Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 23, 2002
SUSAN CARROLL, Tucson Citizen

Fourteen Mexican men who left home in May 2001 in search of 'opportunities' perished along 'The Devil's Path' in the desert of southwest Arizona. Their wives and mothers cry out for help promised by Mexico.

Octavia Fabian Martinez, 23, says her husband, Enrique Landeros Garcia, was trying to get into the United States to find work that would pay for the education of his son, Alexis, 7. Landeros and 13 other crossers perished in the desert in southwest Arizona one year ago today.

SAN PEDRO ALTEPEPAN, MEXICO - The hurt here is deeper than the graves, fresher than the flowers that adorn them.

On the first anniversary of the deadliest border crossing in Arizona history, the widows in the tiny villages clustered high in the Sierra Madre mountains feel forgotten by the outside world.

A Catholic Mass was scheduled today in this pueblo for two fathers, who between them left six children behind. A neighboring town, El Equimite, still mourns a father and his 15-year-old son. A widow from nearby El Tesoro carries a photo of her dead husband in her purse. Down the winding dirt road in Cuatro Caminos, two children, ages 5 and 6, still ask when Papa will come home.

Eight coffee farmers piled into a pickup truck May 15, 2001, headed for Chicago and Lake Placid, Florida. U.S. Border Patrol agents found seven of their desiccated bodies a week later. They were among 14 casualties in a stretch of desert east of Yuma known as El Camino Del Diablo, "The Devil's Path." One survived.

The widows say they have lived a year of broken promises.

For Octavia Fabian, 23, the first promise was personal. It came with a kiss.

Her husband, Enrique Landeros García, 30, promised to send money from the United States to improve their one-bedroom home and put their 7-year-old son, Alexis, through school

"I didn't want him to go," she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "At first I thought he just wanted to make more money. Now I realize he went to offer us more opportunities."

Octavia's second promise came with a handshake.

Juan Hernandez Senter, Mexican President Vicente Fox's adviser for migrant affairs, met the victims' families at the airport when the bodies were flown home from Arizona.

Hernandez, a charismatic Mexican-American, is director of the Office for Migrants Living Abroad, a post created by Fox to assist the millions of Mexicans who live in the United States. Hernandez said his office routinely helps the families of migrants who die while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

At the airport in June, he promised a scholarship fund so the widows' fatherless children could attend secondary school.

Fabián - and the half-dozen other widows in these towns - say they have yet to see a peso from the federal government.

Hernandez said in an interview last week that he had "no idea" why the widows would not have received the promised aid. He asked if they had contacted his office.

"That's what the office is for," Hernandez said. "That's what I'm all about."

Two men left tiny San Pedro, Altepepan, Mexico, in May 2001 to seek opportunity in America. They were found dead in the Arizona desert May 23. Conditions in San Pedro are rough - all roads are dirt, no homes have running water, and few have electricity.

Fabián, her cheeks flushed from washing clothes on a flat stone, works as a kindergarten teacher's assistant, earning about $25 a week. She and her 27-year-old brother tend the family's small coffee farm, which she fought her in-laws to keep after her husband's death.

Lately, she has started thinking about making the more-than-1,500-mile journey across the U.S.-Mexico border that killed her husband.

She wants to keep her husband's promises - and her own - to their son. The only thing that is keeping her here, she says, is family.

"My son says that he doesn't want me to go, that I'm all he has. And I won't go without him," she says. "My in-laws say no, too. They say 'We've already lost a son. We don't want to lose a grandson.'"

Officially, about 49,000 people live in Atzálan, but the government estimates that about 5,000 of them live in the United States. Some of the tin-roofed houses here, shaded by banana leaves, are empty for months and years at a stretch. The coffee trees, once carefully groomed and harvested, droop with rotting beans.

Amid the rows of ramshackle wood-and-tin homes stand adobe buildings with polished concrete floors, signs of relative prosperity. From those homes, women often sell candy from a store in the front window and tend chickens in the front yard. They frequently have a TV inside and a truck parked outside. But no men live in many of those homes.

