March 12, 2006 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Of 375 arrests in past 2 weeks, seven were made in Denver
Immigration officials are cracking down on gangs operating on both
sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to prosecute and deport.
International gangs operating on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico
border are spreading to cities nationwide, including Denver,
officials say.
Federal immigration authorities on Friday announced the arrests of
375 suspected members and associates of Central American, Mexican
and other gangs across the country over the past two weeks – the
latest in a year-long effort that has caught 2,388.
In Denver, immigration agents have arrested 70 suspected members of
gangs such as MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, since July, including
seven in the past two weeks, said Jeff Copp, regional chief of U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
All those arrested locally lacked legal immigration papers or had
been involved in burglaries, car thefts or fake document
trafficking, Copp said. All, he said, had “verified gang
tattoos.”
International gangs “are spreading across the country, and they
are going to move anywhere they have a community that will support
them and a network set up,” he said.
Federal agents teamed with local police to identify and arrest the
seven arrested most recently in Denver. Nationwide, of those
arrested this past year, 533 face criminal charges, and 1,855 were
charged with immigration violations.
Authorities said 260 of those arrested over the past two weeks
nationwide are suspected of crimes including drug-dealing, rape and
murder.
In some cities, international gangs have preyed on
illegal-immigrant workers who owe money to smugglers.
No links to al-Qaeda have been established, said Claude Arnold,
chief of anti-gang operations at immigration headquarters in
Washington.
The gangs “commit acts of violence wherever they are. They rob.
They do carjacking. They do drive-by shootings,” Arnold said.
“They’re a threat to public safety.”
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, gangs increasingly team up with
cartels that smuggle drugs and people, authorities said. Attacks on
U.S. Border Patrol agents are increasing, with more than 700 last
year.
A recent FBI intelligence bulletin warned that “a known alien
smuggler operating near Rio Bravo, Texas, has instructed his
employees to shoot at U.S. Border Patrol agents.”
Years ago, migrants from Central America formed MS-13, the 18th
Street Gang and others in Los Angeles. As U.S. authorities in the
1990s deported members convicted of crimes, the gangs spread south
of the border. The gangs now threaten security across Central
America and Mexico.
Some of those detained in recent sweeps are to be deported. “The
alternative is to leave them on the streets,” said Dean Boyd,
spokesman at immigration headquarters.
“If we have criminal evidence, we are going to use it, put ’em in
jail for a long time,” Boyd said. “If we don’t, we are going to
deport ’em.”
December 22, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
In Denver, it’s been three years since any fine was imposed for failure to verify workers’ immigration status.
While Congress wrestles with new legislation to crack down on
employers who hire illegal-immigrant workers, enforcement of an
existing prohibition has all but ceased.
Not a single employer in the Denver area has been fined for three
years, records show, and federal authorities have targeted only a
handful of employers nationwide.
This week, experts on all sides of the intensifying national
immigration debate agreed: Work- site enforcement will be crucial
in efforts to deal effectively with growing numbers of illegal
foreign-born workers.
“If I could do one thing in the area of immigration reform, it
would be to stop employers from providing the magnet. Then we’d
have much of this problem solved,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo,
R-Colo., leader of the House Immigration Reform Caucus.
A 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border that Tancredo and a
majority of fellow lawmakers demand, costing hundreds of millions
of dollars, “is a symbol as much as it is a practical obstacle
…,” Tancredo said. “I certainly believe we should have that
symbol, but the real key is work-site enforcement.”
Longtime federal immigration chief Doris Meisner, now a senior
fellow at the Migration Policy Institute think tank in Washington,
called current work-site enforcement “a charade,” a
“wink-and-nod system” vulnerable to fraud and fakery.
The 1986 law that makes hiring illegal workers a crime “is an
unworkable law because of the verification issue. There’s no way
for employers to know whether the documents they see are valid,”
she said.
“And they don’t have a requirement to verify those documents. That
has to be fixed,” said Meisner, who ran the Immigration and
Naturalization Service under President Clinton.
“You have to have a way that’s straightforward” – similar to
credit-card verification using photo identification and Social
Security numbers – to check workers, she said.
Establishing penalties and a database for screening workers “is an
important step in developing a credible immigration system,” said
Marshall Fitz, advocacy director for the American Immigration
Lawyers Association.
That group and Meisner contend work-site enforcement must be
combined with bringing in more temporary workers to ensure U.S.
economic competitiveness.
Even business advocates at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce favor
required work-site screening “as long as it is fast, reliable and
accurate,” chamber vice president Randy Johnson said. “We
recognize that improved employer verification has to be part of
reform.”
Senate lawmakers now are expected to offer “guest worker”
proposals. House lawmakers have passed broad enforcement-
oriented legislation that would require employers to verify workers
are legal and impose fines of $25,000 per violation.
Today, federal enforcers let companies police themselves. Under a
nationwide pilot program, only 4,830 employers nationwide (131 in
Colorado, 31 in Denver) voluntarily checked Social Security numbers
against a federal database last year.
Federal enforcers also have failed for nearly a decade to issue
guidelines on which identification documents employers should
review, a Government Accountability Office investigation found.
Wide use of fake documents and identities complicates enforcement.
Government statistics show that workplace arrests of illegal
workers nationwide decreased from 17,554 in 1997 to 159 in 2004.
Notices of intent to fine employers decreased from 865 in 1997 to
three in 2004.
In Denver, no employer has been fined for three years for hiring
illegal workers, said Carl Rusnok, regional Homeland Security
spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Immigration officials blame their lagging enforcement of the
current work-site law on post-
9/11 security priorities. Field agents focus on sensitive work
sites: nuclear power plants, military bases and airports.
Now Homeland Security chiefs are beginning to “look at giving
employers better tools to determine the legality of their
workforce. Some of these things are going to be unveiled pretty soon,” said Dean Boyd, national Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman in Washington.
“If employers don’t take those steps,” he said, “we are looking at what sanctions are available.”
June 13, 2004 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Thousands of Latin American teens fleeing gangs and poverty in
their home nations are being turned away from the United States.
And many of the youths sent back to their homes embark again on the dangerous journey.
Tecun Uman, Guatemala – Heat beats down on Jared Membreño as he
stands by railroad tracks, eyeing northbound boxcars at the
Guatemala-Mexico border. Deported from the United States to
Honduras at age 16, he again is trying to escape his bleak life
selling stolen bananas for $2 a day. Now 19, Membreño scavenges for
food and water, dodges police, and battles gangs that control the
rail route.
A whistle wails. He hears the creak of iron wheels, which have
killed and maimed many migrants. He spots an empty ladder on a
boxcar, runs, leaps.
“I don’t think, only pray I don’t fall, because if I fall …”
His fingers curl around a rung, muscles straining, feet flailing
for a foothold.
The U.S. government is deporting more and more teenagers like
Membreño who are fleeing poverty and lack of opportunity abroad.
Immigration records show deportations of teenagers increased by 38
percent, from 717 in 2001 to 990 last year.
Thousands more were turned back at the southern border without
hearings and handed over to Mexican authorities, U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs said. The
government can’t give precise figures, she said.
Yet tens of thousands still come, mostly from Mexico and Central
America.
Many teens travel unaccompanied by adults. There are no estimates
for how many make it through to the United States.
What officials do know is that, when teens are turned away, about
40 percent return.
And there isn’t enough space in U.S. detention facilities to hold
more teens in custody.
U.S. officials are supposed to deport each teen according to a
“plan of return” that ensures they are safe, said Wade Horn,
assistant secretary of health and human services.
Immigration agents “are not supposed to be sending kids back to
their country of origin and just dump them off at the airport,”
Horn said. “I don’t think the United States has the resources or
even the obligation to ensure that every child in the world is
cared for well. But the kids we have contact with, we do have an
obligation to them.”
Trouble back home
Central American authorities, however, say teen deportees often
suffer.
They face “life in the streets, life with angry parents,
prostitution, drug addiction,” said Josefina Arellano, a
Guatemalan government lawyer charged with protecting children.
“When they are returned and don’t have a family, they find
gangs,” she said. “The gangs become their family. If they try to
leave the gangs, they are killed. If this family wants them to
steal, they must steal.”
Nobody has a solution.
Earlier this year, a Colorado case raised an outcry.
It involved Edgar Chocoy, a soccer-loving 16-year-old who fled gang violence in Guatemala City to join
his mother in the United States.
Then he was arrested with a gang. When U.S. authorities in Denver
moved to deport him, he begged for asylum, saying gangs would kill
him if he was sent home.
A judge deported him anyway. Back in Guatemala he was murdered,
shot in the back of the neck.
More often, hopes are crushed quietly.
On his eighth attempt to enter the United States, Franklin Herrera,
16, made it as far as the Rio Grande. His father is dead. His
mother in Honduras didn’t want him to go but couldn’t provide
food.
“I told her, ‘I want to help you,”‘ Herrera said. “And she said,
‘OK. Go try. God bless you.”‘
He was wading ankle-deep in the river on his way to Texas –
thinking of the house and little church he would build for his
mother, he said, when a border guard caught him.
“I could see Los Angeles, I think,” he said.
Membreño is one of those who did make it through.
Before he was deported, he earned $6.50 an hour taking care of
turkeys in Texas at a giant turkey farm – easy money compared with
selling bananas stolen from a U.S.-owned corporate plantation in
Honduras.
He sent home hundreds of dollars a month. It was all working out,
until police responded to a fight between his uncle and aunt – and
checked everybody’s immigration status.
He spent two months in a juvenile detention facility. Then a
magistrate ordered him deported, and he was moved to an adult
facility for two months.
“You find murderers, robbers. Mexicans were fighting against
Chicanos,” he said.
When he was flown back to Honduras, U.S. escorts handed him over to
local officials. That’s standard procedure in formal deportations.
The locals contacted Membreño’s family in their village near San
Pedro Sula and released him.
Money he sent home had helped buy land for a small patch of beans.
“But I saw my family suffering.”
His father earned $1.50 a day when he could find construction
work.
And the boy couldn’t find anything legal. Again, he was stuck.
“My father said, ‘If you want, go away.’ I didn’t think twice.”
Reforms unlikely to pass
Legislation in Congress, the Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection
Act, would improve conditions for migrant teens held in U.S.
custody. It would require legal representation, appropriate
facilities, appointment of guardians, and careful questioning of
detainees to determine whether they faced persecution. Pushed by
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., it is not expected to pass this
year.
