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.
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Migration
Russian scientist was forced to leave
Telephone calls to scientist Leonid Reznikov’s apartment in
St. Petersburg, Russia, during 1992 forced him out. He remembers
the caller’s voice clearly: “Leave the country. This country is
not for you. You hold a good position, which should be for
Russians, not Jews.”
Police couldn’t guarantee his safety. And when the caller
threatened to kill his daughter, Reznikov rode a train to the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow. He moved to Colorado five months later as a
refugee and settled in Denver. Now 38, he works as an assistant
professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
He’s trying to find new ways to diagnose cancer as part of an
elite international research team led by Dr. Charles Dinarello.
Reznikov also runs the local Russian newspaper Horizon, one of
four Russian newspapers circulating in Denver, along with helping
raise two children.
“I found lots of scientific opportunities on this team. Labs
like this, they are at the same level as the most advanced labs in
the United States,” Reznikov said Thursday at work. “I hope to
continue my work here.”
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Population growth fastest in U.S.
Colorado’s foreign-born population nearly tripled this past
decade and is growing faster than any other state’s, according to
an analysis of new U.S. Census Bureau data.
In 1990, 142,000 Coloradans, or 4.3 percent, were born
abroad. Last year, 413,000, or nearly 10 percent, were born
abroad.
The newcomers arrived from all over, with the greatest
numbers from Mexico, East Asia, Europe and Africa. They’re
changing the face of almost every street: a hockey-loving Denver
bus driver from Mexico, an Ethiopian woman who cooks spicy meats
on East Colfax, a cancer researcher from Russia who also runs a
newspaper.
The influx over the past decade was far more pronounced than
in traditionally international states such as New York and
California.
And considering the rapidly increasing foreign migration into
other interior states such as Nevada, Kentucky, Iowa and Arizona,
experts at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.,
think tank analyzing Census Bureau data, see the makings of a
major demographic shift.
“The places that are attracting a lot of immigrants that are
nontraditional places generally have the characteristics of
Colorado: good labor market and a relatively low cost of living,”
said Steven Camarota, research director at the center. “And
Colorado has reached a critical mass in terms of networks of
immigrants. Immigrants are drawn in by the economy and by the
networks. Middle America now is experiencing a lot more immigration.”
Colorado ranked 13th among states on number of foreign-born
residents. California had the most, followed by New York, Florida
and Texas.
The new numbers come from a population survey conducted last
year by the Census Bureau – separate from the bureau’s
once-a-decade population count.
The figures were broken down state-by-state and analyzed this
month at the Center for Immigration Studies. The bureau plans to
release more data on the foreign-born population over the next two
years.
It might seem as if Colorado’s fast-growing foreign-born
population is a factor in the state’s overall population growth
last decade by 31 percent to 4.3 million. More than 1 million new
residents gave Colorado the third-fastest-growing population
behind Nevada and Arizona.
Actually, foreign migration into Colorado – including births
to immigrants – accounts for about one-third of population growth
here, Camarota said. Nationally, foreign migration plus births
play a larger role, accounting for about two-thirds of U.S.
population growth.
For The Denver Post, the Center for Immigration Studies
conducted some additional analysis of foreign-born population
survey data obtained from the Census Bureau. Among the findings:
About 223,000, or 54 percent, of the foreign-born population
resides in the Denver area.
Poverty and education levels of newcomers vary widely.
African, European and South American-born Coloradans over 21
generally had completed at least high school, but 62 percent of
Mexican-born Coloradans had not completed high school. About a
third of African-born Coloradans lived below the official poverty
line, as did 24 percent of Mexican-born Coloradans. Three percent
of European-born Coloradans lived in poverty.
Of the 413,000 foreign-born Coloradans, 234,000, or 57
percent, moved here during the 1990s, often after settling in
other states.
Colorado stands out nationally with a higher-than-average
share of Mexican-born and African-born residents. About 43 percent
of foreign-born Coloradans came from Mexico – compared with 28
percent nationally. About 6.5 percent of foreign-born Coloradans
came from Africa – compared with 2 percent nationally. East
Asian-born Coloradans made up 12 percent of the foreign-born
population – compared with 18 percent nationwide.
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 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
While snow pelted Denver, aspiring Russian bards huddled
recently in a borrowed conference room, where visiting folksinger
Vladimir Berezhkov serenaded them with tales of life in the shadow
of the Kremlin.
Similarly, 6-year-old Maria Valershteyn hunkered over
Russian language texts this past year to supplement her Denver
Public Schools studies.
And every Saturday morning, Russian-speaking parents hustle
children to the Glendale Community Center for lessons in
traditional dancing.
“We want to keep our culture,” says Lyuda Zatureuskaya, who
supervises the lessons. “We are from a rich culture.”
That preoccupation eclipses today’s election in Russia for
many of the estimated 25,000 Russian-speaking people in Denver.
They form one of the fastest-growing and, by many accounts, most
prosperous communities of recent immigrants from the former Soviet
Union. The United States has admitted more than 450,000 since
communism’s collapse.
