February 14, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
CUCUNA, Guatemala -“Oh, Osveli. My little one. Where have
you gone?”
Isolated in mountains where they’ve cultivated corn patches
for centuries, Mayan farmers chant for a fallen 15-year-old boy
– killed in Colorado as an illegal immigrant when a smuggler’s
van crashed Dec. 23.
They carry the boy in a donated steel coffin to a ridge crest
where they’ll pray for nine days – beneath the sun and the stars
– before decorating Osveli’s tomb with a cross.
Cristobal, Osveli’s father, opens the coffin, peeks at the
disfigured face. And villagers pack in what Osveli would need
for a journey.
Carefully folded clothes. A blanket. New black walking boots.
Even as fathers, mothers and sisters mourn, anxious young men,
soles of their own boots worn thin, talk nervously about the
journeys they intend to make.
“We need money to live,” said Osveli’s 23-year-old brother,
Aulio, a father of three.”I will go to the United States soon.”
The circumstances behind the tragedy of Osveli Salas Vasquez –
which was chronicled in The Denver Post a week ago – suggest the
makings of a mass migration from Central American villages.
Consider how, here in Cucuna, Osveli’s death only adds to the
pressure on the people he hoped to support. Just paying debts
Osveli owed means his family must send another son north in
search of work.
A Colorado rancher who brought home the bodies of Osveli and
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar, a second Mayan migrant killed in the
crash, got an intimate view of the situation. Neil Harmon, who
also runs a funeral home, embarked on an odyssey to do what he
and his wife, Judy, felt must be done.
They lost their son in a car crash two decades ago. And when
they saw the unidentified young Mayans in their morgue at
Springfield, they knew that somewhere parents were suffering.
Mayans here responded with incredulous gratitude.”We’ve
never had an American come into our village and do something
like this,” one man said.
And the villagers began confiding to the Harmons how they
want to benefit from the modern world but not get lost in it.
The Harmons returned to Colorado last week with a new
understanding of the migrant workers – a record 5 million of
them illegal – who help drive the U.S. economy.
“We have a responsibility to help these people who have
nothing,” said Harmon, a politically conservative 61-year-old
who serves as deputy coroner and sheriff’s posse member in
southeastern Colorado’s Baca County.”The pressure is really on
now. This matters because America could lose a valuable culture.”
Getting ahead in Guatemala has proven an uphill battle for
impoverished Mayans. They trek long distances from highland
villages to attend school. They migrate on foot across Mexico to
the United States.
The risks seem horrendous by U.S. standards. But Mayans say
they are desperate.
“We need money to buy land,” said Bidal, father of Raquel
Aguilar, after the first funeral the Harmons attended.
Bidal’s wife died a dozen years ago. Raquel and his five
brothers and a sister had to fend for themselves while Bidal
worked plots of land owned by others. They lived in an adobe
shack with no running water or electricity at Aldea La Laguna.
The village lies up a steep hill from another village called
Chejoj, which six months ago received electricity when
government workers extended a power line.
Raquel migrated to the United States and returned with enough
money to buy a small plot of land last year. But his brothers
and sister still seemed to be falling behind. Raquel”wanted
his little brother to go to school and get a career,” Bidal
said. So last fall, Raquel and his boyhood friend, Aniseto
Ramirez Vasquez, set out for Florida again.
As villagers hoisted his coffin off a dusty field and carried
it toward a cemetery, Bidal hung back.”I can’t bear to see him
go into the ground,” he said tearfully.
In the procession, 45-year-old Florenzio, Aniseto’s father,
approached the Harmons. Aniseto was one of 13 illegal immigrants
who survived the van crash on the prairie. It was Aniseto who
broke down, under questioning by U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents, and identified the body of his
friend Raquel.
Aniseto is in jail, a federal detention center at Englewood,
as a witness in the federal case against the smugglers who drove
the van. Then Aniseto faces deportation.
“Will he be able to stay there and work?” Florenzio asked.
“Or will they send him home? To stay and work, that would be
the best that could happen. We are poor. We have no money.”
The Harmons assured Florenzio that a priest would visit
Aniseto in prison.
Then Israel Roblero approached Harmon hopefully about working
in Colorado.”One of these days I may see you there,” he said.
Harmon paused a few seconds before replying.”Well, I’ll be
glad to see you.”
Some immigration experts believe economic integration across
the Americas will lead to more and more Mayan villagers
migrating to the United States for work.
Hurricane destruction of crops last fall added to the pressure
on indigenous farmers, confined to the margins of Central
American society. They can’t get ahead without leaving their
villages, said Tracy Ehlers, a University of Denver anthropology
professor who has worked in Guatemala since 1976.
“There are no opportunities for kids,” Ehlers said.”They
have to take their lives in their hands and go north.”
A U.S.-orchestrated coup here in 1954 led to decades of
Guatemalan civil war and a legacy of poverty. The conditions
have led desperate Guatemalans into smuggling cocaine and
growing opium for Mexican mobsters.
“Are we responsible for this in any way? Yeah. No doubt about
it,” said Robert Carlsen, a University of Colorado professor
who recently published a book about a highland Mayan community.
“We’ve contributed to the destabilization that makes it so that
(Mayans) can’t exist in their own villages. We put the generals
in power. The cocaine consumers are in the United States.”
And the U.S. economy benefits from cheap migrant labor,
Carlsen added.”Where would we be without them?”