But the broader international problem looms: what happens when
governments increasingly turn away teens without detaining them –
and yet more keep fleeing for help.
“We don’t want to do bad things. Our intent is to find a job and
make money,” said Jose Mendes, 16, deported from Texas to
Guatemala, waiting for a northbound train at Hidalgo, Mexico.
“We make such a long trip. We almost get there. We just have to
make another step. And they say, ‘No.’ They don’t know how we feel.
It’s so hard, because you didn’t reach what you wanted.”
If deportees stay home, they face helter-skelter streets and often
are worse off than when they first left.
In the stench of Guatemala City’s central dump, Carlos Giovanne,
15, who was turned back from the United States last year, now picks
through trash collecting cardboard, metal, anything that might be
resold.
Around him, street children scavenge for tortillas and chicken,
sniffing 75-cent bottles of solvent. Giovanne labors to pay off
$187 that his mother, Alma, borrowed to fund his failed journey.
“I lost all my money,” Giovanne said.
Some find protection with gangs branching out from U.S. cities.
Governments estimate that across Central America there are more
than 60,000 gang members. Authorities see them as potential allies
for narcotics traffickers and terrorists.
Teens fleeing to the United States sometimes “are trying to leave
the gangs. And they face threats” if turned back, said Marta
Altolaguirre, vice minister of foreign affairs in Guatemala’s newly
elected government.
U.S. authorities should “maybe make exceptions on the deportation
of these kids, at least until this government has a chance to
provide a secure environment for the kids to be taken care of
properly,” she said.
Warning cries went unheeded
Edgar Chocoy wanted to be an exception.
He was raised by his grandparents in the gang-plagued barrio Villa
Nueva, on the south side of Guatemala City. His father had
abandoned him, and his mother left him as an infant to work in Los
Angeles.
Chocoy loved playing goalie in sandlot soccer games, but sometimes
sniffed glue, said Virgilia Rodriguez, an aunt. He joined a gang at
age 12, court records show.
At 14, when he tried to leave the gang, members threatened him,
Chocoy testified later. He set out by bus to join his mother in Los
Angeles.
And with the gang there, he was caught with guns. Immigration
agents moved him to a lockdown center in Alamosa and pressed to
kick him out of the country.
Deport me, Chocoy told immigration Judge James Vandello in Denver,
and gang members will kill me.
Vandello rejected his case for asylum. On March 10, federal agents
escorted him on an evening flight to Guatemala City, where local
officials released him to the custody of an aunt, Hortencia Guzman,
54.
He stayed indoors, she said, and wore long-sleeve shirts to hide
the “18” on his forearms – a symbol for the 18th Street gang he’d
joined in Los Angeles, rivals of the Mara Salvatrucha gang active
in Villa Nueva. His grandmother died while he was there.
After 17 days, Chocoy asked permission to go out for a soft drink
and to watch Villa Nueva’s Holy Week parade.
While he was parked on his bicycle watching, a gunman approached,
witnesses told the family. Chocoy threw the bike at his feet,
saying, “Take it.” He turned and ran.
The gunman caught Chocoy by a soccer court and shot him in the back
of his neck, said mechanic Carlos Arriola, 27, who was working
across the street. The police never investigated.
An anonymous mound of dirt beyond an unofficial dump covered
Chocoy’s body.
A shelter amid horrors
Meanwhile, along Guatemala’s northern border with Mexico, the Rev.
Ademar Barilli is trying to prevent more deaths. Barilli runs the
80-bed Casa de Migrantes shelter. Thousands of teenagers a year
come through, typically hoping to join relatives illegally inside
the United States, Barilli said. The teens, he said, “are looking
for food, work, life.”
Tattooed thugs lurk outside the shelter along banks of the Suchiate
River between Guatemala and Mexico. Girls face rape if caught, or
are forced into prostitution.
Salvadoran maid Mirna Portillo, 18, said she considered
prostitution. Instead, on a recent night, she left the shelter,
silently crossing the Suchiate on a raft with her half brother
Santos Aragon, 34. Their mother in El Salvador was going blind,
unable to work, and the family needed help.
Then in Mexico, Portillo and Aragon crept toward the train tracks
in Hidalgo, trying to avoid Mexican police. They slept in tall
grass, anticipating a sunrise departure. Instead, dawn brought
thugs with knives and pistols.
Portillo and Aragon ran, escaping through a market, then back
across the river. They pounded on the blue metal doors at Barilli’s
shelter until someone let them in.
“I was thinking, ‘Maybe this is the end,”‘ Portillo said. “At
first I regretted leaving. But then, I think, I have a purpose
because there is nobody to help us there in El Salvador. The only
ones who could help our family are my brother and me.”
For deportees trying to head north again, days are devoted to
begging for food and money on dusty market streets and at bus
stations.
“People see me on the street, and I am humiliated,” said Jayson
Hernandez, 19, deported last year by airplane to Tegucigalpa,
Honduras.
Denver was among the cities where Hernandez said he worked. He
recalled sleeping near the central bus station, where a police
officer told him he was too young to smoke. Now in Tecun Uman, he
was preparing “to take the train to Tijuana” and hitch to Denver
again.
“In 20 days, I will be at the border of the United States. I don’t
care about sleeping; I don’t care about hunger,” he said. “I have
friends in Denver. The United States is a good country to work in.
We must take advantage of it.”
“You want to cry”
The worst, migrants say, is getting caught.
Elmer Rodriguez, 15, left La Cruz Morazan, Honduras, sleeping out,
enduring mosquitoes, washing in rivers, climbing aboard trains,
raiding farm fields for mangos.
After weeks, authorities caught up with him near Tapachula, Mexico,
and tossed him into a concrete-floor holding facility.
“You want to cry. You will never reach your dreams. It’s so hard
to get so far, and then get caught,” Rodriguez said.
Slumped beside him, Ever Deras, 15, told of his work on a farm near
Copan, Honduras. The owner’s granddaughters passed him once and
were “happy, friendly. They used to tell me hello. I was nice with
them. Then the people who were in charge of me said, ‘Go work,’ and
they made me work until 9 o’clock. I felt very tired to be working
so late for a miserable wage.”
“We never had anybody help us. I feel that nobody knows me.”
In that detention center, there are no beds, let alone books. And
some children wait for days while authorities try to locate
relatives.
Parents inside the United States illegally, who call for their
children to come north, are largely to blame, said Gabriela
Coutiño, spokeswoman for the Mexican immigration agency. Then
again, those parents often can’t support their children at home,
she said.
And “there isn’t even a conversation” between governments about
how to deal with the growing numbers of teens in transit.
Some, such as Guatemalan villager Mauricio Martinez, 17, are maimed
by the wheels of trains.
Martinez fell while trying to catch a train in January. The wheels
severed his legs.
Now he sits on a bed in a red soccer jersey with other amputee
migrants at a house run by a nun in Chiapas, Mexico.
In a notepad, he sketches a woman.
“I want to go on,” he said, “but I can’t.”
…
Clinging to the ladder as his boxcar rolls north from the
Guatemala-
Mexico border, Membreño figures he has as good a chance as any to
make it back into Texas.
He’d eluded U.S. authorities before, hiking through arid
borderlands, and the trek seemed less daunting this time around.
He knew the risks. His cousin Danny had fallen from the top of a
boxcar and was “killed in four pieces” on his first trip north,
Membreño says. “I cried.”
Now the challenge is dealing with thugs. He and fellow migrants
describe themselves as a family, bonded by the dream of returning
to the United States. They had fought off one group of toughs by
throwing rocks. They would acquire machetes if necessary, Membreño
says.
He tightens his grip and holds on.
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303.954.1700 or
bfinley@denverpost.com.
November 23, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Latin America, Water
As many as one-fifth of the world’s people lack safe water – and 6,000 children are dying every day as a result. But developed nations and companies with know-how are doing less to help.
CANDELARIA, Honduras – Struggling for the water her family needs to
live, Maria Garcia hikes five times a day from her dirt-floor shack
to a creek. The creek – cloudy from pesticides and from villagers
bathing and washing clothes – isn’t safe. Her first son, Roni, died
of hepatitis at age 3 – one of an estimated 2 million children a
year worldwide who die from diseases linked to bad water. Now her
second son, 1-year-old Jose, “is always with diarrhea, always
coughing.” Still, Garcia, 23 years old and seven months’ pregnant,
has no choice. This is the only water she can get.
She scoops the creek water into her red jug. She hoists this
40-pound load onto her back and, stretching rattan cords across her
forehead to support it, claws her way up a slippery clay slope on
the quarter-mile haul home.
“It’s hard to do without falling,” she says. “I’m going to have
to do more trips. I’m going to need the water.”
Today, nobody is moving to help Garcia and the growing numbers of
people – an estimated 1.1 billion, nearly a fifth of humanity – who
lack safe water. Twice that many lack basic sanitation.
The death toll from bad water mounts. United Nations officials say
it tops 6,000 children a day – mostly in low-income Africa, Asia
and Latin America.
Children are especially vulnerable to waterborne diseases that can
lead to fatal dehydration. Most common is diarrhea – easily
preventable in developed nations such as the United States.
But elsewhere, solutions are constrained by spreading poverty and
increasingly limited water resources.
Water shortages and deficient sanitation now are starting to
aggravate conflicts, leading to political turmoil. Three years ago
in Bolivia, slum dwellers rioted when the government tried to
install a water system that required them to pay fees they found
intolerable. International bankers would only back a for-pay
system.
And last month, Bolivian peasants and slum dwellers, riled about
their government’s free-market policies in general, marched on
Bolivia’s capital, hurling dynamite. They forced President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada to resign.
“We could have water wars – not riots, I mean wars – between
countries over control of river systems,” said Andrew Natsios,
chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the
nation’s main humanitarian agency. “We are very worried about
that.”
World aid agencies doing less
In Iraq this year, a sudden collapse of water-supply networks
enraged Iraqis as U.S. troops, who had bottled water, occupied
their communities. In India, a dispute over water allocations has
led to interstate rioting. In China, an estimated 100 million
peasants unable to irrigate crops converge on ill-equipped cities.
In the Middle East, a behind-the-scenes struggle for water strains
efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Water shortages also are expected to spur migration from water-poor
regions to Europe and the United States, where jobs and water are
plentiful.