Their accents suggest they might well be engrossed in the
fate of President Vladimir Putin as voting begins across Russia
this morning. Yet Putin – a hard-liner who took charge when Boris
Yeltsin resigned New Year’s Eve – draws lukewarm attention at best.
“For me, American politics is a lot more important,” said
Yuliya Fridman, 24, a US West employee whose family moved from
Minsk in 1991. “This is where I live. This is where I plan to have
my family. I do care about what’s going on in Russia. But I’m
planning to make my life here.”
Rather, Russian-speaking immigrants focus on establishing
cultural institutions in Denver.
They’ve set up two Russian schools that teach children
traditions from music to chess.
An association of 11 clubs draws hundreds of adults for
discussions, concerts, fitness activities and poetry.
Grocery stores such as Dmitri Gershengorin’s European Mart on
Leetsdale Drive supply Russian sausages, pastries, smoked fish,
salads – and Russian videos for rent.
The Denver-based Moscow String Quartet plays classical music
that many immigrants love.
A Russian Orthodox Church at South Colorado Boulevard and
East Iliff Avenue is one of several where Russian-speaking
immigrants worship.
Their cultivation of Russian-ness while sinking roots here
stands out at a time when other immigrants use the United States
simply as a money-making center for building a better life
elsewhere.
Russian poetry in Denver trumps politics in Russia in the
view of Moscow-born Will Kaufman, 35, a member of the Russian Bard
club here and a successful computer programmer. “I am very cynical
about Russia, very cynical about this war in Chechnya.” Kaufman
called today’s elections “a travesty” masking control of Russia by
wealthy oligarchs.
Many Russians here won’t vote for lack of interest, said
Leonid Reznikov, a researcher at the University of Colorado Health
Sciences Center who also edits the Russian newspaper Horizon.
Reznikov presented election information in Horizon. He also
advised Russian consular officials who plan to supervise absentee
voting today at the Glendale Public Library. About 200 Russian
immigrants with passports voted in Russia’s parliamentary election
last fall.
“I believe some people may come to support Grigory Yavlinsky
(one of 11 candidates challenging Putin),” Reznikov said. “But
there is no real choice. Putin will win anyway. Hopefully he will
not bring a real dictatorship to Russia. It may be a soft
dictatorship. We already have some signs that censorship is
starting in the Russian press.”
In Denver, the Russian-speaking community emerged in the late
1970s with the arrival of a few Jewish dissidents. It took off
around 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Nationwide, at least 454,628 immigrants have arrived from
former Soviet countries since 1990, according to federal
statistics. Of those, about 372,335 entered as refugees. The
United States gives special priority to Jews and evangelical
Christians in ex-Soviet countries who claim they face persecution.
Thousands more migrated to the United States for economic
opportunities or as spouses of previous immigrants. And the
454,628 figure doesn’t include a growing number of
Russian-speaking temporary workers.
The emphasis on sinking roots in America, rather than
investing earnings back home, reflects that “things have not gone
as smoothly as they might have in the countries they came from,”
said Terry Rusch, director of refugee admissions for the U.S.
Department of State. “Overall, it’s been a very positive
experience. They’ve come, they’ve enriched this country.”
Economically, Russian speakers in Denver say they are getting
ahead. The elderly rely heavily on public support. But working-age
immigrants find their solid education in Russia pays off here.
More than 44 businesses run by Russian-speaking immigrants
advertise in the Denver-based newspapers Horizon and Vestnik.
Businesses here include a crew of carpenters, Vartan
Tonoian’s jazz club “Vartan’s” in Downtown Denver, the Astoria
restaurant serving borscht, chicken Kiev, plove (a rice and meat
dish from central Asia) and more, a pharmacy in Cherry Creek
North, two Russian bookstores, and Little Russian Cafes.
Russian speakers in Denver often say they are lonely. They
say they need to cultivate a distinct identity in America.
Parents lament that their children, who tend to hang out with
other Russian-speaking children, converse predominantly in
English.
“People miss the closeness they had in Russia – closeness
with friends sitting at the kitchen table drinking vodka talking
about anything at all,” Kaufman said while handling a computer job
last week. “Here their relations with Americans at work and with
neighbors are very superficial. “How’s work? How’s the weather?’
Their soul yearns for some sort of really close contact.”
The main challenge now is just finding some place to meet.
Community leaders talk of raising money for a Russian Cultural
Center.
Until now, Russian speakers have borrowed rooms for club
gatherings. The Glendale Public Library, with Russian-speaking
staffers, serves as an unofficial center.
Occasionally, Jewish Community Center auditoriums are
available.
“We need it,” school director Zatureuskaya said of the
proposed cultural center. Enrollment at her Science, Art and Sport
Center for Children has doubled over the past three years to 150
students. They range from 6-year-old girls in ballet attire to a
sheepish 15-year-old boy who wasn’t inclined to give his name
after practicing for a recent dance performance. “Half of it, my
parents make me come,” he said. “Half of it is fun.”