U.S. immigration officials are watching for signs of a mass
migration. In December, most of the 2,400 migrants stopped along
the southwestern U.S. border came from Central America, said
Greg Gagne, INS spokesman in Washington, D.C. Many were
indigenous people who find little opportunity at home.
“We recognize that the potential is there,” Gagne said.
“We have contingency plans that deal with augmenting our
resources along the border. … Certainly, on a human level, we
have empathy for these individuals. But our job requires us to
enforce the law. And we do.”
After Raquel’s funeral, reaching Osveli’s village proved
difficult for Harmon.
The road to Cucuna turned into a steep trail, too rough for
four-wheel-drive. Harmon set out on a mule.
Osveli’s brother Aulio and other men already had hauled the
300-pound casket up the steep, 3-mile, twisting trail to Cucuna.
Harmon followed them into the clouds where, at an altitude of
about 9,000 feet, villagers look down on Chiapas, Mexico, to the
west.
Men trek down there, sneak across the Mexican border and work
on small coffee plantations. They earn about $3.50 a day.
Osveli got tired of that and left. And died.
When Harmon arrived, the villagers, who speak mostly in Mam,
were mourning.
They invited him into an adobe house, across from the
thatch-roof adobe where Osveli lived. The closed coffin was on
display, candles flickering around it. Women arranged lilies
they picked below in the valley by the Coatan River.
Cristobal, Osveli’s 57-year-old father, spoke to Harmon through
a translator.
“Thank you for bringing my son back to his home. I am content
now that my son is home.”
Into the night, as villagers grieved in the candlelight, nine
young men gathered more closely around Harmon.
“We can’t do anything,” Santos Hernandez confided in a
quavering voice, tears in his eyes.”We work all the time. We
have to go to make it, to make it here. To stay we would have to
work the land better using fertilizers. But we don’t have the
money to get fertilizers. We can’t do anything. We all want to
go to the United States.”
Hurricanes last fall wiped out most of Cucuna’s corn. A bit
that was salvaged was stored in the rafters above where Osveli’s
body lay in the coffin.
The next day, the young men told Harmon how Osveli had
borrowed 8,000 quetzales (more than $1,000) from a woman in
Tacana, the electrified town 5 miles below in the valley.
It was money he needed to pay guides and make it to Florida,
where he hoped to join his sister, Irma. He planned to earn
enough money to pay off the debt and more. But robbers took the
money in Mexico.
When Osveli set out a second time with his brother, Noe,
the family already owed the debt from his first try.
“”So that is why now I must go,” Osveli’s brother Aulio said.
The death raised concerns about dangers of the long journey
north – which Mayan migrants make mostly on foot.
A 23-year-old villager, Jaime Rodrigo Perez, confessed that
Osveli’s death leaves him”a little afraid” about leaving home
for the United States. He described an uneasy tension between
young men and village elders who never felt they had to leave
home.
“We have to go for money. Here, we can’t earn it,” Perez
said.”Our parents say: “Don’t leave. It’s far. Why leave?’ But
we need to live better. We try to explain to our parents. They
are content only when we return. And then, they thank us.”
The Harmons say they never thought much about migrant workers
until the accident near their ranch. Now they’re convinced that
technical assistance delivered directly to Central American
villagers, and compassion toward migrants in the United States,
could help improve a complex, intertwined situation.
In Cucuna, Neil Harmon asked villagers what they would buy –
if village debts were paid – with any extra money their children
might earn in the United States.
A water pump, they said. Elders said a gasoline-powered pump
might help them move water hundreds of feet up from the valley
floor below during dry seasons. And a pump could move greater
volumes of water from side streams when they run full.
Harmon nodded. What else?
Electricity, they said. A farmer across the valley in another
hillside village had a solar-powered light. Cucuna villagers
looked out at it every night.
And how did he get it?
His son had worked in the U.S. and brought the solar panel
home.
Today, just about every ambitious Mayan in Cucuna has Neil
Harmon’s address on the Colorado prairie near Springfield.
“No, I won’t be surprised to see them knocking on my door,”
Harmon said, heading home past the mist-shrouded tops of
volcanoes.”And I wonder, will I welcome them then? I don’t
know. … But we’re going to try to help.”
February 6, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Coloradans help Guatemalan clan
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – A Colorado rancher and his wife
walked solemnly into a world of grief this week – bringing the
bodies of two illegal immigrants home.
The fathers of the two Guatemalans were waiting for Neil and
Judy Harmon at a mortuary. Anguish etched on their faces, they
are Mayan farmers who journeyed for more than seven hours from
Guatemala’s impoverished highlands to the capital.
Their sons – 15-year-old Osveli Salas Vasquez and 22-year-old
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar – died near the Harmons’ ranch in
southeastern Colorado – victims of unscrupulous smugglers.
“I was trying to convince him not to go,” Aguilar’s father,
Bidal, lamented. “But he saw that the situation here wasn’t
getting any better. He went to support his little brothers and
sister.”
The Guatemalans gazed with awe at the Harmons, who also run a
funeral home near their ranch in Springfield, where they had
taken care of the bodies since the crash Dec. 23 of a van packed
with illegal immigrants.
The Harmons couldn’t ignore the tragedy – two decades ago,
they lost their own son in a car crash. And the more they tried
to do the right thing, the deeper they ventured into Central
America’s woes.