Many experts believe that a concerted effort to address global
water supply and sanitation should be a priority for the United
States and other wealthy countries. U.S. government studies have
found that installing a basic water system in a village can cut
infant mortality by up to 50 percent.
Yet the governments and corporations that could help instead are
withdrawing from the challenge instead.
Government water aid from 21 of the richest countries to poor
countries decreased by 18 percent between 1997 and 2001, according
to data compiled by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and
Development, an international group based in Paris.
The U.S. government – focusing on military priorities this year –
budgeted only $162 million for water-supply and sanitation help
abroad.
USAID’s Natsios said this will change. The United States will
follow through on a presidential “Water For the Poor” initiative
to spend $970 million over three years “to deal with these
issues,” he said. That money – a third of it approved so far by
Congress – falls far short of the tens of billions U.N. leaders say
are needed.
The other key players in addressing water shortages and poor
sanitation are corporations that can design and install efficient
systems. They, too, are doing less. Private-sector spending on
water supply and sanitation decreased by 82 percent between 1997
and 2002, from $8.3 billion to $1.5 billion, according to data from
the World Bank, the main international financing agency.
Engineering, construction and utility firms aren’t motivated. As
the poor world gets poorer, the potential for profit diminishes.
Companies no longer bid on requests to install water systems even
in megacities – let alone in the villages where more than half the
world’s poor reside, said Don Evans, chief of water operations for
Denver-based CH2M Hill – one U.S. firm in a water industry
dominated by Europe- based conglomerates.
“The poor residents of these countries have no access to water.
They have incredible sanitation issues with huge health impacts,”
Evans said. “It’s a tragedy to these countries that nothing is
going to happen.”
‘It’s very hard to lose a son’
In Honduras, population 6.6 million, one of the poorest countries
in the world, water problems are chronically as severe as anywhere
in the Western Hemisphere. The struggle for clean water is constant
in villages such as Candelaria in the central highlands.
Here, amid screeching roosters and the hum of insects, Maria Garcia
enters her shack and unloads her sloshing jugs beneath rafters
where she stores maize, in the tradition of Lenca Indians,
descendants of the Mayans who once thrived across Central America.
A small fire smokes in the corner.
The only way to make the water safe – Garcia has heard from
visiting Cuban health workers – is to boil it.
But boiling water requires wood. The nearest forest lies 3 miles
away in the mountains – meaning a major chore for Reyes Gomez, 24,
her husband.
“We can’t get that much wood,” Garcia says. At the same time, she
believes that Roni died, and Jose is sick, because “we drink the
water without boiling it.”
The family tried to get help for Roni. Gomez carried the boy 13
miles down the muddy road to La Esperanza – the nearest city.
Doctors took blood and urine samples and sent Gomez and his son to
a regional hospital 60 miles across mountains in Comayagua.
There, nurses sent them back to La Esperanza. Gomez turned to a
private specialist who suggested a test for $147. Gomez sold the
family’s bull for $264 to pay for the test. The specialist
concluded Roni’s hepatitis was chronic. There was nothing to do.
Gomez carried his son home. Six nights later, on Dec. 28, as
parents and grandparents cradled him, Roni died.
“It’s very hard to lose a son,” Gomez said. “You want to kill
yourself.”
Doctors face similar cases every day.
More people worldwide enter hospitals with waterborne diseases than
with any other type of ailment, said Mark Brown, chief of the
United Nations Development Program. Lack of safe water ranks among
the leading causes of death. An estimated 2 million children a year
are victims of water-related diarrhea, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq
said. Typically, the diarrhea comes from swallowing fecal
bacteria.
In a dimly lit emergency ward along the northern coast of Honduras,
Dr. Marta Benitez said 40 percent of her patients are children sick
from foul water. It’s a bigger killer than the mosquito-borne
malaria and hemorrhagic dengue fever that also haunt Central
America.
During a recent night shift, Benitez and two nurses handled five
critical cases. One dehydrated boy, Daniel Ramos, 3, lay on a
gurney, eyes rolling as he drifted in and out of consciousness,
loops of white tape holding an intravenous tube on his tiny right
wrist.
“He’s always sick with diarrhea,” said his mother, Esperanza
Hernandez, 27. He’d been crying that his stomach hurt, and in the
middle of the night his family hustled down a rocky trail from
their village in foggy forests above banana plantations. “I was
worried he would pass out on the way to the hospital,” Hernandez
said.
The family drinks stream water. “We don’t boil the water,” said
Dolores Ramos, the boy’s grandmother, “because we don’t like the
taste of boiled water.”
Benitez told the parents to just wait. “With IV, I think he’ll
respond.” As they hung their heads, she added: “We could prevent
these.”
Polluted water hurts people in countless ways. Typhoid and cholera
flare regularly. Waterborne parasites cause onchocerciasis –
“river blindness.” Other parasites contribute to malnutrition.
And everywhere, girls give their lives to the chore of hauling
water for their families.
Miriam Garcia, 13, and her friends recently balanced 20-pound water
buckets on their heads along the Guaymitas River on the outskirts
of El Progresso, an industrial boomtown in northern Honduras. They
had to quit school after third grade.
“My mother doesn’t come to get water because her hip hurts, so I
am the only one who comes,” Garcia said.
The girls bathe, wash clothes and play in the river – within a mile
of family shanties. Diarrhea and headaches are the norm.
Doctors at public clinics “only pay attention to those who have
money,” Garcia said. “We all have parasites in our stomachs.”
Population growth erases gains
For three decades, leaders of rich countries have vowed to help the
world’s water have-nots.
The United Nations, which declared the 1980s “The Decade of
Water,” again has put water at the top of its global agenda. After
last year’s U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg, South Africa, U.N. leaders set a goal to halve the
proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and
sanitation by 2015.
Yet “the water situation worldwide is distressing and not
improving noticeably,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, president of the
Denver-based American Water Works Association, a leading group of
water professionals.
Part of the challenge is that deaths caused by contaminated water –
unlike deaths from earthquakes or hurricanes – are “a persistent,
growing problem,” said John Halpern, senior water supply and
sanitation adviser for the World Bank. Politically, it’s hard to
get governments to focus on such problems because they don’t seem
as urgent even if the consequences are huge, Halpern said.
And gains have been nullified by population growth in the most
severely afflicted countries across Asia, Africa and Latin
America.
Finally, lenders who could supply the billions needed for urban
water systems turn away because governments in poor countries often
can’t or won’t pay bills.
Meanwhile, villages like Candelaria – population 1,500 – are so
scattered that only small-scale solutions are feasible. Grassroots
nonprofit aid groups are the best hope for villagers, Halpern
said.
“The rich world needs to be involved. In pure economic terms,
growth in these countries is what’s going to help grow the world
economy. The industrialized countries including the United States
need somebody to sell goods and services to. Most of the population
lives in the developing world and will live increasingly in the
developing world.”
A debate among water experts also stalls action.
The issue is whether corporations should control water. In the
mid-1990s, corporations backed by the World Bank began installing
and operating water systems in needy countries – for profit, with
the view that charging for water is essential to allocate it
efficiently. People in rich countries generally pay for their
water, though rates often are lower than in poor countries where
water is scarce. Critics argue that water essential for life
shouldn’t be privately controlled.
“There has to be strong government oversight and protection of the
public good,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific
Institute, a water policy research center.
While the debate rages, children die. Anger grows.
“The U.S. response, in particular, has been inadequate. Our
contribution to water projects internationally is pathetically low.
It’s a tiny fraction of the aid we give, which itself is a tiny
fraction of what’s needed,” Gleick said.
“If this problem got the attention it deserves, we could eliminate
deaths from water-related diseases. But we seem to do better at
dealing with short-term crises. It’s more upsetting to us when a
plane crashes than when 6,000 kids died yesterday, and today, and
will die again tomorrow from preventable water-related diseases.”
For a few years, Honduras stood out among water-poor countries
because it did get some serious attention in 1998 following
Hurricane Mitch. The death and destruction – concentrated in the
north where U.S. corporations Chiquita and Dole for decades have
run banana plantations – drew more than $1 billion in emergency
aid. The United States gave more than $145 million.
Hurricane aid helped town
The aid paid for CH2M Hill, the Denver-based engineering firm, to
install $3 million worth of water supply and sanitation systems,
mostly in northern cities near the plantations and new factories.
Now in La Lima, population 70,000, healthy children play soccer
beneath red tanks that supply purified water.
The water immediately improved lives of thousands who lacked access
before, said caretaker Gilberto Nunez, 40, a father of two, who was
watering Llama del Bosque trees recently at the base of one tank.
“We don’t have the shortages we had before. People are really
satisfied,” Nunez said. “Before, they had to walk far and carry
their water. We were always working to get water.”
CH2M Hill sent engineer Leda Amador, who grew up in Honduras, to
coordinate work at the local level – including the delicate matter
of convincing low-income residents to pay for treated water piped
to their homes.
Incomes here, as across much of the world, are generally less than
$500 a year. And newcomers flocking from rural areas for factory
work often bristle at the notion of paying for water. Sometimes
they refuse.
“The question is whether the poor can pay,” Amador said. “I
think they can. If you figure what their other options are – what
they pay to buy water from private water trucks or to buy water in
bottles – it’s more than what they would pay for (municipal) water
service.”
Amador teamed with leaders of neighborhood “patronata” self-help
associations to explain plans. City officials backed her up,
cutting off service when people didn’t pay. Rates were set on a
sliding scale to help the poor. A typical family pays $7 a month.
But now Honduras’ hurricane money has run out. CH2M Hill is closing
its office. And, as in other poor countries, hundreds of thousands
of Hondurans – the population is growing by 3.2 percent a year –
still lack access to safe water.
The United States “must continue helping, because in poor
countries, we don’t have the capability to build up our water
systems because it’s too expensive,” said Mayor Nelly Soliman of
El Progresso, population 200,000. “Always, the policy has been,
the richer countries should help the poorer countries. This is a
severe problem for us.”
U.S. officials say the most children die in rural areas, where 36
percent of Hondurans lack water. “I’d like to put more in. It is
needed,” said Paul Tuebner, USAID’s director in Honduras.
“Have you ever hauled water daily for 2 miles on your head up and
down mountains? … We have studies that show, once we put in a water
system, infant mortality goes down.”