Former actress Inna Valershteyn is passionate about ensuring
that her 6-year-old daughter, Maria, studies Russian in addition
to Denver Public Schools classes. In the family Volvo, she drives
Maria to private classes with Olga Sventuh at a rented facility.
“I don’t want to lose this language,” Valershteyn said. “If a
child has more than one language, it makes life richer.”
Political freedom here enables activity that once proved
risky in Russia. For example, free-thinking bards raised
suspicions during Soviet times. The Russian bard tradition
involves composing poems, then singing them while playing guitar –
a bit like Bob Dylan. The bards gather in forests to do this.
Last summer, club leaders booked space for 40 at a campground west
of Denver. More than 70 aspiring bards arrived, setting up tents
beneath pine trees, tuning guitars, sipping wine. They sang out
their poetry until dawn. Coordinating all these cultural
gatherings on top of fast-paced U.S. work schedules is a difficult
job. But the Russian-speaking community found a solution: Mikhail
Timashpolsky, 76, president of the Denver Russian Community
Cultural Center, who once ran government cultural “palaces” in
Russia. A pensioner with time to make phone calls, Timashpolsky
devotes most of his waking hours to keeping his countrymen together.
“In the former Soviet Union, people were going for community,
rather than individuality,” he said. “That’s why, when
Russian-speaking people come here, they still have this desire to
be in a community. Many feel they have no outlet for their
creativity. These people, they want to preserve their culture and
knowledge.”
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.'”
March 1, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Ruling affects criminals whose native countries won’t allow them back home
Federal appeals court judges in Denver on Tuesday backed the
government’s power to detain indefinitely immigrant criminals
whose countries won’t take them back.
Weighing into a national dilemma, their 10th Circuit Court of
Appeals ruling asserts that this growing class of deportable
immigrant criminals has lost basic rights under the U.S.
Constitution.
The ruling upholds a 1996 law requiring deportation of
immigrants convicted of crimes and detention of those who can’t be
deported. Under the law, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service is holding 4,566 immigrant criminals, filling up a fourth
of INS detention center beds.
The appeals court case concerned two Vietnamese men detained
at a 340-bed regional INS detention facility east of Denver.
Now they and other detainees – including a Laotian named Sia
Vang who appeared in a separate federal court case Tuesday –
depend more than ever on INS discretion if they ever are to rejoin
their families.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock delayed a decision on
Vang, who was sentenced to 24 years of probation in 1996 for
sexual assault on two preteen girls.
In addressing the constitutional concerns, the appeals court
judges declined to interfere with the law Congress passed in 1996,
which set no time limit for detention.
“This court will not substitute its judgment for that of
Congress by reading into the statute a time limit that is not
included in the plain language of the statute,” Appellate Judge
Michael Murphy, a Clinton appointee, wrote in the 33-page ruling.
Releasing the two Vietnamese detainees who sought freedom
under the Constitution would amount to awarding them “the very
right denied them as a result of the final (deportation) orders,
the right to be at large in the United States,” the judges
reasoned. “The relief they seek is indistinguishable from a
request to be readmitted to this country.” But these and other
immigrant criminals whose countries won’t take them back are
indisputably here, critics emphasized after the ruling. The cost
to U.S. taxpayers tops $100 million a year.
Appellate Judge Wade Brorby, a Reagan appointee, issued a
sharp dissent to the ruling: “Governmental conduct that so reduces
an individual to a “non person’ to permit such imprisonment most
assuredly shocks my conscience,” he wrote.
The ruling immediately drew calls for reconsideration from
immigrants’ rights advocates nationwide.
“We’re going to continue fighting,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a New
York-based senior lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union,
who argued the case with local lawyer Jim Salvator last July.
Immigrants convicted of crimes “are human beings,” Rabinovitz
said, “and our Constitution protects all persons from deprivation
of life, liberty and property. The two-judge majority
fundamentally misconstrued the constitutional issues presented in
this case.”
A former INS legal chief joined in the outcry.
“Anybody in the United States subject to government power is
entitled to the protection of the Constitution,” said Alex
Aleinikoff, chief INS counsel from 1994 to ’97 and now a professor
at Georgetown University Law Center.
“The conclusion that there are people in this country who can
be arbitrarily detained indefinitely, on the theory that they have
no rights is inconsistent with developments in due process law
over the last century.”
And University of California law professor Charles
Weisselberg, a veteran immigration lawyer, suggested that U.S.
moral authority will suffer. “This makes it harder for us to hold
other countries accountable (for jailing people indefinitely) when
we give people in our country the back of the hand.”
The decision in Denver begins to firm up an uncertain
landscape for detention of immigrants. It’s the second appellate
court ruling supporting the 1996 immigration law that has led to
hundreds of cases in federal district courts nationwide. The Fifth
Circuit Court, covering Texas and Louisiana, ruled last August.
The Ninth Circuit Court in California is expected to rule soon
after hearing arguments earlier this month. Circuit court
decisions are binding in their areas for federal judges ruling on
similar cases.