The villagers who raised Raquel and Osveli are desperate.
A U.S.-backed coup here in 1954 led to decades of Guatemalan
civil war, which brought guerrillas and government soldiers into
the highlands and erased more than 400 Mayan villages. War gave
way in the mid-1990s to lawlessness and pockets of extreme
poverty. Then last fall, hurricanes hammered Central America,
worsening the poverty by destroying coffee plantations where
Mayan villagers sometimes found work.
So village elders had little choice but to wave adios to their
young shining stars last fall. Osveli and his 19-year-old
brother, Noe, left from Canton Cucuna, near Tacana, and Raquel
from Aldea La Laguna, near Cuilco.
They hiked down from their native land of towering volcanoes
and joined the exodus of tens of millions of people moving from
poor countries to rich ones. Raquel, Osveli and Noe hired
“coyotes,” smugglers who spirited them through Mexico and into
the Arizona desert. There they met other smugglers, who drove
them in van along a notorious smuggling route – one that INS
agents say brings at least 1,300 illegal immigrants a month
through Colorado. But these smugglers pushed too hard. On a
frigid patch of prairie west of Springfield, the van crashed.
Raquel died instantly of head injuries. Osveli died soon after,
also of head injuries, at Southeast Colorado Hospital.
The bodies lay unidentified in Springfield for more than a week.
Some authorities called for cremating or burying the illegal
immigrants in Springfield. But Neil Harmon, who also serves as
the deputy Baca County coroner and a member of the sheriff’s
posse, wouldn’t do that. In 1980, the Harmons’ 19-year-old son,
Bo, died on that same prairie when a tractor-trailer mowed
through his prized bronze-colored Camaro.
“It’s bad enough losing a child,” Harmon said recently at
the wheel of his white pickup. “But for the families that sent
those boys not to have the bodies back. …”
So he embalmed the bodies carefully. And he waited, checking on
them at the end of each day.
“These boys need to go home.”
***
The tragedy of Osveli, Noe and Raquel began with basic education
and ambition.
They grew up in villages where elders speak mostly in Mam – a
language spoken before Spaniards arrived in America. No
electricity. No running water. The villagers harvest just enough
maize and beans to survive. But the boys went to school in
accordance with new Guatemalan laws. They learned to speak
Spanish and write a bit. In the Vasquez family, Osveli was the
youngest of twelve, said his 57-year-old father, Cristobal Salas
Perez. “My last boy.”
Rugged, nearly impassable terrain separates Osveli’s village
from Raquel’s. The two never met before reaching the United
States.
Raquel had worked briefly in Florida before and saved enough
money to dream about buying a bit of land near his home,
building a house and getting married. He returned from Florida
in February 1998 to check on his father, five younger brothers
and a sister. Their mother, Rosenda, died 12 years ago.
The children were barely managing to eat, said 47-year-old
Bidal. “That’s why Raquel left again, to help the family
survive.”
Getting into the United States was an ordeal.
After the journey through Mexico, U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents caught Raquel trying to cross the
border illegally near Nogales on Dec. 8. They entered his
fingerprints into a computer database and sent him back across
the border. On his second try, Raquel made it. He sneaked to
orange groves near Chandler Heights, Arizona, a well-known
staging ground for smuggling across the United States.
Osveli and Noe fared better at first. But the desert route
they took left cactus spikes embedded in Osveli’s right hand and
arm.
Laying low in the orange groves, they met other immigrants,
all hungry and exhausted, and haggled with smugglers for rides.
Much of what happened next is described in a federal affidavit,
based on interviews with crash survivors, that prosecutors in
Denver filed for their case against smugglers.
Investigators believe 13 illegal immigrants jammed into the
ill-fated van. They paid $250 to $700 each for transportation to
labor compounds in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.
The smugglers suspected of transporting Osveli, Raquel, Noe
and the others were illegal immigrants themselves: Alberto
Velasquez of Guatemala and Beltran Morales Roblero of Mexico.
Other than front seats for the driver and his assistant, there
was one seat. Most of the immigrants huddled on the floor. And
in the frigid darkness of Dec. 23, the van was speeding along
U.S. 160, which runs east from Trinidad. INS agents say they
can’t afford to patrol the long, empty highway.
The accident occurred about 6:30 a.m., 8 miles west of
Pritchett, where the highway curves sharply to the north. Over
the last two decades, more than a dozen vehicles have crashed at
the turn.
The driver hit the brakes and skidded. The van apparently
flipped and rolled.
The immigrants wore no seat belts. Some, including Noe, were
dozing. The impact hurled them around the metal interior. Some
were ejected through shattered windows. The van’s roof crumpled.
At the back of the van, Raquel slumped, face down and
lifeless, his skull crushed.
Six survivors, cut and bruised, staggered away from the
wreckage. One man threw away a driver’s license that INS
investigators later found in a clump of grass. As the sun rose,
the survivors trudged across the prairie toward three grain
elevators visible in the distance. A Colorado Public Service
utility crew picked them up and drove to the scene of the crash,
then radioed for help.
At the Southeast Colorado Hospital in Springfield, a doctor
pronounced Osveli dead. Nurses called for an airlift to Denver
for his brother, Noe, who was unconscious with neck injuries.
“This disturbed me terribly,” said nurse Marilyn Chenoweth.