The anger that has led to riots over water has erupted here, too.
Last March, 1,500 protesters riled about water targeted roads in a
northern industrial area where they knew they might get attention.
They blocked traffic around new “maquila” factories where, for
about $50 a month, workers make Fruit of the Loom, Wrangler, Tommy
Hilfiger and other garments for U.S. consumers.But Honduras’ rural
poor traditionally are peaceful. And in Candelaria, villagers
preferred a practical approach.
They’ve designed a water system that would pipe water from a spring
to spigots at family compounds.
A few years ago, they bought pipes and laid them, with dozens of
men contributing free labor. But the pipes burst. Local engineers
had failed to allow for pressure changes as water whooshed up and
down hills. Now, with help from different engineers, village
leaders have modified their plan and are looking for a better kind
of pipe.
Some villagers are hopeful. Maria Garcia and Reyes Gomez are
impatient after their son’s death.
Gomez now plans to emigrate to the United States. Friends who have
managed to sneak into the country send home money that lets their
families live comfortably in La Esperanza.
Working abroad “would be harder. This is my father’s land. I
learned to grow crops from my father. This is the natural way for
me to earn my living,” Gomez said. But potato and banana crops
don’t pay. His wife, Maria, is too busy hauling water to work in a
sewing cooperative.
So Gomez talks of borrowing $1,300 to hire a smuggler to guide him
north. There are alligators in the river along the U.S.-Mexico
border, he said. “That’s what I’m scared of, and maybe somebody
will kill me.”
If he gets through, his first earnings will pay off his lender, he
said. “Then I could help my family.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
American Water Works Association (Based in Denver):
….www.awwa.org; 303-734-3410
….www.water4people.org; 303-734-3476; ….303-734-3494
World Vision, aid contacts in La Esperanza, Honduras:
….Cesar_zelaya@wvi.org
….Region_intibuca@wvi.org
….honduras@wvi.org
Pacific Institute, an Oakland, Calif.- based water research center
that publishes the biennial survey “The World’s Water”:
www.pacinst.org
USAID, a government humanitarian agency: www.usaid.gov
World Bank, an international finance organization:
www.worldbank.org
HONDURAS
Population: 6,669,789
Median age: 18.8 years
Population growth rate: 3.2 percent
Infant mortality rate: 29.96 deaths per 1,000 live births
Life expectancy at birth: 66.65 years
Fertility rate: 4.07 children born per woman (2003 estimate)
Literacy rate: 76.2 percent (those 15 and over who can read and
write)
Population below poverty line: 53 percent (1993 estimate)
Unemployment rate: 28 percent (2002 estimate)
Sources: Denver Post research,
CIA Factbook
October 21, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Latin America
Millions of producers in Third World mired in poverty
UNILDE, Nicaragua – Standing in a cloud forest on the side of
a volcano, Santiago Rivera closes his calloused fingers over green
coffee fruits blushing ripe – future flavor for U.S. consumers.
He descends a twisting trail, past banana trees and the
donkey he fondly calls “the squirrel,” to his adobe house with an
earthen kitchen floor and no plumbing.
He gets by thanks to the “fair trade” deal that gives him 91
cents a pound – double what most growers here get. In fact, Rivera
is the model campesino pictured on brochures touting Starbucks
Coffee’s participation in fair trade, in which companies and
consumers team up to get more money to peasants.
But millions of other coffee producers, across Central
America and much of the Third World, are mired in some of the
planet’s worst poverty. A few hours from Rivera, women give birth
in fly-infested black-plastic shanties without medical help, and
barefoot children grow up on one meal a day.
The survival or suffering of people who produce your coffee
is one of many aspects of today’s world that U.S. consumers can
control. Today, poverty and despair are spreading, creating
breeding grounds for trouble in a world where the threshold for
violence rose Sept. 11.
Leading analysts, including former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado,
who recently led a sweeping appraisal of U.S. national security,
say we must confront global poverty – especially to combat
terrorism.
“There must be much more concerted international effort to do
what the Army calls drying up the swamp. The swamp is composed of
four things – money, weapons, shelter and the fourth thing –
recruits,” Hart said. “The only way you do the fourth is by ending
the despair and offering hope through concerted
economic-development programs.”
The emerging fair-trade movement tries to accomplish this
within the market system instead of relying on aid handouts or
moving farmers into low-wage factories. The way it works is U.S.
consumers pay 5 to 10 percent more for products with fair-trade
labels. Those additional cents, and savings from companies buying
the products more directly from producers and co-ops abroad, can
give producers in the field a minimum price. Inspectors verify
whether the money gets through.
This movement brought “fair trade” coffee to Starbucks a year
ago along with other coffee shops – Kaladi Brothers in Denver,
Coffee Jones in Boulder and Bongo Billy’s Coffees in Buena Vista,
among them. Now, movement leaders target giant corporations that
drive world prices – owners of Maxwell House, Folgers and the
like. More than 80 percent of the coffee Americans drink is this
relatively inexpensive canned coffee.
Fair-trade leaders also plan to broaden their strategy to
encompass producers of other commodities – bananas, sugar,
chocolate, clothing.
But consumer-led poverty reduction isn’t possible unless
corporations agree to offer fair-trade products. Many refuse. As
it stands now, few coffee growers benefit because less than 1
percent, or 2.19 million of the 219 million cups of coffee
Americans drink daily, is certified as fair trade.
Meanwhile, a global coffee crisis caused by overproduction
drives millions ever deeper into poverty.
“We eat only beans,” said Paula Mercado, 40, in a dark
hillside shack near Rivera. “We’re killing ourselves working, and
we can’t get a decent price.”
Highly traded commodity
Four in five U.S. adults drink coffee, helping to make coffee
the world’s second most-traded commodity after oil with $55
billion in annual sales. And industry experts say the very best
coffee generally comes from small-scale farmers like Santiago
Rivera laboring in tropical highlands from Ethiopia to Indonesia.
This fine coffee grows on shaded plots, under diverse
canopies considered ecologically healthy, where complex flavors
develop. Here in the mountains of northern Nicaragua, brilliant
blue butterflies bounce around Rivera’s carefully tended coffee
plants.
His classic method and wise, weathered face made him a
modern-day Juan Valdez for Starbucks, which distributes its
fair-trade brochures at 3,000 shops around North America. Soon
Starbucks will offer fair-trade coffee worldwide, chief executive
Orin Smith said. “We’re going to be a force within our industry
… working very hard to make this program work.”
It isn’t charity, he said. To keep selling top-quality
coffee, “we need these people to survive.”
For his role, Rivera gained a public-relations tour of
America last year. He saw “streets made of nothing but buildings –
beautiful.”
Now back home he struggles, perched on a wood chair teetering
on an uneven floor, weighing his finances. His wife, Ermelinda,
brings him a cup of his own coffee – one of the few luxuries in
his life. His earnings as a coffee grower aren’t enough even to
afford Nescafe instant from the village store, let alone an $11.45
bag of his beans in America.
He collects 91 cents a pound because he’s part of a
cooperative – Prodecoop based in Esteli – that sells 60 percent of
its coffee at fair-trade prices – $1.26 a pound for fair-trade
beans and $1.41 for beans also certified as organic. Directors
said farmers usually receive about $1 a pound depending on
deductions for transport, processing and community projects.
Rivera’s 91 cents means his six children can attend school
and, at this time of drought, eat store-bought rice and corn. He
still relied on aid handouts after Hurricane Mitch to repair his
roof and an outhouse.
Yet his struggles are minimal compared with those of
neighbors around him who must sell their beans for 45 cents a
pound. They beg regularly to let them join his co-op. Rivera must
say no until demand grows – which torments him.
“You should be able to work and have a better life,” he said.
Sales are still low, but the volume of fair-trade coffee
imported by the United States has more than doubled since 1999,
said Paul Rice, director of the TransFair USA organization that
coordinates monitoring and labeling.
“U.S. consumers are a sleeping giant,” Rice said. “As it
awakens, corporate America has to sit up and listen.”
But fair traders face an uphill battle.
Across coffee-dependent Central America – where good times
mean living on $2 a day – relief agencies estimate 1.5 million
peasants lack food as a coffee crisis worsens. World market prices
plunged to all-time lows last week – 19 cents a pound for
low-quality robusta and 45 cents for arabica beans. In Nicaragua
alone, a quarter-million people are suffering, and United Nations
officials said more than 12,000 coffee workers now receive
emergency food aid.
What caused this crisis? Investors over the past decade
sensed profit opportunities in Vietnam, where peasants work as
cheaply as anywhere in the world. Financiers and Vietnam’s
government directed rapid development of coffee plantations.
Vietnam now is the second-largest coffee producer behind Brazil –
churning out cheap robusta coffee that corporate giants like
Procter & Gamble buy. A resulting glut of this coffee sucked down
world prices.
Vietnamese peasants win.
But in Nicaragua, Victor Manual Alvarez, 45, sat on the floor
of his two-room house measuring out the last of the corn that
feeds his family. His four barefoot children watched listlessly.
“When this runs out …” His voice trailed off. The family
has no money, he said. A dry cornfield behind the house isn’t
planted. He still counts on coffee, but unable to sell at
fair-trade prices he must settle for 50 cents a pound. After
tending to his coffee plants and harvesting, moving his coffee to
local middlemen requires five day-long donkey treks down the
volcano and then along a rocky 5-mile road to Somoto.
He devotes more time now to searching for construction work
that might bring some money for food. Sometimes he’s gone for
weeks.
“It’s not fair,” he said. “Fifty cents a pound is not enough
to provide coffee.”
There was a time when he envisioned a better life for his
children. “I’ve been working with a machete since I was a little
boy. I never studied.”
Now he just wants them to survive. “Give a good price to us,
the poor producers of your coffee,” he implored. “The coffee we
produce is good coffee.”
United Nations World Food Program supervisor Rosario Sanabria
laments that too many commodity producers are falling behind.
“The companies play an important role,” Sanabria said. “Their
values are not human. They are commercial. What is their
responsibility? In general, we’re not taking care of human values.
The world would be a little more fair if we thought more about
human values.”
Inside a Starbucks cafe on Denver’s 16th Street Mall,
bank-loan specialist Beth Bockenstedt, 44, ordered up a $3.80
Caramel Macchiato last week. She knew about fair-trade coffee.