Federal district judges have been divided, and rulings for
and against the law are mulitiplying.
INS officials took Tuesday’s ruling as less than a green
light for future detentions. They’re reluctant to use their powers
too frequently in part because they don’t have room for many more
long-term detainees.
“The fact that you’ve got two circuit courts that have
basically upheld that the law is constitutional is certainly
significant,” INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said. “But it does not
resolve, finally resolve, the issue. And it may be that ultimately
you will need a Supreme Court decision given the varying district
court rulings.”
The burden of housing growing numbers of immigrant criminals
has forced INS leaders to ask to transfer some to regular federal
prisons. And INS officials say they want their $4.4 billion annual
budget increased this year to afford more beds. INS agents in some
parts of the country who catch illegal immigrants are forced to
release them simply for lack of space.
“Detention is a crucial component of our overall enforcement
effort,” Bergeron said. “The greater our capacity to detain, the
greater our ability to return credibility to the nation’s
immigration laws.”
In Colorado, INS District Director Joe Greene awaits further
instructions from the appellate court.
But Greene said he doesn’t plan on changing his approach to
Vang and other detainees or the reviews and voluntary releases
that the INS began a year ago aimed at easing constitutional
concerns.
At least 1,000 immigrant criminals, convicted of crimes from
manslaughter to misdemeanor drug offenses, were released into U.S.
cities this past year.
All this is bad news for Vang, because Green still considers
him a threat to public safety. “I have to wait,” Vang concluded
glumly Tuesday morning.
The good news for the INS, Greene said, “is that the circuit
has spoken. At least the law for my region has been settled –
until the Supreme Court chooses to decide. That means a little
less litigation, doesn’t it?”
February 14, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
CUCUNA, Guatemala -“Oh, Osveli. My little one. Where have
you gone?”
Isolated in mountains where they’ve cultivated corn patches
for centuries, Mayan farmers chant for a fallen 15-year-old boy
– killed in Colorado as an illegal immigrant when a smuggler’s
van crashed Dec. 23.
They carry the boy in a donated steel coffin to a ridge crest
where they’ll pray for nine days – beneath the sun and the stars
– before decorating Osveli’s tomb with a cross.
Cristobal, Osveli’s father, opens the coffin, peeks at the
disfigured face. And villagers pack in what Osveli would need
for a journey.
Carefully folded clothes. A blanket. New black walking boots.
Even as fathers, mothers and sisters mourn, anxious young men,
soles of their own boots worn thin, talk nervously about the
journeys they intend to make.
“We need money to live,” said Osveli’s 23-year-old brother,
Aulio, a father of three.”I will go to the United States soon.”
The circumstances behind the tragedy of Osveli Salas Vasquez –
which was chronicled in The Denver Post a week ago – suggest the
makings of a mass migration from Central American villages.
Consider how, here in Cucuna, Osveli’s death only adds to the
pressure on the people he hoped to support. Just paying debts
Osveli owed means his family must send another son north in
search of work.
A Colorado rancher who brought home the bodies of Osveli and
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar, a second Mayan migrant killed in the
crash, got an intimate view of the situation. Neil Harmon, who
also runs a funeral home, embarked on an odyssey to do what he
and his wife, Judy, felt must be done.
They lost their son in a car crash two decades ago. And when
they saw the unidentified young Mayans in their morgue at
Springfield, they knew that somewhere parents were suffering.
Mayans here responded with incredulous gratitude.”We’ve
never had an American come into our village and do something
like this,” one man said.
And the villagers began confiding to the Harmons how they
want to benefit from the modern world but not get lost in it.
The Harmons returned to Colorado last week with a new
understanding of the migrant workers – a record 5 million of
them illegal – who help drive the U.S. economy.
“We have a responsibility to help these people who have
nothing,” said Harmon, a politically conservative 61-year-old
who serves as deputy coroner and sheriff’s posse member in
southeastern Colorado’s Baca County.”The pressure is really on
now. This matters because America could lose a valuable culture.”
Getting ahead in Guatemala has proven an uphill battle for
impoverished Mayans. They trek long distances from highland
villages to attend school. They migrate on foot across Mexico to
the United States.
The risks seem horrendous by U.S. standards. But Mayans say
they are desperate.
“We need money to buy land,” said Bidal, father of Raquel
Aguilar, after the first funeral the Harmons attended.
Bidal’s wife died a dozen years ago. Raquel and his five
brothers and a sister had to fend for themselves while Bidal
worked plots of land owned by others. They lived in an adobe
shack with no running water or electricity at Aldea La Laguna.
The village lies up a steep hill from another village called
Chejoj, which six months ago received electricity when
government workers extended a power line.
Raquel migrated to the United States and returned with enough
money to buy a small plot of land last year. But his brothers
and sister still seemed to be falling behind. Raquel”wanted
his little brother to go to school and get a career,” Bidal
said. So last fall, Raquel and his boyhood friend, Aniseto
Ramirez Vasquez, set out for Florida again.