The immigrants she treated “looked like a bunch of kids.”
Meanwhile, Neil Harmon, in his capacity as deputy coroner, went
to the scene and retrieved Raquel’s body. And Noe woke up
clueless in Denver.
Doctors at Denver Health Medical Center had stabilized him and
put his neck in a brace. Several teeth were bashed in, leaving
raw nerves exposed. A nurse told him he’d been in an accident.
All Noe knew was that his little brother Osveli wasn’t with him.
***
At the INS regional detention center in Aurora, agents pressed
the crash survivors for evidence, anything. They got nothing for
days.
Then one of the survivors, another Guatemalan, broke down and
identified Raquel Jimenez Aguilar. He gave the name of a cousin
in North Carolina.
Around Christmas, Noe was released, somehow, from the Denver
Health Medical Center. His discharge papers indicate nurses
checked him out on Dec. 26, with instructions to seek further
treatment. Noe went to the Denver Rescue Mission in a taxi
sent from the hospital, shelter director Paul Anderson said.
That was home for a week. Noe barely spoke, shelter workers
said. He couldn’t eat, though he was starving, with the nerves
of his broken teeth exposed.
And Noe might still be at that shelter today were it not for
the Corica family of southeast Aurora.
On the snowy evening of Jan. 2, Carmine Corica, his wife,
Razz, and Gaby, their 12-year-old daughter, who wanted to help
homeless people, arrived at the shelter for a stint as volunteer
kitchen workers.
A Sun Microsystems technician, 37-year-old Razz Corica once
was an illegal immigrant herself, smuggled across the Mexican
border with her mother. Once, after INS agents raided the
Chicago plastics factory where her mother worked, she was nearly
deported. An agent took pity on the mother and her daughter and
offered to sponsor them as future citizens.
At the homeless shelter in Denver, Razz remembered all this
when she noticed Noe gazing down, looking lost, as she tried to
hand him a green chile burrito.
He sat down alone and couldn’t eat it. The Coricas decided to
sit down next to him.
He told them he’d been in an accident. “He said: “I’m on my
way to Florida to meet my sister,”’ Razz recalled. “I said:
“You’re in Colorado.’ He took that in. He said: “How far is that
from Florida?”’
Another homeless man showed them a crinkled newspaper story
about an accident in Springfield. The bodies hadn’t been
identified.
From that moment, the Coricas made the case their mission.
“I put my arms around him and said: “We’re going to help you
find your family,”’ Razz said.
Noe had little to offer. The telephone numbers to reach his
sister Irma in Florida had been lost. That night, Razz worked
her computer and phones, focusing on “Ejido Miscun,” the name
of a village in Chiapas, Mexico, that Noe mentioned – a village
where his other sister, Mercedes, might have access to a public
telephone.
Razz reached an operator in Mexico City who gave her an area
code for southern Mexico. Razz dialed a number randomly,
reaching a servant, and arranged to call back 15 minutes later
for an area code for Ejido Miscun. Using that code, she dialed
randomly again, reaching a nurse. And the nurse gave her a
number for a public telephone facility close to Ejido Miscun.
Razz reached an operator, who said she would have Noe and
Osveli’s sister Mercedes by the telephone that evening.
At last the connection was made.
The Coricas got more phone numbers and information they needed
to help Noe.
They’d taken Noe into their two-story, three-bedroom home.
They rented him a Bruce Lee video.
Carmine Corica persuaded Noe to drive with him to Springfield
in early January to try to find out about his brother. Noe was
terrified that police would arrest him.
Inside Neil Harmon’s funeral home morgue, Noe gazed at the two
bodies silently for more than 10 minutes. He and Corica got
back in the car. That’s when Noe broke down.
Corica still recalls those wails word for word. “My poor
little brother. Now I’ll never see him again. He’s dead. And I
was supposed to protect him.”
Corica called the Harmons later to identify the body.
Neil Harmon rarely has felt so relieved. “I’ve never had a
body this long in 17 years,” he said later in Springfield.
“You think, who is this kid? How do I get him back? He needs to
go back to his family. And am I going to be able to show him
when I get him back?”
The Harmons began collecting money to send the bodies home.
“After losing Bo, it really became important to us to get
these bodies home,” Judy Harmon said. “We’re Christians. We
like to go the extra mile.”
They received contributions from four prairie churches. Baca
County social services officials kicked in $2,000. Denver City
Councilwoman Debbie Ortega persuaded American Airlines to ship
the bodies for free. Illegal immigrants where Osveli and
Raquel’s relatives work scraped together more than $1,000. And
in the end, the Harmons contributed $2,500 of their own money.
They hired Funeraria Latina of west Denver to handle paperwork
with the Guatemalan consulate in Los Angeles.
Meantime, Carmine Corica had rented a car and was driving Noe
on to his destination – a labor compound in Florida.
Reunited with his sister, Noe has managed to elude INS agents,
who are eager to find him as a witness to the crash.
The Coricas are confident they did the right thing.
“I believe U.S. actions in Latin America over the last 200
years are deplorable,” Razz said. “All those governments they
propped up at the expense of the peasant population. … If this
is what I get put in jail for, it’s a noble cause.”
***
This weekend, the Harmons are traveling with the fathers and
cousins of Osveli and Raquel back into their villages. Families
in the villages plan funerals based on a fusion of Catholic and
indigenous rites.