She’d seen the brochure featuring Santiago Rivera. The cafe in
Denver offered no fair-trade coffee as a daily brew. Bockenstedt
said she might be inclined to try it or buy fair-trade beans for
home instead of French Roast – even if those beans aren’t quite as
good.
But she doubts fair-trade money really reaches peasants. She
views fair trade as “just a gimmick” to hook socially conscious
consumers.
At Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, chief executive Smith
worried about the quality of fair-trade coffee. He said he wants
fair-trade leaders to work with industry leaders to find
cooperatives that can produce the best coffee in large volumes.
Specialty-coffee lobbyists fear this is happening too slowly
and that an industrywide roughening of quality will result as
Vietnamese robusta drives out savory arabicas.
Fair-trade pitch rejected
“We can’t do what we need to do with fair trade,” said Ted
Lingle, director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
“We can’t get consumers to connect with the issue fast enough to
make a real difference for the farmer.” Lingle wants coffee-market
leaders in New York and London to remove “triage” waste products
that inflate global coffee volume, in an emergency effort to
resuscitate prices.
Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble directors at a shareholder
meeting Oct. 9 rejected a pitch to offer fair-trade coffee. P&G
prefers to help impoverished producers by giving aid, spokeswoman
Margaret Swallow said.
Executives are looking for groups that work with farmers to
help them switch from coffee into growing more profitable crops,
she added.
Pressure groups plan to attack P&G as suppliers of “sweatshop
coffee.”
And in the U.S. Congress, lawmakers are trying to make up
their own minds about what kind of coffee to drink. Last week
lawmakers tested fair-trade blends in a congressional cafeteria.
Yet so far nobody is making a real difference for coffee
workers.
In a fly-infested shanty camp near Matagalpa, Dimas Carrazo,
40, grips an ax, trolling for wood to cut and sell, the only way
he can afford food for his four starving kids. Frustrations mount.
Carrazo and others once fought as U.S.-backed contra fighters to
subvert Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Many still wear blue
contra caps emblazoned “Guardians of Democracy.”
Americans should help with the coffee crisis, said Marcos
Molina Velazquez, 40, an ex-fighter now raising five kids. “If
they helped us before to get arms, now they should help us get
tools.”
In another roadside camp, Samuel Tinoco, 53, suggested:
“Maybe I should go to Vietnam?”
Leading a group of 350 landless coffee workers, who marched
all the way to Managua pleading for aid to sick children and then
camped at the National Assembly, Maria Victoria Picado, 45,
announced: “If nobody does anything, this will get violent.”
This year, a U.S. State Department report warned that “endemic
poverty” in Nicaragua is driving entire communities into smuggling
drugs from Colombia north to the United States.
Even Santiago Rivera questions the free-market system right
now. He has friends in the United States, and excused himself
tearfully after watching the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center. “We’re all brothers.”
Yet in Nicaragua’s election next month, he’s backing
ex-Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, a man with questionable
connections to Libya and Iraq who once tried to lead Central
America toward socialism. He’s worth another try, in Rivera’s
view, as a leader responsive to real people.
February 4, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
SAN JULIAN, Mexico – Outside the house, the annual fiestas
reverberated, three weeks of dancing, weddings, family reunions,
polished pickup trucks parading through town.
Inside, Maria del Carmen, 49, sat silently at her kitchen
table holding a photo of a man in a cowboy hat standing by his
beloved red horse.
The man should have been here with all the other husbands,
sons, brothers and fathers reveling in their hometown before
returning to work in the United States.
But 16 months ago, Denver police stormed the wrong house at
the wrong time. They killed him, the wrong man, in a botched drug
raid.
The man was her husband, Ismael Mena. To make amends, Denver
taxpayers paid $400,000. That money bought this house at the edge
of San Julian for Maria and her nine children – more convenient
than living on Mena’s hardscrabble farm southeast of here.
The kitchen is fancier than Maria ever imagined, with running
water, a stove, a 4-foot-tall refrigerator, tile floor, even a
microwave. In addition, monthly $1,600 checks are scheduled to
arrive for two decades.
Still, every check “makes me more sad, because I remember
what happened to my husband,” Maria del Carmen said. “I’m
thinking, it was much nicer when he was here in Mexico with us.”
And while the legal business is officially over, the Mena
case festers, raising questions of justice that have many
Coloradans, and Mexicans, furious.
Last month, Denver leaders let officer Joseph Bini, whose
faulty no-knock warrant triggered the raid, resume police work
after a three-month suspension. Last week, City Council members
agreed to pay $1.2 million – three times as much – to a Denver
teenager paralyzed when police shot him running from a burglary
with a gun.
“Disgusting,” Mexican Consul General Carlos Barros said in
Denver.
Here in Mexico, people shake their heads, saying this just
cements the hypocrisy of a nation that relies on Mexican labor as
never before while openly discounting Mexican lives.
Yet Maria’s message to you in Denver is measured: “We thank
everyone who is helping us, supporting us,” she said. “I feel sad
when I think of what happened to my husband. I take consolation
that I’m with my children.”
For Bini, she voiced compassion. “I’m very sad about what
happened to my husband,” she said. “But him, he needs his work. He
has a family, too.”
New house means end
of life on the land
Big changes in the Mena survivors’ lives began six months ago
when they used some settlement money to buy the two-story,
three-bedroom house in this farming town of about 20,000 people.
It cost $70,000.
Living here’s easier, though not as free, as on the farm
where the Menas struggled before. Ismael Mena was exceptionally
devoted to traditional farming on his 14 acres. He kept his family
in a three-room adobe house. He invested in livestock despite
scarce water and globalization’s side effects: collapsing beef and
milk prices.
Mexico’s entry into the world economy means more competition
for small farmers and new factory opportunities for workers,
raising expectations – and shaking traditions Mena loved.
Now, his survivors’ house is fairly typical.
San Julian is filled with modern, bright two- and three-story
homes painted pink, turquoise and yellow, some adorned with
intricate round observatory towers and giant rooftop satellite
dishes. That’s because an estimated 90 percent of men here work in
the United States. They earn up to $20 an hour (about $41,600 a
year, not counting overtime), enabling an ever-more comfortable,
family-oriented lifestyle.
They are among 300,000 or more Mexicans who go north, legally
or illegally, to work in U.S. cities such as Denver. Mexicans
working in the United States last year sent home an estimated $7
billion. Meanwhile, poverty in Mexico is increasing, with 15
million people living on less than $1 a day. Ismael Mena worked in
the United States for years, with an official work permit at
times. In Denver, Coca-Cola accepted his papers and gave him a
$300-a-week night-shift job lifting red plastic crates.
Today in Mexico, the Menas are more or less middle class. Few
people know they receive money from Denver. The $1,600 monthly
checks, which started arriving in August, cover basic expenses.
Maria said groceries for 10 – including 2-year-old grandson Miguel
– cost about $1,000. Medicine costs about $100. Ismael Jr., 18, is
diabetic. Twin 21-year-old daughters Rosaelia and Rosalilia suffer
from headaches and underwent medical tests.
“They are traumatized,” Dr. Ismael Macias said in his
diagnosis. “It will take time.”
Other monthly expenses include $80 for telephone service, $20
for electricity, $20 for cable television (39 channels) and $8 for
water. Maria and her daughters make most of their own clothes.
They walk to church and shops, though eldest son Heriberto, 22,
recently paid $8,000 for a used Chevy truck. Filling it with gas
costs about $50 – too much.
The main difference now: less work. Running water – “hot
here, cold here, and we even have hot water upstairs,” Maria noted
proudly – means she needn’t hike out to pumps or ponds and lug
buckets back every time she washes dishes or clothes.
The gas stove frees her from having to find, cut and haul
wood before meals.
The refrigerator enables a more diverse diet. Maria still
prepares corn tortillas and beans in the blackened ceramic pot she
used before. Now she also serves beef and fresh vegetables.
At last the children are regularly in school. At sunrise, as
roosters crow, Juanita, 13, and Irene, 15, their backpacks stuffed
with books and notepads, set out down Calle Reforma toward the
high school with 17 rooms and 700 students. Soon after, Alejandro,
12, who loves soccer, and Carmen, 9, who loves coloring books,
walk through a pasture to a primary school.
Ismael Jr., makes furniture at a small local factory. Wages
are less than $10 a day. But he’s proud, learning new skills. “Six
days a week,” he said, smiling, sanding a sheet of pine for
shelves that are sold here in San Julian.
Family keeps memories of hard-working patriarch
Mena’s family keeps a suitcase full of his work clothes to help
them remember him – very strong, hardworking, a loving man who
brought them toys from the United States, a horseman who could
also ride bulls.
“When you hold the clothes, it makes you content,
remembering,” Rosaelia said.
Yet memories also torment them, arriving unexpectedly,
sister Rosalilia added.
“Not exactly every hour, but at various times all the day.
Always when we see something he liked. Or when we see a red horse
– like his. It’s sad, thinking. …”
The twins plan to work at small household sewing centers in
the future if their headaches pass. Maria taught them to sew on a
white Kenmore that Ismael brought from the United States.
For now, they work at home, mopping the tiled floor daily.
They hang clothes to dry on the patio. The children help water red
flowers growing in silver coffee cans and clay pots. They’re not
allowed to play in the living room with immaculate new furniture.
One recent night, the Mena children walked through San Julian
to a carnival, part of the annual Candelaria fiestas. Originally
religious, the fiestas are adapted to a family-centered migratory
culture. The Menas passed bumper cars, a roller coaster and dart
games where visiting fathers hovered over other children smiling
happily.
It’s a source of great sadness for Maria that her eldest son,
Heriberto, plans to move north again in the migration that
consumed his father.
Heriberto, 22, first left at 16. That’s what local heroes do.
He excelled in the United States, essentially running one
restaurant, waiting tables at another. He graduated from high
school and had begun college computer courses when his father was
killed.
He never visited home for fear his lack of legal immigration
papers would make it difficult for him to get back to work. He
missed his father’s funeral for this reason. In December, he went
home because the settlement made his family’s situation less
precarious.
He loved it. He went out every night, circling up and down
Avenida Hidalgo, letting friends drive his blue truck. A photo of
his father in his wallet, and long-awaited braces on his teeth,
Heriberto exchanged greetings, shook hands, savored every glance
at the beautiful women. He danced late into one starry night with
a girl in a pink top and tight black pants as Julio Preciado and
his band performed.