As villagers hoisted his coffin off a dusty field and carried
it toward a cemetery, Bidal hung back.”I can’t bear to see him
go into the ground,” he said tearfully.
In the procession, 45-year-old Florenzio, Aniseto’s father,
approached the Harmons. Aniseto was one of 13 illegal immigrants
who survived the van crash on the prairie. It was Aniseto who
broke down, under questioning by U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents, and identified the body of his
friend Raquel.
Aniseto is in jail, a federal detention center at Englewood,
as a witness in the federal case against the smugglers who drove
the van. Then Aniseto faces deportation.
“Will he be able to stay there and work?” Florenzio asked.
“Or will they send him home? To stay and work, that would be
the best that could happen. We are poor. We have no money.”
The Harmons assured Florenzio that a priest would visit
Aniseto in prison.
Then Israel Roblero approached Harmon hopefully about working
in Colorado.”One of these days I may see you there,” he said.
Harmon paused a few seconds before replying.”Well, I’ll be
glad to see you.”
Some immigration experts believe economic integration across
the Americas will lead to more and more Mayan villagers
migrating to the United States for work.
Hurricane destruction of crops last fall added to the pressure
on indigenous farmers, confined to the margins of Central
American society. They can’t get ahead without leaving their
villages, said Tracy Ehlers, a University of Denver anthropology
professor who has worked in Guatemala since 1976.
“There are no opportunities for kids,” Ehlers said.”They
have to take their lives in their hands and go north.”
A U.S.-orchestrated coup here in 1954 led to decades of
Guatemalan civil war and a legacy of poverty. The conditions
have led desperate Guatemalans into smuggling cocaine and
growing opium for Mexican mobsters.
“Are we responsible for this in any way? Yeah. No doubt about
it,” said Robert Carlsen, a University of Colorado professor
who recently published a book about a highland Mayan community.
“We’ve contributed to the destabilization that makes it so that
(Mayans) can’t exist in their own villages. We put the generals
in power. The cocaine consumers are in the United States.”
And the U.S. economy benefits from cheap migrant labor,
Carlsen added.”Where would we be without them?”
U.S. immigration officials are watching for signs of a mass
migration. In December, most of the 2,400 migrants stopped along
the southwestern U.S. border came from Central America, said
Greg Gagne, INS spokesman in Washington, D.C. Many were
indigenous people who find little opportunity at home.
“We recognize that the potential is there,” Gagne said.
“We have contingency plans that deal with augmenting our
resources along the border. … Certainly, on a human level, we
have empathy for these individuals. But our job requires us to
enforce the law. And we do.”
After Raquel’s funeral, reaching Osveli’s village proved
difficult for Harmon.
The road to Cucuna turned into a steep trail, too rough for
four-wheel-drive. Harmon set out on a mule.
Osveli’s brother Aulio and other men already had hauled the
300-pound casket up the steep, 3-mile, twisting trail to Cucuna.
Harmon followed them into the clouds where, at an altitude of
about 9,000 feet, villagers look down on Chiapas, Mexico, to the
west.
Men trek down there, sneak across the Mexican border and work
on small coffee plantations. They earn about $3.50 a day.
Osveli got tired of that and left. And died.
When Harmon arrived, the villagers, who speak mostly in Mam,
were mourning.
They invited him into an adobe house, across from the
thatch-roof adobe where Osveli lived. The closed coffin was on
display, candles flickering around it. Women arranged lilies
they picked below in the valley by the Coatan River.
Cristobal, Osveli’s 57-year-old father, spoke to Harmon through
a translator.
“Thank you for bringing my son back to his home. I am content
now that my son is home.”
Into the night, as villagers grieved in the candlelight, nine
young men gathered more closely around Harmon.
“We can’t do anything,” Santos Hernandez confided in a
quavering voice, tears in his eyes.”We work all the time. We
have to go to make it, to make it here. To stay we would have to
work the land better using fertilizers. But we don’t have the
money to get fertilizers. We can’t do anything. We all want to
go to the United States.”
Hurricanes last fall wiped out most of Cucuna’s corn. A bit
that was salvaged was stored in the rafters above where Osveli’s
body lay in the coffin.
The next day, the young men told Harmon how Osveli had
borrowed 8,000 quetzales (more than $1,000) from a woman in
Tacana, the electrified town 5 miles below in the valley.
It was money he needed to pay guides and make it to Florida,
where he hoped to join his sister, Irma. He planned to earn
enough money to pay off the debt and more. But robbers took the
money in Mexico.
When Osveli set out a second time with his brother, Noe,
the family already owed the debt from his first try.
“”So that is why now I must go,” Osveli’s brother Aulio said.
The death raised concerns about dangers of the long journey
north – which Mayan migrants make mostly on foot.
A 23-year-old villager, Jaime Rodrigo Perez, confessed that
Osveli’s death leaves him”a little afraid” about leaving home
for the United States. He described an uneasy tension between
young men and village elders who never felt they had to leave
home.