The journey, with gray steel caskets in tow, is a long one on
rugged roads. Logistical preparations began Thursday when the
bodies arrived, and when Guatemalan Congressman Juan Diaz
Gonzalez intervened to help speed matters with airport
authorities. As president of Guatemala’s Commission on
Indigenous Communities, Gonzalez sees smuggling of undocumented
workers as a growing problem that countries must address
cooperatively – not just with domestic immigration crackdowns.
Impoverished Mayans are making their way to the U.S. “out of
necessity,” said Gonzalez. “It’s survival for them. And the
migration is going to increase rapidly because of the hurricanes
last fall.”
A cooperative approach could eliminate opportunities for
smugglers: Guatemala could open its doors to U.S.
labor-contracting companies that would recruit workers here and
grant them proper eight-month visas up front, Gonzales said.
But mourning, not politics, was the priority in Guatemala City.
The fathers and cousins repeatedly thanked the Harmons.
“We’ve been suffering here. We were far away and couldn’t do
anything when we heard about the deaths,” said Luis Domingos
Vasquez, a cousin of Raquel Aguilar serving as family spokesman.
“The boys were in their country illegally. And for these people
to help. …
“How can we ever repay you? ” he said to the Harmons. “God
will reward you. We are very satisfied and content with what you
have done.”
Osveli’s father, Cristobal, can’t bear to look directly at the
Americans, ashamed because he doesn’t have money to help pay for
a truck to carry his dead son’s casket.
“I want to thank for all your work and sacrifices,” he told
Judy Harmon in a quiet, measured voice. “I am completely
grateful to you.”
The Harmons replied, through an interpreter, that they
understand, a little, because they lost a son once, too.
Guatemalan migrants “are just people, like we are,” Neil
Harmon said. “They are poor, hardworking people just trying to
get a job. And I can identify with them.”
January 11, 1998 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Human Rights, Immigrants, Migration
Dia’s family devastated by his death
DIORBIVOL, Senegal – “Baba?” cries 3-year-old Amadou,
clinging to his visiting uncle Abdourahmane’s right leg, dark
eyes shining with hope.
Daddy?
Little Amadou is bewildered by the soft sobbing among adults
he hears in this hot windy village at the edge of Africa’s
Sahara Desert. He’s never met his quiet, coffee-colored father.
They were supposed to meet this year. Yet now when Amadou asks
about Daddy, the sobbing gets louder.
Nobody can bear to tell Amadou the truth: His father –
38-year-old Oumar Dia – is dead. A gas station clerk shot him
one November night as he waited at a bus stop after work, half a
world away in Denver, Colo.
Now in tiny Diorbivol, the full meaning of Dia’s death is
starting to sink in: A bit of wanton barbarism in Denver
threatens the very survival of his village. Like villagers
across Africa, and much of the developing world, Dia’s people
depend increasingly on their migrant sons.
They sent Dia into the growing wave of tens of millions of
sons and daughters migrating from poorer nations to richer ones
to make better lives for themselves and their families back
home. And Dia became one of the newest of such immigrants in the
United States, where just about everybody has an ancestor who
came from someplace else – Ireland, Italy, Germany, Mexico. It
is a phenomenon that has defined our country.
Here in Africa, the situation resembles that of American farm
boys leaving the heartland for city lights. Young Africans go
far to get money at gateways to the global economy. They scrub,
lift, sell – any kind of job – in Dia’s case cleaning at a Hyatt
hotel. They send home money and sustain the places of their
heart – the familial villages where two-thirds of Africa’s 700
million people live.
The Denver Post decided to go to Dia’s village to investigate
the impact of his death on the people he was supporting. A month
after the murder, you can already measure the difference here in
Diorbivol. The rice supply is running out. The water pump that
used to irrigate rice paddies doesn’t work, and nobody’s in a
position to diagnose the problem, let alone pay for fuel. Eyes
and noses of the sick are left to run. Children no longer can
aspire to attend high school. Dia’s family must forget about a
solar panel that would let them turn on a light at night.
This wasn’t the first tragedy the family endured. In 1989,
they were driven from their village in Mauritania by the Moors
in a massive land grab. The conflict has racial overtones
because the lighter-skinned Moors still enslave dark-skinned
Mauritanians without land.
Now in this village where the Dia family resettled along the
Senegal River, Dia’s grieving relatives slump on straw mats
beneath the acacia tree that grows in their compound of cement
houses and adobe huts. A pale blue-and-yellow mosque towers over
the survivors: his widow, Mariam, veiled in black; his frail
father, Barka, tears seeping through slits of his nearly blind
eyes; his mother, Aissata, lines on her face etching in what
feels like too much of an endless struggle.
“Since Oumar died, we cannot live normally,” says
80-year-old Barka, clutching empty bottles of the glaucoma
medicine he needs to save him from blindness. “All what Oumar
had done in the United States, we saw it here. Everything we
needed to lead a good life came from Dia – health, shelter,
food.”
Now the family must decide what to do. Justice is one thing.
But they’re more concerned about simply managing to live.
They’ll send out other sons to try to take Dia’s place. And
they’ll pray.
“Alhamdoulilahi (Thanks be to God),” they say, bowing
repeatedly in respect at the rising and setting of the sun and
the moon and the stars.