“But one month is enough,” he said. There’s no work here that
appeals to him, he said. Farming offers no future.
Looking at Heriberto chatting over tequila at a wedding as
the bride and groom danced, he seemed “like the happiest guy in
the world,” said Juan Herrera, 33, a close friend who stood nearby.
But Heriberto’s head is turning inside, Herrera said. “Maybe
after five years, this family will begin to feel better.” Denver’s
wrongful death money “is part of” the healing, Herrera said. “But
it’s not everything. Because in Mexico the family is so strong, it
is harder here. It’s going to take time.”
No formal apology from Denver ever arrived here, the Menas say.
One recent morning, Heriberto drove half an hour east to the
cemetery where his father is buried.
Caretaker Pedro Losano was hauling weeds in a wheelbarrow.
Heriberto found the white tomb. He faced it silently for
nearly two minutes. He cried quietly.
He went to Losano and asked what the family must pay to keep
the bones in the tomb after five years.
Then Heriberto drove west, kicking up contrails of dust, on
the road to the family farm by an old church and a few houses that
together are known as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
He stopped at the church. Old men were fixing it up slowly
for a fiesta today. Heriberto entered through the side. He
crossed himself and sat in the front pew where the family used to
sit together.
Outside, Sara and Francisco Cabrera, selling sodas to passing
pilgrims, told Heriberto it’s not right that police responsible
for killing his father continue to work.
Heriberto drove on to the family farm where his grandmother
Dona Julia, 81, putters alone with her mutt and caged dove. She
refuses to leave the crumbling old house with dirt floors: “mi
casa.”
She padlocks herself into her room every night, where candles
burn by the carved statues of saints on her shelves.
Heriberto sat with her, and reluctantly gave her $100 for
food. He gave her money before and she promptly donated it to the
church in memory of her son.
An old friend, Santiago Torres, approached on his burro,
asking if anybody had seen three stray cows.
He told how he knew Ismael Mena when Heriberto was a toddler,
helped him build the gray adobe house and work the cornfield.
Torres knew Ismael “better than I,” Heriberto recalled sadly, for
his father worked in the United States during much of his childhood.
His grandmother returned to her stitching and watering her
plants. She said Ismael’s ghost visits her on the farm. “I still
cry for my littlest boy,” she said tearfully.
“I had a dream. My son was calling. “Mama! Mama!’ I woke up.
I went to console him, my poor little boy. But he wasn’t there.”
THE CASE OF ISMAEL MENA
Sept. 29, 1999
Denver police kill Mexican migrant Ismael Mena in a botched
no-knock drug raid on High Street in Denver. SWAT officers went to
the wrong house because of a mistake in a search warrant prepared
by officer Joseph Bini. Mena had been sleeping after his night
shift at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Dec. 15, 1999
The FBI launches as investigation of possible criminal civil
rights violations after Mexican officials raise concerns in
Washington, D.C.
Feb. 4, 2000
Special prosecutor appointed by Denver District Attorney Bill
Ritter charges Bini with perjury. Bini allegedly lied to the judge
who signed the warrant, claiming he knew the address in the
warrant was correct because he saw his informant enter and leave
the house.
Feb. 8, 2000
Denver Police Chief Tom Sanchez returns from Hawaii after being
called back by Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. That evening, Webb
fires Sanchez as chief.
Feb. 23, 2000
Webb names Division Chief Gerry Whitman interim police chief.
Feb. 24, 2000
Webb announces a proposed overhaul of Police Department
policies, including reducing the number of no-knock raids and
giving the public access to discipline records.
March 23, 2000
Mena family settles with the city of Denver for $400,000.
May 19, 2000
Gov. Bill Owens signs Senate Bill 208, which tightens
requirements for approval of no-knock warrants. A prosecutor’s
signature now is required before a judge is asked to approve a
warrant.
July 7, 2000
Whitman becomes police chief.
July 18, 2000
Denver police alter ride-along rules after revelations that
then-Colorado Rockie player Mike Lansing accompanied police during
the Mena raid.
Sept. 1, 2000
A Denver judge limits evidence that can be presented against
Bini. Mention of Mena’s death during next month’s trial is
forbidden.
Dec. 1, 2000
Denver District Judge Shelly Gilman sentences Bini to 12 months
probation and 150 hours of community service after he pleads
tearfuly for mercy. Bini pleaded guilty to first-degree
misconduct, a misdemeanor.
Jan. 15, 2001
Denver Manager of Safety Ari Zavaras and Whitman concur: Bini
can go back to work. They announce he received a three-month
suspension without pay.
Jan. 29, 2001
Denver City Council members approve a $1.2 million settlement
for a Denver teenager shot at the scene of a burglary by Denver
police officer Keith Cowgill. The teen was left paralyzed. Police
emphasized he had a gun. The $1.2 million is three times what
Denver paid Mena’s family.
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Latin America, Migration
Road paved with good fortune for RTD driver
RTD bus driver Luis Escebedo, 40, grew up on dirt streets at
the edge of Juarez in northern Mexico. He’ll never forget the
families who lived there without electricity, purchasing their
drinking water weekly from a tanker truck that filled metal drums.
Escebedo moved north to Denver in 1978 to visit his sister. “I
fell in love with the place.”
He found work as a janitor on South Colorado Boulevard. Then
he found better work driving a forklift at a brick factory.
He met his wife, Rosa, here in Denver. Now they raise four
sons in a tidy house off a park in northwest Denver.
“My children love it here,” Escebedo said Thursday before
beginning his afternoon shift at the Regional Transportation
District. “There’s not much crime. This is one of the most
beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. The economy is great. That’s why
so many people are coming. The weather is good.”
Two years ago, Escebedo became a legal resident – fulfilling
his mother’s dream back in Mexico before she passed on. His goal:
“Stay together as a family. My life is my kids. I would do
anything for them.”
The Escebedos envision their best future in Denver. Yet
every December, Luis or his brother return to the dirt streets at
the edge of Juarez.
They deliver toys to the children of fathers less fortunate.
June 15, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
But “non-immigrant’ visas not a cure-all
Broadmoor hotel manager Bob Keesler relies on foreign-born
workers to fill 35 percent of the jobs at his complex in Colorado
Springs.
He’s still posting 190 openings, which he says U.S. citizens
ignore. His $8-an-hour maids from abroad each already work an
average of 500 overtime hours a year. He wants to hire people from
Honduras, India, Pakistan – anywhere.
Keesler and thousands of other U.S. employers are counting on
a new class of work visa proposed by a Colorado immigration lawyer
that would allow this move to happen. The proposal has developed
into a national Essential Worker Initiative to fill tens of
thousands of jobs by bringing unskilled and semi-skilled workers
from abroad.
Advocates plan to unveil the concept today at the American
Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in Chicago.
Panelists will discuss the initiative Friday, then circulate draft
legislation in Congress.
This would be the latest in an alphabet soup of so-called
“non-immigrant” worker programs approved by Congress in recent
years to keep the economy growing without extending citizenship to
newcomers.
Rather than full-fledged immigration – a high-stakes issue
that presidential candidates have avoided – U.S. leaders
increasingly have focused on temporary non-immigrant programs
tailored to meet business needs. High-tech industry lobbyists say
they need 300,000 new white-collar workers; the federal Bureau of
Labor Statistics projects a shortage of 10 million workers within
the next decade.
First up in Congress this summer is a proposed increase in
“H1B” visas, which bring college-educated workers from abroad.
Support is strong from Silicon Valley to the White House for
raising the limit from 115,000 to about 200,000 visas a year. H1B
workers stay for up to six years.
The support comes despite charges the program is riddled with
abuse. The Denver Post has learned that federal labor officials
essentially rubber-stamp H1Bs with little scrutiny of the effects
on U.S. workers. And the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service violated the existing H1B cap by letting in 21,888 too
many H1B workers last year. INS spokeswoman Eileen Schmidt said
the “overage” was because of a counting mistake.
Other legislation in Congress would streamline the H2A visa
program that brings agricultural workers from abroad.
Various proposals to give amnesty to some or all of the
estimated 6 million undocumented workers also are at play in a
packaging and repackaging designed to marshal congressional votes.
AFL-CIO labor union leaders support a broad amnesty for current
undocumented workers, which could increase union membership.
It all reflects a sea change in the immigration landscape.
Four years ago, Congress focused on deportation. Some
politicians worried that a new wave of immigration, the greatest
since the turn of the 20th century, would threaten national unity.
But in July, Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan warned
labor shortages threatened the national economy. Greenspan said
increased immigration could ease labor shortages and reduce
inflationary pressure.
Ever since, coalitions pushing for more foreign-born
non-immigrants have been gaining momentum. The population of
non-immigrants residing in the United States tops 3 million, based
on INS figures. That’s in addition to an annual flow of more than
900,000 immigrants (660,000 legal and 250,000 undocumented).
“What we are doing now is we are building up a huge reservoir
of temporary, non-immigrant residents in this country who are
trying to fit through a bottleneck of limited green cards,” said
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration
Reform, which opposes the efforts.
The influx, Stein said, “is killing the American worker’s
ability to get any kind of wage increase.”
The Essential Worker proposal that will circulate today in
Chicago is designed to help employers such as nursing homes,
hotels and motels, restaurants and construction companies.
An existing H2B program for temporary unskilled workers fails
to meet employer needs, said Donna Lipinski, the Denver-based
lawyer and AILA board member who proposed the essential worker
visa two years ago.
This year, AILA leaders resolved to back an essential-worker
initiative. They mobilized a coalition of 21 business groups.
Coalition leaders are considering coupling their proposal to
create essential-worker visas with proposals to grant amnesty for
undocumented workers.
Leaders are weighing whether to call for a specific number
of visas or tie the program to a national unemployment figure
above which essential workers would be sent home, advocacy
director Judy Golub said.
Even without specifics, the initiative has won some political
support.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., backs efforts to ease labor
shortages, said his spokesman, Sean Conway. “He’ll consider any
legislation.”
Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush supports
H1B and H2A legislation, but hasn’t taken a position on essential
workers. Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate,
supports H1B visa increases, too, though he wants to attach
amnesty provisions for some undocumented workers. Gore backs H2A
reforms in principle. He hasn’t decided on essential workers.