“We have to go for money. Here, we can’t earn it,” Perez
said.”Our parents say: “Don’t leave. It’s far. Why leave?’ But
we need to live better. We try to explain to our parents. They
are content only when we return. And then, they thank us.”
The Harmons say they never thought much about migrant workers
until the accident near their ranch. Now they’re convinced that
technical assistance delivered directly to Central American
villagers, and compassion toward migrants in the United States,
could help improve a complex, intertwined situation.
In Cucuna, Neil Harmon asked villagers what they would buy –
if village debts were paid – with any extra money their children
might earn in the United States.
A water pump, they said. Elders said a gasoline-powered pump
might help them move water hundreds of feet up from the valley
floor below during dry seasons. And a pump could move greater
volumes of water from side streams when they run full.
Harmon nodded. What else?
Electricity, they said. A farmer across the valley in another
hillside village had a solar-powered light. Cucuna villagers
looked out at it every night.
And how did he get it?
His son had worked in the U.S. and brought the solar panel
home.
Today, just about every ambitious Mayan in Cucuna has Neil
Harmon’s address on the Colorado prairie near Springfield.
“No, I won’t be surprised to see them knocking on my door,”
Harmon said, heading home past the mist-shrouded tops of
volcanoes.”And I wonder, will I welcome them then? I don’t
know. … But we’re going to try to help.”
February 6, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Coloradans help Guatemalan clan
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – A Colorado rancher and his wife
walked solemnly into a world of grief this week – bringing the
bodies of two illegal immigrants home.
The fathers of the two Guatemalans were waiting for Neil and
Judy Harmon at a mortuary. Anguish etched on their faces, they
are Mayan farmers who journeyed for more than seven hours from
Guatemala’s impoverished highlands to the capital.
Their sons – 15-year-old Osveli Salas Vasquez and 22-year-old
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar – died near the Harmons’ ranch in
southeastern Colorado – victims of unscrupulous smugglers.
“I was trying to convince him not to go,” Aguilar’s father,
Bidal, lamented. “But he saw that the situation here wasn’t
getting any better. He went to support his little brothers and
sister.”
The Guatemalans gazed with awe at the Harmons, who also run a
funeral home near their ranch in Springfield, where they had
taken care of the bodies since the crash Dec. 23 of a van packed
with illegal immigrants.
The Harmons couldn’t ignore the tragedy – two decades ago,
they lost their own son in a car crash. And the more they tried
to do the right thing, the deeper they ventured into Central
America’s woes.
The villagers who raised Raquel and Osveli are desperate.
A U.S.-backed coup here in 1954 led to decades of Guatemalan
civil war, which brought guerrillas and government soldiers into
the highlands and erased more than 400 Mayan villages. War gave
way in the mid-1990s to lawlessness and pockets of extreme
poverty. Then last fall, hurricanes hammered Central America,
worsening the poverty by destroying coffee plantations where
Mayan villagers sometimes found work.
So village elders had little choice but to wave adios to their
young shining stars last fall. Osveli and his 19-year-old
brother, Noe, left from Canton Cucuna, near Tacana, and Raquel
from Aldea La Laguna, near Cuilco.
They hiked down from their native land of towering volcanoes
and joined the exodus of tens of millions of people moving from
poor countries to rich ones. Raquel, Osveli and Noe hired
“coyotes,” smugglers who spirited them through Mexico and into
the Arizona desert. There they met other smugglers, who drove
them in van along a notorious smuggling route – one that INS
agents say brings at least 1,300 illegal immigrants a month
through Colorado. But these smugglers pushed too hard. On a
frigid patch of prairie west of Springfield, the van crashed.
Raquel died instantly of head injuries. Osveli died soon after,
also of head injuries, at Southeast Colorado Hospital.
The bodies lay unidentified in Springfield for more than a week.
Some authorities called for cremating or burying the illegal
immigrants in Springfield. But Neil Harmon, who also serves as
the deputy Baca County coroner and a member of the sheriff’s
posse, wouldn’t do that. In 1980, the Harmons’ 19-year-old son,
Bo, died on that same prairie when a tractor-trailer mowed
through his prized bronze-colored Camaro.
“It’s bad enough losing a child,” Harmon said recently at
the wheel of his white pickup. “But for the families that sent
those boys not to have the bodies back. …”
So he embalmed the bodies carefully. And he waited, checking on
them at the end of each day.
“These boys need to go home.”
***
The tragedy of Osveli, Noe and Raquel began with basic education
and ambition.
They grew up in villages where elders speak mostly in Mam – a
language spoken before Spaniards arrived in America. No
electricity. No running water. The villagers harvest just enough
maize and beans to survive. But the boys went to school in
accordance with new Guatemalan laws. They learned to speak
Spanish and write a bit. In the Vasquez family, Osveli was the
youngest of twelve, said his 57-year-old father, Cristobal Salas
Perez. “My last boy.”
Rugged, nearly impassable terrain separates Osveli’s village
from Raquel’s. The two never met before reaching the United
States.