Emigration from the towns that are part of the municipality of Atzálan was rare 15 years ago. Nearly anything will grow in this verdant farmland - coffee, citrus and bananas. Families tended their own coffee farms, earning enough to survive and a little extra to save after the winter harvest.

Then, five years ago, the demand for coffee seemed to vanish like the morning mist on the Sierra Madre mountain range.

"That's when everybody left," said Augustina Romero Enriquez, 36, whose husband of 19 years died in the ill-fated crossing attempt, his second illegal crossing. "Some ran to Mexico City, some to the other side."

Reyno Bartolo Hernandez was one of the unlucky ones. Last May he walked to his grave.

Romero keeps his picture wrapped in notebook paper in the inside pocket of her purse.

On a muggy afternoon, she wiped tears on her blue flower-print dress before pulling out the photo. They tried for years, she said, but couldn't have any children. They finally adopted a little girl, who was 4 years old, in 1988.

"She just got married," Romero said. "I am alone."

Bartolo, who was 37 when he died, borrowed from local lenders to pay the $1,800 fee negotiated by henchmen for a smuggler know as "Sierra Moisés."

"I lost everything," she says. "I lost my husband, and I lost the money."

As she held the photo, she asked for revenge. Romero says she knows the names of the smugglers who came in pickup trucks and recruited men to make the journey to the United States.

Augustina Romero Enriquez, 36, whose husband of 19 years died in the ill-fated crossing attempt, his second illegal crossing, keeps a picture of him wrapped in notebook paper in the inside pocket of her purse. The 37-year-old man borrowed from local money lenders to pay the $1,800 fee negotiated with a smuggler.

Romero can rattle off their names, their hometowns and the places they reportedly fled to after the deaths. They are not far away, she says, in Tlyapocoyan, Veracruz, the state capital of Xalapa, and the neighboring state of Puebla.

The U.S. and Mexican governments "said they were going to find the men who came here and took their money and then left them...to suffer and die," she says. "They haven't even done that."

She is thankful that the Mexican government paid to have the bodies flown from Arizona to Veracruz. She is also thankful that the local government, the municipality of Atzálan, paid to have his body delivered from the Veracruz airport. Bartolo now rests in a graveyard high on a hill, above lush farmland and coffee farms.

The mayor of Atzálan, Ramiro Barradas Vivrios, promised families of the seven dead migrants from Atzálan $525 to cover burial costs. They each received $460 and a flower arrangement.

For the anniversary, Barradas has commissioned a sculpture, a tribute to the dead migrants modeled after the 15-year-old from El Equimite who died on the way to the hospital.

The boy, who died one week shy of his 16th birthday, is buried next to his father, 56-year-old Raymundo Barreda Mauri. The recessed graves, near the edge of the cemetery, are marked with wooden crosses and tepejilote, a palm with broad, velvety green leaves.

The father and son set out together May 15. Both named Raymundo, the son wanted to be just like his father. The younger Raymundo played soccer on the same field as his father, Raymundo Sr. He wanted to buy a truck, as his father did with money from an earlier trip working in a cannery in Ohio and a farm in Mississippi.

For the widows, recalling the deaths brings out a mixture of longing, need and bitterness.

Juanita Hernández Sanchez, 34, remembers running to the community phone the night of May 23, 2001, her five children trailing behind her down the dark, rocky road.

The voice on the other end of the phone was not that of her husband, Lorenzo Hernandez Ortiz, but an anonymous caller who told her he was dead.

"It's been so hard to accept," says Hernández, sitting outside her tin-roofed shack with her children, ages 4 to 13. "I still hope it was some kind of mistake, that maybe it was somebody else. I keep hoping maybe he will come home one day.

"But, no," she says, her brown eyes flat. "It's been a year. And he hasn't come back. He isn't coming back."

The only thing that seems to come easily are tears. She struggles to keep the children in school, in clothes and fed. She is angry with the Mexican government.

"They sent flowers and forgot about us," she said. "Their promises didn't count for anything."
Her thoughts then turned to her husband.

"Why does he need flowers?" she asked. "He doesn't want for anything anymore. God is taking care of him."

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/local/5_23_02desert_deaths.html