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Mexicans mourn the deaths of migrants who sought a way out of poverty by working in the United States.
©Associated Press
October 20, 2002
LOS CONOS, Mexico -- Roberto Esparza crossed the U.S. border illegally three times, believing each time he was a step closer to building a comfortable life for his wife and 14-month-old son in this arid Mexican hamlet.
The first two trips brought the 23-year-old ironworker to Sarasota, where along with hundreds of other Mexicans from poverty-stricken towns, he labored at landscaping and construction jobs, earning 10 times more money than what he could scrape together in Los Conos.
Esparza told his wife before setting off for the third time in June that he would bring back $1,500 in nine months -- enough to finish building the modest concrete block house he referred to as "El Rancho."
But during the third crossing, Esparza's luck ran out. Mexican authorities informed his family Friday that voter ID cards belonging to him and his cousin, 17-year-old Omar Esparza, were found inside a rail car in Denison, Iowa, along with the bodies of seven men and four women who died from extreme heat and dehydration.
Workers at a grain elevator in Denison, about 60 miles northeast of Omaha, Neb., discovered the victims Monday as they prepared to clean grain cars.
Officials said that the rail car left the Mexican border city of Matamoros in June, stopped in Oklahoma for several months, then was hauled to Denison.
Esparza's family waited anxiously Saturday as his father-in-law, Francisco Contreras, applied for a visa in the border city of Matamoros to fly to the United States to help identify their bodies.
"There's nothing to do now but wait," said Esparza's mother, Leticia Rico. "But the pain will be even worse when they bring the two bodies back."
Like the thousands of Mexicans who try to cross the U.S. border illegally every year, Esparza, known affectionately here as "Berto," knew he was taking a risk.
But this sun-scorched town 260 miles northwest of Mexico City offers few alternatives for those trying to make a living.
The town of 900 is named for huge cone-shaped silos of brick and concrete that were built to hold grain but have sat empty for more than five decades.
Few crops grow in the surrounding desert, which overflows with oversized nopal cacti but is devoid of most other vegetation.
Almost all working-age men have gone to the United States. Residents say there is almost never any traffic on the muddy roads, except for a Corona beer truck that unleashes a torrent of dust when it rumbles to restock three convenience stores twice a week.
"Everybody goes north," said Esteban Castro, who was steering his bike around a small park not far from the center of town. "This whole place is empty."
Esparza once worked as an ironworker here, welding doors and signs in a small workshop in his mother's driveway. But he was lured away by the knowledge that in Florida he could make 10 times his weekly pay of $40.
"It doesn't seem fair," said his wife, Irene Godinez, 22. "He left looking for a new life but he had no idea what he was getting himself into."
The first time he went to the United States, in 1999, he hired smugglers who helped him cross the border on foot. Last year, a smuggler got him on a flight to Texas, said his wife. In June, Esparza told his family he would take a bus to Matamoros then cross into the United States from there.
The family got word that he never made it on Wednesday, when a migrant smuggler or "coyote" whom Rico identified as Rogelio Hernandez called to tell them that Esparza and his cousin were among those found in the boxcar.
"He said he was sorry, but that we should not call the police," said Rico, 45.
According to Rico, Hernandez showed up every 15 days in Los Conos to take more than a dozen hopeful migrants up to Matamoros and then across the border. Esparza and his cousin paid him $1,500 in June to guide them to Florida.
Although it's doubtful Hernandez will show his face here again anytime soon -- family members were told he had fled to the United States using a false passport -- Rico says others will be quick to take his place.
"People know what happened with Berto but still they will go (north)," she said. "It is a pattern that no one is going to stop."
Marcela Rodriguez, 42, whose husband and grown son work in Sarasota after crossing the border illegally, keeps a book with the names of at least 18 local people who have died in the past two years either while making the trip north or while working in the United States.
Each time word of a migrant's death reaches Los Conos, Rodriguez goes into the streets to collect donations for their funerals. On Saturday, sympathetic townspeople were slowly filling up a plastic bag with change and small peso bills for the burials of Roberto and Omar Esparza.