The wooden casket sitting behind the mosque here has a splintered
hole in one end. This is the casket that carried Dia’s body
home, accompanied by Mohamadou Cisse, one of Dia’s friends in
Denver. The villagers received it, pulled out the body, and
buried Dia lovingly in the cemetery overlooking the Senegal
River. Dia’s freshly turned grave isn’t marked. The villagers
can’t afford that. But they welcomed Dia back, eulogizing him as
a hero slain while doing his duty for the village.
The villagers understand all too well: Dia bridged a gap that
is wider than the oceans.
Until he was 30, he lived the life of a subsistence farmer.
He was born and grew up in Rouji Aoudi, Mauritania, a squat
adobe village half a day’s hike from here on the northern side
of the Senegal River. He liked to wrestle, sometimes tussling
with other boys to the beat of a drum in parched, dusty yards.
At age 7, he began school, hiking 3 miles and crossing the
river to Senegal, then climbing up through eroding gullies to a
village called Poste. A teacher in a one-room concrete building
taught French, bits of geography and history. At 12, his
education was finished, because his parents had no money to send
him away for high school. So he did what boys do across this
Pulaar-speaking region: herded goats, fished from pirogues in
the murky green river, tended green shoots of maize and millet,
savored the strong sweet tea that women prepare after dusk.
But then, one day in May 1989, everything changed.
Khaki-clad Mauritanian soldiers approached his village. The
fertile floodplain around Rouji Aoudi is one of the few parts of
Mauritania with the potential for large-scale development. In
1989, indiscriminate attacks on Pulaar-speaking people flared
into a brutal campaign that forced out more than 70,000
landowners – persecution that human-rights groups describe as a
Bosnia that the rich world ignored.
When the soldiers arrived, most of the villagers, including
Dia’s family, fled, paddling pirogues across the river to
Senegal. Dia and a half-dozen other men never made it.
The soldiers caught them and arrested them. They marched them
20 miles along the river at gunpoint to what Dia later would
describe as “a military labor camp” at Mbagne. Moorish
authorities have jailed hundreds of Pulaar-speaking people as
political prisoners, and other dark-skinned Mauritanians are
condemned to work as indentured slaves.
The soldiers put Dia and the others to work tilling hard soil
and hauling rocks. Apparently, the Moors believed rocks near
Mbagne contained iron. They used the prisoners as miners. In the
camp, soldiers fed Dia very little.
Others fared worse. In Rouji Aoudi, soldiers gang-raped a
local beauty named Djeneba Baidy. As refugees tell the story,
her parents rescued her one night, led her to the river, sent
her away in a pirogue to Senegal. She took shelter with Dia’s
uncle, Djiby, in Diorbivol. When the soldiers found she was
gone, they threatened to kill the parents if Djeneba wasn’t
returned. Resigned, Djeneba’s brother Adama crossed the river to
collect his sister at Djiby’s house in Diorbivol. The two headed
back to Rouji Aoudi. As they were approaching the village,
soldiers with machine guns opened fire, mowed them down and left
them dying in the dirt.
After two months, the soldiers released Dia and other
prisoners, and ordered them out of Mauritania across the Senegal
River. Dia searched for his family at the Thilogne refugee camp.
When he found them eventually at a camp near Matam, his parents
looked defeated and old. He stayed with them for a few weeks.
But he knew, without asking, there was only one thing to do.
The ethnic cleansing in Mauritania forced Dia to leave rural
Africa for a fundamentally different world.
He squeezed into a 16-seat Car Rapide bus and set out for
Dakar, Senegal’s capital. It was a 12-hour drive down a pocked
two-lane blacktop road that curls across the threshold between
traditional and modern. The closer Dia got to Dakar, the busier
life became. There were more cars, and they moved faster.
Streetside stacks of watermelons for sale grew higher. There
were more merchants, and their voices grew more and more
aggressive. There were power lines and factories of all sorts
making tissues and phosphates and battery acid.
In Dakar, Dia shared a room with a cousin in the crowded slum
of Pikine. He worked shining shoes, lugging a box of rags and
polish. He charged about 20 cents a shine. He saved up enough to
travel, by train and bus, to Abidjan, capital of Ivory Coast,
and later to Libreville, capital of oil-rich Gabon. In these
cities, Dia bought and sold costume jewelry, stringing the
necklaces enticingly across his long, slender fingers and
smiling so that maybe pedestrians would stop.
In this new, busy city world, family life fit in on the side.
On one brief visit to Diorbivol, Dia married Mariam. On
another visit, he rejoiced at the birth of a daughter. Two years
later, Mariam gave birth to another daughter. Dia told her he
also wanted a son. And he wanted to stay with the family. But
the family needed money. Life was tearing Dia apart.
He left again, vowing to return one day and keep their
fractured family together. He promised Mariam he wouldn’t be
like his oldest brother, who went to France 25 years ago and
never came home.
Yet living up to that promise – a promise made by millions of
African men – became incredibly hard. Between 1970 and 1990,
economies crashed and jobs disappeared across Africa, where 270
million people live on less than $1 a day. Conflicts flared from
Kano to Kinshasa. An old bailout option for West Africans in
former French colonies – migrating to Paris – was closed off
under tough new immigration rules.
Dia grew desperate. And on June 3, 1994, he boarded his first
airplane, the Air Afrique flight to New York, where his cousin
Sileye Gaye was living in a basement in Brooklyn. Dia had
embarked on the heart-driven struggle that led millions of
immigrants from around the world into better lives in America.