Labor unions strongly oppose allowing any more workers from
abroad. “The reason employers can’t fill their jobs here is they
don’t pay enough money,” said Bob Greene, president of the
Colorado AFL-CIO. Employers want non-immigrant temps, Greene says,
because “they can not only pay them low wages, they can also force
them to do anything they want them to do.”
In the meantime, the agencies administering current
non-immigrant programs are strained. The needs of a soaring U.S.
economy, domestic workers and a global workforce hungry for
American jobs are colliding:
U.S. Department of Labor officials, traditionally charged
with watching U.S. worker interests, is focusing on easing
shortages for business. Congress required labor officials to
essentially rubber stamp 300,000 H1B certifications for 1 million
jobs, senior U.S. labor administrator John Fraser in Washington,
D.C, told The Post.
Yet, Fraser said, 19 percent of H1B workers are underpaid
in violation of those certifications. And government
investigations – 194 completed with 80 percent showing violations
– can only be done when H1B workers complain. Few do that, he
said. “We’ve tried to point this out over and over again, that
these workers are beholden to their employers.”
A pool of money set up to counter H1B effects on U.S. workers
is largely unspent. Job-training grants worth $12.4 million were
given this year. At least $40 million more is unspent, labor
officials said.
The INS – its enforcement budget has tripled since 1993 to
$4.3 billion a year – may go unpunished after violating the H1B
visa cap. H1B legislation contains “forgiveness clauses,” INS
spokeswoman Schmidt said. “The legislation contains language that
allows INS – it basically just forgives the overage.”
Foreign-born workers themselves are strained by the notion
that, in the future, the United States would use them temporarily,
legally, yet with no possibility of becoming U.S. citizens.
At the Burnsley Hotel in central Denver, maid Gabriela
Flores, 28, of Mexico, says she vacuums, wipes toilets and
polishes chandeliers because of a dream. She, her parents and nine
siblings migrated north hoping to become U.S. citizens who can
work into better jobs, vote and build a better life.
To work at unskilled jobs and perhaps be sent home if the
economy falters would make her feel “sick,” she said. “I want to
go to college. I want to be a kindergarten teacher.”
At the Broadmoor, Keesler would prefer “a long-term steady
workforce that’s local.” Any essential-worker legislation ought to
include provisions to send foreign-born workers home if the
economy slumps, he said.
But with few U.S. workers responding to his postings for
$6-an-hour-plus-tips and $8-an-hour jobs just getting permission
to hire foreigners is urgent.
Keesler tries to bolster spirits by giving out awards. He
sets an example by working long hours himself, and only ducking
out for fast food.
But when he approached a nearby Arby’s last month, Keesler
was dismayed. A note was posted on the drive-thru window. “Only
two people working today,” it said. “Drive-thru closed.”
March 24, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Webb steps in to broker deal in fatal no-knock raid
Denver Mayor Wellington Webb brokered a $400,000 settlement
Thursday with the family of Ismael Mena, the Mexican migrant
worker Denver police killed in a botched no-knock drug raid last
fall.
The deal sets a monetary record for Denver in wrongful-death
cases involving police. City attorneys say the previous high
payment was $260,000.
It begins to resolve a major fiasco. The fatal raid on Sept.
29 prompted Mexican government officials to raise concerns in
Washington. The FBI launched an investigation into possible
criminal civil-rights violations.
Denver’s mistake – police hit the wrong house – was a factor
in Police Chief Tom Sanchez’s resignation. And it sparked scrutiny
of how hundreds of no-knock search warrants are issued.
A key legal factor in the settlement was Mena’s immigration
status. He had entered the United States without proper documents.
To work, he showed employers fake papers, family attorney Robert
Maes said.
Mediator Jim Carrigan “kept telling us the ultimate value
of this case was between $200,000 and $500,000,” Maes said. A
former federal judge, Carrigan “reminded us several times that he
was really a potential felon by illegally living in the country,”
Maes said.
Lead city attorney Ted Halaby confirmed that this factor “was
considered.”
The $400,000 falls far short of the $5.5 million Maes
initially sought for Mena’s family in Mexico. Denver initially
offered $150,000. A migrant worker for much of his life,
45-year-old Mena was working here to support his wife and seven of
their children, ages 8 to 20, on his farm near San Julian in the
central Mexican state of Jalisco. Two sons work in Los Angeles.
Mena’s widow, Maria del Carmen, was forced to sell his
animals. She traveled to Denver to attend negotiations last week
and, according to Maes, grasped the implications of a protracted
court battle. Then she returned to Jalisco. Mena’s eldest son,
Heriberto, 21, a restaurant worker, stayed in Denver to represent
the family.
“I don’t know if that’s good,” Heriberto said of the
$400,000, “but this is the best for my family.”
Mexico’s representative in Denver, Consul Carlos Barros,
immediately praised the deal. The money “is going to be good
enough to guarantee that Mena’s children get an education, which
is a main concern,” Barros said. “I’m very happy the whole case is
solved. It was always a deep concern to have this family with no
means of survival. … Now we can do some more productive work.”
Webb said: “What we tried to do was come up with what was
fair. … I frankly don’t think you can put a price on a person’s
life.”
Thursday afternoon, Webb intervened when both sides were
deadlocked in arbitration in a Lower Downtown conference room.
Attorneys agreed only on calling out for Quizno’s at lunch.
At 2 p.m., Maes said, the city was offering $275,000 while he
was asking for $600,000.
That’s when Webb went to the room. “I thought I might be able
to get it solved,” Webb said later.
Webb listened for the better part of an hour, Halaby said.
Then he gave the go-ahead for a compromise offer of $400,000.
Today, Mena family attorneys are structuring an annuity that
will pay the family $1,700 a month for 20 years, plus $100,000 up
front for a house in the town of San Julian. Maes said he and his
legal team will take 25 percent of the settlement money.
The move to San Julian will improve the lives of Mena’s
children, he said. There’s a school there, and running water.
Mena’s two oldest sons plan to keep working in the United
States.
Mena preferred life on the farm, which he struggled to
maintain from afar. The settlement, Mexican Consul Barros
suggested, amounts to “a transformation of his dream.”
Heriberto Mena said Thursday that he’s considering moving
from Los Angeles to Denver if possible. “I like it a lot here.
Good people here.”
Legal experts said the settlement was low compared with what
other cities have paid in wrongful-death suits. Denver “maintains
its reputation for never capitulating on these kinds of cases,”
lawyer Craig Silverman concluded.
But the city’s lawyers “should be commended for
stepping up to the plate when there’s a reason to do it,” lawyer
Scott Robinson added. Happy over settlement
Denver Police Union President Kirk Miller declined to comment
on the settlement except to say police need better training.
And lawyer David Bruno, representing Denver police officer
Joseph Bini, who faces perjury charges in the no-knock raid, said
he’s happy the city and family have settled. “Any time you can
settle a case you’re better off.”
Yet the settlement left sadness and rage. “I want to cry a
little,” Maes confided after a city hall news conference. “I wish
I could have got them $2 million.”
Mena’s illegal immigration didn’t keep him from working for
dozens of U.S. employers for years – earning more than $10,000 in
1998, Maes pointed out. He worked most recently at the Coca-Cola
bottling plant in north Denver.
Beyond Mena’s death, the tragedy exposed “an unspoken”
agreement between Mexico and the United States that is wrong, Maes
said.
“He had a green card, and it was a false green card,” he said.
“We let ’em in so long as they don’t create waves. We’re not going
to enforce on the employers. I know who pays the price: It’s the
people who come north looking for an opportunity. And their
families pay a price, too. … We’re not only complicit, we are
hypocritical. Our corporate culture takes advantage of this labor
pool.”
Webb declined to comment on that broader situation.
He said the settlement concerned only this case.
“This doesn’t mean if there are future cases we would do them
the same way,” Webb said.
Denver Post staff writers Peter G. Chronis and Mike McPhee
contributed to this report.
MAJOR POLICE SETTLEMENTS IN DENVER
December 1999 – Antonio Reyes-Rojas received a $30,000
settlement after he was shot by Denver police officer Kenneth
Chavez.
November 1998 – Relatives of Jeffery Truax accepted a $250,000
settlement with the Denver Police Department for the March 1996
shooting death of Truax outside a Denver nightclub by Chavez and
officer Andrew Clarry. A jury had awarded the Truax family $500,000.
June 1998 – Mauricea Gant received an undisclosed settlement for
the September 1992 killing of her father, Steven Gant, by Denver
police officer Michael Blake.
May 1998 – A jury awarded the family of teenager William “Bill’
Abeyta $400,000. Abeyta was shot to death in January 1995 as he
allegedly drove a stolen Jeep at police. The Denver City
Attorney’s Office, however, says a payment that high was never made.
October 1993 – A federal jury awarded $330,000 to the family of
Leonard Zuchel for the 1985 fatal shooting of Zuchel by Denver
police officer Frederick Spinharney.
ELSEWHERE IN THE STATE
April 1996 – Juan Pablo Rocha-Gallegos was awarded a $225,000
settlement against the city of Greeley after being shot seven
times by a police officer during a massive drug raid in Eaton in
1993.
July 1988 – Derek Scott Powell, 25, was killed by a Boulder
County sheriff’s deputy after Powell allegedly pointed a rifle at
the officer. A federal jury awarded $1 million to Powell’s family.
A federal judge threw out the verdict, but the family settled with
the county and the deputy.
March 16, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Talks start today in no-knock death
SAN FELIPE JESUS DE LAS CASAS BLANCAS, Mexico – Ismael Mena’s three-room adobe house gives shelter from hot wind.
Nine children once chattered by flowers in the courtyard
where, today, their 80-year-old grandmother putters alone.
An adjoining stable Mena built for his beloved red horse sits
empty; the saddle gathers dust. His cornfield fights weeds.
The 14-acre farm here was Mena’s dream.
To keep it alive – traditional lifestyles are dwindling as
Mexico goes modern – Mena had to toil in the United States for
much of his life. Most recently, he worked the night shift for
Coca-Cola in a graffiti-splotched north Denver neighborhood where
drug deals are done. He fixed wooden pallets. He lifted hundreds
of red plastic crates, each packed with eight 2-liter plastic
bottles of Coke, and hoisted them into red trucks.
The money he sent home sustained his wife and seven children
on the farm. Two older sons had moved to work in Los Angeles.
