the legend: “Immigrant, you are not alone.” EFE
Nogales, Mexico, Jan 12 (EFE).- Long before they face the dangers of crossing the Arizona desert into the United States, migrants from Central and South America who use Mexico as a stepping stone face a gamut of perilous challenges, including train-hopping that every year leaves scores without an arm or leg.
Among those who have paid a steep price for their quest to reach “el Norte” are Hondurans Wilfredo Ortiz and Andres Fuentes, countrymen who first met this week at a migrants’ shelter in the border town of Mexicali where both are convalescing from mishaps that cost each of them part of a leg.
Undocumented immigrants must dodge bandits, endure abuse from corrupt cops and officials and exploitation at the hands of people-smugglers, as well as hunger, thirst, the desert heat, snakes and scorpions.
And as if all that were not enough, some U.S. lawmakers want to build hundreds of miles of barriers along the southern border, where immigration authorities have already stepped up their vigilance in ways that are readily apparent here in Nogales, which lies just opposite the likenamed town in Arizona.
At Casa Betania (Bethany House) in Mexicali, Ortiz and Fuentes recounted the separate yet similar paths that left them dependent on the charity of the Mexican NGO which operates the shelter.
Ortiz, a 38-year-old from the southern Honduran town of San Lorenzo, told EFE that he fell from a train just as it reached Nogales, 35 days after beginning his trans-Mexico odyssey in the southern state of Chiapas.
After losing the lower part of one leg in the accident, Ortiz received emergency first-aid from Mexican immigration officials before being taken to the nearest Red Cross station, which treated him and then sent him on to Casa Betania, where he speaks of his frustration at failing to reach the United States.
The would-be immigrant made the journey in hopes of finding work so he could send money home to his wife and five children.
“It’s hard knowing that I must return to Honduras defeated and crippled, but we have to keep struggling,” Ortiz says while resting in a room dominated by an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe – Mexico’s patroness – that bears the legend: “Immigrant, you are not alone.”
Fuentes, a Lenca Indian who hails from the Intibuca region of Honduras, says he was in death’s shadow after his Christmas Eve fall from a train that was pulling into Mexicali.
Also a father of five, he told EFE that he suffered “the most horrible trials” during the more than a month it took him to reach the northern border from Chiapas in the company of migrants from his own country, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador.
“Now, we want only to return to Honduras – by plane, I hope – and for someone to help us buy a prosthesis,” Fuentes said, speaking for himself and Ortiz.
Yet both men said they will surely set out on future quests for the “American dream,” because, as one of them put it, in Honduras “there is neither work nor hope.”
“I think the (future) Honduran president (Manuel Zelaya) will have to do something very serious to stop people from going to Mexico and the U.S. and so they don’t keep dying en route,” Ortiz said.
Directors at Casa Betania and other shelters in Mexicali and Nogales say that in an average month, they provide succor and temporary lodging for more than 400 stranded migrants, a quarter of them from Central and South America.
“Many undocumented migrants, including women and children, suffer too much crossing the deserts of Sonora and Arizona,” notes Tomas Reyes Hernandez, who runs Casa Betania.