Almost as soon as he landed at Kennedy International Airport,
he felt a new “time is money” ethic sweeping him up like a
desert wind.
He hailed a cab, and gave Gaye’s address on Dean Street. When
the cab arrived, Gaye emerged from the two-bedroom basement. Dia
got out, said: “America, it’s not like what you hear once you
arrive. It’s harder.”
Gaye knew what he meant. Sometimes Gaye missed Africa so much
he stayed awake all night thinking. If only there were more jobs
at home.
At first, the two worked together as street vendors. “Seven
to seven,” they would say, referring to their 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
routine.
They’d hurry, hurry, catch the A or C train to Manhattan.
There, at a wholesale warehouse, they’d buy discounted
merchandise – Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs, watches – then haul the
stuff back to Brooklyn to sell on the streets.
It was anxious work, complicated by neighborhood gangsters.
When street vendors started packing guns for protection, police
told them: You fight, you both go to jail. Some vendors still
carried bats to scare off gangsters. “We never worked like this
before,” Gaye said, referring to the long hours and the danger.
At night, they retreated to the basement, ate together and
prayed to Allah. After praying, Dia would sit for a few minutes
stroking his red prayer beads contemplatively.
“Alhamdoulilahi,” he would whisper. Thanks be to God.
Meanwhile, across the world, Dia’s mother, Aissata, was
praying, too, in her crumbling adobe hut. Aissata thought about
her son even when she was sleeping. She missed him. Yet facing a
severe drought, she relied on the money he sent to buy rice and
oil.
“In ancient times, there used to be everything here in the
forest,” she explained to her villagers when they asked about
Dia. “Everything we needed was right here. Man did not need to
go away to get things for the family. But now that the wars have
destroyed everything, man is obliged to go abroad to find things
for the family. Many of our fields have been confiscated.”
Here’s the real tragedy of Oumar Dia’s life: Starting in
1996, he was actually managing to make his miracle – the
American miracle – happen the way it’s supposed to. He found a
better job in New York, running a trash compactor for a
janitorial company. Remembering his imprisonment in Mauritania,
he also filed two applications for political asylum.
“The situation in Mauritania has not improved, and I still
fear returning there,” Dia wrote. In the United States, he
sought “protection and relief from the atrocities I have
suffered.”
He seldom took time off work. One day he made an exception.
He rode the ferry from the southern tip of Manhattan to the
Statue of Liberty. He came back smiling.
And in July 1996, after two years in New York City, he
boarded a Greyhound bus for Colorado. He’d heard that a growing
number of West African immigrants earned good money there, and
that Colorado was cheaper than New York. Africans said they felt
less racial tension than in New York.
In Denver, he shared a third-floor apartment off East Colfax
Avenue with fellow Africans. He found work as a janitor at the
Hyatt hotel Downtown. He wore a white uniform and earned $6.50
an hour. And he enrolled in an English class at Emily Griffith
Opportunity School. He took copious notes.
“I am tired” and “She is lonely” are two sentences he
wrote in a workbook.
On Nov. 12, 1996, his application for political asylum was
approved. Dia cried. He celebrated over dinner and fruit juice
with friends. For an African migrant, asylum status means you
can at least think of visiting home without worrying about not
being able to get back into the United States.
And Dia was thinking a lot about his family in Diorbivol. He
sent back $200 a month. He figured out how to phone home through
an expensive and tedious process.
Once a month, he dialed the number of a shop run by Abdul
N’Diaye in Orefonde, a town near Diorbivol. Dia would tell
whoever answered to send somebody to Diorbivol to tell Mariam
Dia that her husband in America would try to call the next day
and to be by the phone in Orefonde. She would walk there, two
hours each way. Sometimes, when Dia couldn’t get off work at the
Hyatt, she waited all day for a call from the United States that
never came.
But when they did connect, Mariam’s heart leapt at the
sensation of hearing Dia’s voice.
“How are the children?” he would say. “The family? What is
lacking there?”
They made plans. They relied on Mamadou Gaye, Dia’s cousin
who lived in Dakar, to relay goods and transfer money. There are
no banks, not even a power line, in Diorbivol. When Amadou was
sick with an open sore on his stomach, Gaye brought the boy to
Dakar for medical treatment.
For the future, Dia envisioned a solar panel on his family’s
roof so his children could see at night. He wanted to help fix
the machine that pumped water up from the river to irrigate rice
paddies. He thought about maybe moving Mariam and the children
to Dakar, where schools were better – maybe even flying them to
Colorado. On the night before he was killed, he telephoned Gaye
in Brooklyn and said he was missing his family too much. This
system of living apart made no sense to him.
“I want to bring them out here,” he told Gaye. “They’d be
safer.”
More than anything, Dia wanted to meet Amadou, his son who
was born after he left for the United States. Now that he had
papers, he promised Mariam he would visit this coming summer, no
matter what. He set aside some money he usually sent home to buy
a plane ticket.
“That’s why this year we couldn’t have new clothes,” Mariam
tells me.
He would get to know his children at last. Then it all fell
apart.
Maybe it was Dia’s determination to see his son Amadou that
explains why he didn’t fight back that night Nov. 18.
He’d just finished work at the Hyatt, was sitting on a 17th
Street bus bench waiting for the last No. 20 bus, which was due
to come by at 11:49 p.m. Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, a single mother
he’d never seen before, joined him waiting by the bench.