Raquel had worked briefly in Florida before and saved enough
money to dream about buying a bit of land near his home,
building a house and getting married. He returned from Florida
in February 1998 to check on his father, five younger brothers
and a sister. Their mother, Rosenda, died 12 years ago.
The children were barely managing to eat, said 47-year-old
Bidal. “That’s why Raquel left again, to help the family
survive.”
Getting into the United States was an ordeal.
After the journey through Mexico, U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents caught Raquel trying to cross the
border illegally near Nogales on Dec. 8. They entered his
fingerprints into a computer database and sent him back across
the border. On his second try, Raquel made it. He sneaked to
orange groves near Chandler Heights, Arizona, a well-known
staging ground for smuggling across the United States.
Osveli and Noe fared better at first. But the desert route
they took left cactus spikes embedded in Osveli’s right hand and
arm.
Laying low in the orange groves, they met other immigrants,
all hungry and exhausted, and haggled with smugglers for rides.
Much of what happened next is described in a federal affidavit,
based on interviews with crash survivors, that prosecutors in
Denver filed for their case against smugglers.
Investigators believe 13 illegal immigrants jammed into the
ill-fated van. They paid $250 to $700 each for transportation to
labor compounds in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.
The smugglers suspected of transporting Osveli, Raquel, Noe
and the others were illegal immigrants themselves: Alberto
Velasquez of Guatemala and Beltran Morales Roblero of Mexico.
Other than front seats for the driver and his assistant, there
was one seat. Most of the immigrants huddled on the floor. And
in the frigid darkness of Dec. 23, the van was speeding along
U.S. 160, which runs east from Trinidad. INS agents say they
can’t afford to patrol the long, empty highway.
The accident occurred about 6:30 a.m., 8 miles west of
Pritchett, where the highway curves sharply to the north. Over
the last two decades, more than a dozen vehicles have crashed at
the turn.
The driver hit the brakes and skidded. The van apparently
flipped and rolled.
The immigrants wore no seat belts. Some, including Noe, were
dozing. The impact hurled them around the metal interior. Some
were ejected through shattered windows. The van’s roof crumpled.
At the back of the van, Raquel slumped, face down and
lifeless, his skull crushed.
Six survivors, cut and bruised, staggered away from the
wreckage. One man threw away a driver’s license that INS
investigators later found in a clump of grass. As the sun rose,
the survivors trudged across the prairie toward three grain
elevators visible in the distance. A Colorado Public Service
utility crew picked them up and drove to the scene of the crash,
then radioed for help.
At the Southeast Colorado Hospital in Springfield, a doctor
pronounced Osveli dead. Nurses called for an airlift to Denver
for his brother, Noe, who was unconscious with neck injuries.
“This disturbed me terribly,” said nurse Marilyn Chenoweth.
The immigrants she treated “looked like a bunch of kids.”
Meanwhile, Neil Harmon, in his capacity as deputy coroner, went
to the scene and retrieved Raquel’s body. And Noe woke up
clueless in Denver.
Doctors at Denver Health Medical Center had stabilized him and
put his neck in a brace. Several teeth were bashed in, leaving
raw nerves exposed. A nurse told him he’d been in an accident.
All Noe knew was that his little brother Osveli wasn’t with him.
***
At the INS regional detention center in Aurora, agents pressed
the crash survivors for evidence, anything. They got nothing for
days.
Then one of the survivors, another Guatemalan, broke down and
identified Raquel Jimenez Aguilar. He gave the name of a cousin
in North Carolina.
Around Christmas, Noe was released, somehow, from the Denver
Health Medical Center. His discharge papers indicate nurses
checked him out on Dec. 26, with instructions to seek further
treatment. Noe went to the Denver Rescue Mission in a taxi
sent from the hospital, shelter director Paul Anderson said.
That was home for a week. Noe barely spoke, shelter workers
said. He couldn’t eat, though he was starving, with the nerves
of his broken teeth exposed.
And Noe might still be at that shelter today were it not for
the Corica family of southeast Aurora.
On the snowy evening of Jan. 2, Carmine Corica, his wife,
Razz, and Gaby, their 12-year-old daughter, who wanted to help
homeless people, arrived at the shelter for a stint as volunteer
kitchen workers.
A Sun Microsystems technician, 37-year-old Razz Corica once
was an illegal immigrant herself, smuggled across the Mexican
border with her mother. Once, after INS agents raided the
Chicago plastics factory where her mother worked, she was nearly
deported. An agent took pity on the mother and her daughter and
offered to sponsor them as future citizens.
At the homeless shelter in Denver, Razz remembered all this
when she noticed Noe gazing down, looking lost, as she tried to
hand him a green chile burrito.
He sat down alone and couldn’t eat it. The Coricas decided to
sit down next to him.
He told them he’d been in an accident. “He said: “I’m on my
way to Florida to meet my sister,”’ Razz recalled. “I said:
“You’re in Colorado.’ He took that in. He said: “How far is that
from Florida?”’