Now Mena’s dead. Denver police shot the 45-year-old migrant
mistakenly in a botched no-knock drug raid last fall; they went to
the wrong house. Once a policeman in Mexico, Mena had been
sleeping off his night shift.
Five months later, Mena’s family is torn. Without him
working, Maria del Carmen saw fit to sell his 10 cows, one mule
and the horse. She has moved the children in with her parents 5
miles closer to the nearby town of San Julian and the doctor her
diabetic son needs.
“We are wondering how we will live,” she said.
Today, negotiations for wrongful-death compensation begin in
Denver, where Maria, eldest son Heriberto, and attorney Robert
Maes, referred by the Mexican government, square off against
Denver’s legal team.
The city’s offer – $150,000 – falls short of the $5.5 million
Maes seeks for the family. Former federal Judge James Carrigan is
to guide arbitration today.
The only reason Maria didn’t sell her husband’s land, too, is
that Mena’s mother, Dona Julia, absolutely refuses to leave it.
While water trickled from a tap into buckets, Julia conjured
images of Ismael talking to his cows as he milked them.
“Why did they have to kill my son? I loved him so,” she said,
drawing a black shawl across her wrinkled face. If she left the
farm, Dona Julia said, “everything would be over. It would all
fall down. That’s why I don’t want to go.”
Meantime, Ismael’s 20-year-old daughter, Rosalilia, is in
charge of the children surviving here on beans and tortillas,
cooked over a wood fire in an adobe house with no bathroom. Ismael
Jr., 17, injects himself each morning with insulin. Rosalilia’s
twin, Rosaelia, cradles Mena’s 1-year-old grandson, also named
after him, whom he never saw.
Little Maria del Carmen, 8, and Alejandro, 11, attend a small
rural school; no secondary school is reachable for Juanita, 11,
Irene, 14, and the others. The younger children grasped that their
father was dead when they saw his body at the funeral. Now they
treasure his clothes.
“We try not to talk about it too much,” Rosalilia said.
“Thinking about their father makes them feel very bad.”
The pastoral lifestyle Mena preferred to modern city life is
also a dream for thousands of other migrant workers in the United
States. For lack of money as Mexico modernizes, they travel north,
sometimes at great risk, to fill proliferating U.S. jobs that pay
$8 an hour or less. Our humming economy depends on their labor.
U.S. big business is lobbying Congress to allow more migrant
workers, especially those with basic skills, lest labor shortages
force up wages.
Yet rather than settle in the United States, many like Mena
work solely to build up what’s theirs back in Mexico, using their
savings to expand rural houses and herds. Here in rugged
6,000-feet-high eastern Jalisco, electricity lines installed
around 1993 and telephones more recently raise the possibility of
comfortable rural living.
For one fleeting moment in 1997, Maria del Carmen said, she
felt Mena had achieved his Mexican dream. Water holes were full.
Green maize shoots poked up from the field. Mena strode proudly
from the adobe house to the field. “I was walking with him. We
were walking with all the children too.”
She wanted that togetherness every day.
“I’d tell him: “Come back and live with your brother and
sisters and horses,'” Maria del Carmen said. “He’d say he’d come
back when he got some more money.”
His mother Julia said she regularly reminded him: “Save the
money. Send it to Mexico. Or bring it. So that you can stay here
and not have to leave so much.”
Mena was born during hard times. His father moved from the
town of San Miguel across what is called “El Canon” to a mesa.
Drought soon drove the family away again to the current farm near
the stone church and a dozen or so homes that together are known
as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
They sold a little maize.
Mena loved horses, his brother Salvador, 58, said in the
dirt-floor house where he lives nearby. “Charro” horsemen are
local heros to this day.
School for Mena lasted only a few years. Work beckoned. At 18,
he left Mexico, crossing to Arizona, where he drove a tractor.
Back from that first stint abroad, he was playing soccer one
day when Maria del Carmen and friends stopped to watch. He
remembered her. A few weeks later at a fiesta nearby in Jalpa, he
approached. “He said: “I want you to be my girlfriend,'” Maria del
Carmen recalled. “I said: “Yes.'”
They married. “He wanted a family.”
To that end, Mena moved north again – the migration that would
repeat itself again and again over nearly three decades. In the
United States he worked as a meatpacker, cook, busboy while she
raised their babies. Family photos show Mena working at one
restaurant in California. He wore a clean white shirt with black
bow tie and cap. He tended bar, washed dishes in the kitchen,
wiped tables and, after closing time, swept the floors.
When he returned to Mexico, his children said, he brought them
presents: bicycles, dolls, a tape deck. Once he brought a
television. The kids spend hours watching a wide commercial world
from the countryside here.
The children especially remember his way with horses. “He
could make one lie down, and then he’d motion and it would get
up,” Rosalilia said.
Ismael Jr. recalled: “He would say “Never hit an animal. Talk
with them, chat. Feed them well. And stroke them.'”
He also worked on roads. Once, his brother Salvador said, he
cracked a rib trying to pry loose a rock. For days he wheezed.
Unable to work on his farm, he arranged to serve as policeman
in the sleepy town of San Diego de Alejandria. A family photo
shows Mena standing with a pistol tucked into the waist of his
trousers. Six months later, he turned in the pistol and the
bullets. “He thought police work might be dangerous,” Salvador
said. “He wanted to get back to the ranch.”
Yet to buy animals, Mena had to migrate, carrying a crinkled
Virgen de Guadalupe prayer card in his wallet.
Mena left last in August 1997. He worked for a beef company in
Idaho, earning more than $18,000 in 1998, according to records
attorney Maes collected.
Last year he moved to Colorado, staying first with cousins in
Fort Lupton, cleaning apartments and landscaping.
He moved into Denver as pressure mounted back home: Ismael Jr.
had collapsed. Maria del Carmen and her parents hauled him to San
Julian. “He was almost in a coma,” said Dr. Ismael Macias, who
gave basic treatment and then sent the boy to a hospital in
Guadalajara. He lay for 15 days on intravenous fluid. The final
diagnosis is that “his pancreas does not work at all,” Macias
said. He needs insulin daily.
Mena began building up savings when he landed what his son
Heriberto described as a $300-a-week job at the Coca-Cola bottling
plant.
Heriberto recalled their last telephone conversation: “It was
difficult for him to sleep at day. But he was happy with this
work,” said Heriberto, a restaurant worker in Los Angeles.
Mena also “asked about the family. He said he was going back
to Mexico this year.”
Coca-Cola managers said they were preparing Mena to drive
forklifts.
At daybreak, Mena would walk two blocks past public housing
and an alley where dealers and junkies would hang out. He’d climb
the 15 stairs in the house at 3738 High St. where he rented an
8-by-8-foot room. The window looked out on the Coca-Cola plant and
a round brick smokestack in the distance. And he’d sleep.
Penciled Xs still mark the spot where bullets pierced walls
in Mena’s room during the midday raid on Sept. 29. A
Spanish-speaking little girl from another family now sleeps there.
Mena was sleeping when police burst in.
They’d been paying an informant who once used drugs to make
undercover purchases in the area. Based on his information, they
secured a no-knock warrant for the two-story house where Mena
lived. The informant apparently got mixed up.
Police said they shouted “Police!” and “Policia!” as they
entered. They pinned down Antonio Hernandez in the room next to
Mena’s.
Earlier in September, police apparently had confiscated a gun
Mena was carrying illegally. They say he had another one on Sept.
29, a Burgo .22 – untraceable so far – and that, despite their
warnings, he fired three shots.
Police fired too. Eight bullets tore into Mena’s face, chest
and arms. He died at the scene. Here in Mexico, his sister Maria
de Jesus figured he had the gun “for his protection” in a
dangerous big city.
The shooting was “a violation of basic human rights,” Dr.
Macias contends.
“Police shouldn’t be able to do things like this,” Mena’s
brother Salvador said.
“Who fired first?” nephew Sergio, 26, wanted to know.
Sergio feels the “indignity” acutely. When he was headed to
the United States for work in 1992, his mother Maria de Jesus told
him to go with her brother. The men crossed near Tijuana. Though
Mena knew the way well, he hired a “coyote” guide for $800, Sergio
said. “He wanted to be more sure we’d make it because of me.” In
tense moments crossing, Sergio recalled, Mena encouraged him.
“He said: “We’re going to go work … We’ll go and earn a
whole lot.'”
Today the farming lifestyle Mena loved is generally
threatened. His relatives hanging on here still contend “nothing’s
better.”
At night, cattle low amid nopal cactuses, dogs howl, and
constellations light the sky: Virgen de San Juan in the north,
Ojos de Santa Lucia overhead, and the Cruz de Mayo to the south.
But shoe factories run by transnational companies are the
focus of economic action in the region. Small farming in Mexico
“doesn’t work economically,” said Dr. Macias The land is too poor
and there’s not enough water, he said. “It doesn’t pay. Fertilizer
costs. Seeds cost.”
Dr. Macias worries that Mena’s children still are “suffering
a lot.” He and others advise Maria del Carmen to move into San
Julian so her children can salvage some education. Then they could
work in small business.
Maria del Carmen has a sewing machine. With money from Denver,
she said, she might afford a house. Living in San Julian would
cost about $1,000 a month, she figured. Rosalilia says she’s
interested in designing clothes. She wants to make up the school
she’s missed over the last eight years.
“I’d say it would be justice to help my brothers and sisters
with their studies. Because my father can’t help us. We don’t have
any help.”
The decision to sell off the animals was painful, Maria del
Carmen said, and if immigration papers were available she’d
consider leaving Mexico altogether and moving to the United States.
“It’s over,” she said of the farm. Yet nobody’s ready to
really accept that, least of all Dona Julia.
In Mena’s empty stable, she tried to fix his bridles and
lassos. She nailed a stirrup on the wall above a crucifix and
broken television.
She envisions everybody back in the house. “Como antes,” she
said. “Like before.”
Money from Denver might help at least fix up the farm,
“starting with Ismael’s room,” she suggested. She envisions white
paint on the walls, a tiled floor “not cement,” a new door, with a
tractor and little cow outside.
The last time she spoke with Ismael, “he told me, “You know, I
love you too much.’ I cried,” she said, crying again.
“He told me: “Don’t cry. When you think about me, just make a quick prayer. Nothing more.'”
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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.