Denver police reports describe what happened next. About
11:40, Nathan Thill, a 19-year-old who called himself a
supremacist skinhead, and a friend, with a few beers inside
them, approached the bus bench. They saw Dia. They taunted him
and called him racist names. Finally, they knocked his cap off,
onto the pavement.
VanVelkinburgh reached and picked up the cap. As she was
handing it back to Dia, at 11:46, one of the men opened fire. He
pumped three bullets into Dia’s upper chest and neck. Then, as
VanVelkinburgh turned trying to flee, the killer fired another
bullet into her back that left her paralyzed. Thill later
confessed to the killing. He said he targeted Dia “because he
was black” and didn’t belong in America.
At 12:15 a.m. in the Denver Health Medical Center emergency
room, Dr. Brad Post pronounced Dia dead.
Is that Oumar?” comes the voice of 3-year-old Amadou in
Diorbivol, mid-December, two weeks before Ramadan.
He has glimpsed a framed photo of Dia that village elders are
passing around as they look over condolence letters I delivered
from Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, Dia’s classmates and dozens
of other people in Colorado.
The elders are sitting on the floor of a 12-by-14-foot room.
They nod as a visiting graduate student I hired slowly
translates Webb’s letter into the local Pulaar.
Afterward, the elders make public speeches of thanks to Webb,
President Clinton and the thousands of Coloradans who attended
public anti-hate rallies after the slaying. The killing was a
tragedy for which people of Denver “should be embarrassed,”
Barka Dia allows. Yet the sympathetic way Denver leaders dealt
with Dia’s death – from paying to send Dia’s body to Diorbivol
to prosecution of the crime – leaves the villagers heartened.
“We consider Americans to be the leading people in the
world,” Barka Dia says.
Yet here in this village, where people have virtually
nothing, nearly every family has delivered me a meal to eat. And
the elders have given me a goat – enough meat to feed a family
here for several days. This African village – with such marginal
prospects for the 21st century – is a cradle of basic human
virtues.
The elders tell me villagers have accepted Dia’s death as fate.
Fate is the standard explanation African villagers settle on
when their migrant sons are slain far away. Of the thousands of
Africans who set out from Senegal’s old slave port of Dakar, at
least 40 were murdered in New York over the past five years,
government officials told me. Most were gypsy cabdrivers,
serving dangerous neighborhoods that other cabdrivers avoid. In
each case, villagers mourned. Yet village elders won’t hesitate
to send out more sons to America, government officials said,
because the murders were fate and the villagers have no better
option.
Now in Diorbivol, Dia’s people explain intently that they’re
struggling to move beyond their grief. But there’s so much to
do. For example, the broken water pump. Nobody can afford to fix
it, let alone pay for the fuel to run it. The rice paddies are
drying up, and food supplies are dwindling. Store-bought rice in
Orefonde costs too much. Then there are sick villagers with
runny noses and watery eyes.
Amadou squirms insistently in the arms of his sisters –
5-year-old Djeneba and 7-year-old Makai. The girls remember
their father. They are fine-boned, gentle, content to be quiet,
the way Oumar appears in videos taken before the murder. They
like to play by the river, scooping mud from the banks, molding
it into pirogues and cows. If American children come to
Diorbivol, Makai informs me, “I will take them down to the
river to play.”
As Amadou squirms, Barka Dia, draped in blue robes, clears
his throat, then lays out concerns that are far more pressing
here than the abstract concept of justice. He points at the
children. Makai should be starting school, but the teacher
appointed to work in Diorbivol hasn’t shown up. The family can’t
afford to send the children away to school.
“I am 80 years old now,” he says as the villagers fall
silent. His left hand shakes, still clutching those empty
bottles of glaucoma medicine that he needs.
“As you can see, I cannot work, I cannot do anything,” he
says. “I was always waiting for Oumar to give me things. What
we are eating now was given to us by Oumar. Everything we have
now came from Oumar. And he’s got these three children, two
daughters and one son. These children cannot live if you in the
United States don’t help us.”
The only silent adult on this day is 27-year-old Mariam Dia,
Dia’s widow. Tall and slender, downturned face shrouded in
purple, she’s following a tradition of mourning in seclusion and
silence for three months. But she makes an exception on behalf
of her children.
“If I had the means, I would send my children to study
abroad,” she says. “The men who are responsible for Dia’s
death, I pray to God they may help us, so that we can raise the
children in the best way.”
She pauses for a moment, thinking of the long road from
Mauritania to murder, and how her family in Africa fits into the
modern world. She sighs.
“The best place for the children,” she says resolutely,
“would be the United States.”
DONATIONS
Friends of Oumar Dia, local Muslims and Dia’s employers at
the Downtown Denver Hyatt Regency Hotel have been collecting
money since Dia was killed Nov. 18. The goal is to provide for
Dia’s family, said John Schafer, general manager at the hotel.
So far, more than $20,000 has been raised.
Donations can be made to:
MEMORIAL FUND FOR OUMAR DIA,
c/o Norwest Bank,
1740 Broadway, MS 8671,
Denver 80274;
attn: PERSONAL BANKING.
For more information, contact John Schafer, general
manager, Hyatt Regency Denver, 1750 Welton St., Denver 80202.
Telephone: (303)295-1234.
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