Another homeless man showed them a crinkled newspaper story
about an accident in Springfield. The bodies hadn’t been
identified.
From that moment, the Coricas made the case their mission.
“I put my arms around him and said: “We’re going to help you
find your family,”’ Razz said.
Noe had little to offer. The telephone numbers to reach his
sister Irma in Florida had been lost. That night, Razz worked
her computer and phones, focusing on “Ejido Miscun,” the name
of a village in Chiapas, Mexico, that Noe mentioned – a village
where his other sister, Mercedes, might have access to a public
telephone.
Razz reached an operator in Mexico City who gave her an area
code for southern Mexico. Razz dialed a number randomly,
reaching a servant, and arranged to call back 15 minutes later
for an area code for Ejido Miscun. Using that code, she dialed
randomly again, reaching a nurse. And the nurse gave her a
number for a public telephone facility close to Ejido Miscun.
Razz reached an operator, who said she would have Noe and
Osveli’s sister Mercedes by the telephone that evening.
At last the connection was made.
The Coricas got more phone numbers and information they needed
to help Noe.
They’d taken Noe into their two-story, three-bedroom home.
They rented him a Bruce Lee video.
Carmine Corica persuaded Noe to drive with him to Springfield
in early January to try to find out about his brother. Noe was
terrified that police would arrest him.
Inside Neil Harmon’s funeral home morgue, Noe gazed at the two
bodies silently for more than 10 minutes. He and Corica got
back in the car. That’s when Noe broke down.
Corica still recalls those wails word for word. “My poor
little brother. Now I’ll never see him again. He’s dead. And I
was supposed to protect him.”
Corica called the Harmons later to identify the body.
Neil Harmon rarely has felt so relieved. “I’ve never had a
body this long in 17 years,” he said later in Springfield.
“You think, who is this kid? How do I get him back? He needs to
go back to his family. And am I going to be able to show him
when I get him back?”
The Harmons began collecting money to send the bodies home.
“After losing Bo, it really became important to us to get
these bodies home,” Judy Harmon said. “We’re Christians. We
like to go the extra mile.”
They received contributions from four prairie churches. Baca
County social services officials kicked in $2,000. Denver City
Councilwoman Debbie Ortega persuaded American Airlines to ship
the bodies for free. Illegal immigrants where Osveli and
Raquel’s relatives work scraped together more than $1,000. And
in the end, the Harmons contributed $2,500 of their own money.
They hired Funeraria Latina of west Denver to handle paperwork
with the Guatemalan consulate in Los Angeles.
Meantime, Carmine Corica had rented a car and was driving Noe
on to his destination – a labor compound in Florida.
Reunited with his sister, Noe has managed to elude INS agents,
who are eager to find him as a witness to the crash.
The Coricas are confident they did the right thing.
“I believe U.S. actions in Latin America over the last 200
years are deplorable,” Razz said. “All those governments they
propped up at the expense of the peasant population. … If this
is what I get put in jail for, it’s a noble cause.”
***
This weekend, the Harmons are traveling with the fathers and
cousins of Osveli and Raquel back into their villages. Families
in the villages plan funerals based on a fusion of Catholic and
indigenous rites.
The journey, with gray steel caskets in tow, is a long one on
rugged roads. Logistical preparations began Thursday when the
bodies arrived, and when Guatemalan Congressman Juan Diaz
Gonzalez intervened to help speed matters with airport
authorities. As president of Guatemala’s Commission on
Indigenous Communities, Gonzalez sees smuggling of undocumented
workers as a growing problem that countries must address
cooperatively – not just with domestic immigration crackdowns.
Impoverished Mayans are making their way to the U.S. “out of
necessity,” said Gonzalez. “It’s survival for them. And the
migration is going to increase rapidly because of the hurricanes
last fall.”
A cooperative approach could eliminate opportunities for
smugglers: Guatemala could open its doors to U.S.
labor-contracting companies that would recruit workers here and
grant them proper eight-month visas up front, Gonzales said.
But mourning, not politics, was the priority in Guatemala City.
The fathers and cousins repeatedly thanked the Harmons.
“We’ve been suffering here. We were far away and couldn’t do
anything when we heard about the deaths,” said Luis Domingos
Vasquez, a cousin of Raquel Aguilar serving as family spokesman.
“The boys were in their country illegally. And for these people
to help. …
“How can we ever repay you? ” he said to the Harmons. “God
will reward you. We are very satisfied and content with what you
have done.”
Osveli’s father, Cristobal, can’t bear to look directly at the
Americans, ashamed because he doesn’t have money to help pay for
a truck to carry his dead son’s casket.
“I want to thank for all your work and sacrifices,” he told
Judy Harmon in a quiet, measured voice. “I am completely
grateful to you.”
The Harmons replied, through an interpreter, that they
understand, a little, because they lost a son once, too.
Guatemalan migrants “are just people, like we are,” Neil
Harmon said. “They are poor, hardworking people just trying to
get a job. And I can identify with them.”
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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.
