[Reader-list] Immigrants die at borders

[Rana Dasgupta]

The last few weeks have seen a number of high-profile stories of immigrants
dying in the attempt to get into the US or Europe.  The way that the
mainstream media frame these stories is to present the moneygrabbing
smugglers as the vilains, the unfortunate dead migrants as the victims of
illegal schemes and false promises.  The attached article, from today's NYT
is such an article, albeit a more human one than most.

This is a more sympathetic kind of narrative than the more usual one in
which immigrants are simple faceless criminals.  All of these stories remain
trapped, however, in the basic nationalist, welfare-statist logic; in fact
the fierce desire of people to get into America, Britain etc leads to all
sorts of sickening self-congratulation in which everyone understands anew
why the system is so important to protect.  They do not choose to see it,
instead, as a fundamental challenge to the smugness of a welfare state in
which fairness and mutual responsibility are only limited, local values from
which most people must be violently excluded.  Just think how much work the
concept of "nation" is doing in that argument.

See No Border's valuable compilation of such stories for more:

http://www.noborder.org/dead.php

R



June 29, 2003
Deaths of Immigrants Uncover Makeshift World of Smuggling
By KATE ZERNIKE with GINGER THOMPSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/national/29SMUG.html?hp

HARLINGEN, Tex., June 26 — Karla Patricia Chávez left her home in Honduras
when she was only 15, guided across the Mexican border by immigrant
smugglers to seek a more prosperous life in the United States.

Now, a decade later, federal prosecutors say that Ms. Chávez has become a
smuggler herself, the ringleader of an operation that went disastrously
wrong when 19 illegal immigrants died from the oppressive heat in a truck
ferrying them through South Texas — the nation's deadliest smuggling
incident.

Prosecutors portray Ms. Chávez's group as a sophisticated enterprise that
stretched across the United States and six Latin American countries. Here in
the border region where she lived, and where the fatal journey began, a
different image emerges, of a small-time, often disorganized crime ring in
which Ms. Chávez was barely a novice.

Law enforcement officials say that Ms. Chávez's group was typical of those
that bring more than a million immigrants across the Mexican border into the
United States each year. Unlike narcotics organizations, which are tightly
centralized and controlled by powerful dons, immigrant smuggling networks
rely on constantly shifting configurations of guides and safe houses from
Honduras to Houston and beyond.

Illicit rings of coyotes, as the smugglers are known, are so common in the
border area that immigrants often regard them as services rather than
criminal syndicates. It is precisely their informality that makes them
especially difficult for United States authorities to track, and potentially
very dangerous for those who put themselves in the smugglers' hands.

Immigration officials say that women often play leading roles in smuggling
rings, because the illicit business rarely sees the kind of gangland
violence connected with drug dealing.

Ms. Chávez and her accused associates used technology no more advanced than
their cellular telephones and sport utility vehicles, court documents show.
They brought immigrants across border rivers on inner tubes, stowed them in
their own apartments in low-income housing projects and met each other at
welfare offices and truck stops, the documents show.

According to her indictment, Ms. Chávez packed far too many immigrants — at
least 77 — into a tractor-trailer that had neither water nor ventilation,
for a 325-mile journey in scorching desert heat. Some immigrants who
survived the journey had body temperatures of 105 degrees when they were
discovered.

When the trip turned to tragedy the crime ring quickly fell apart. The
driver, Tyrone Williams, abandoned the trailer full of bodies, then fled to
a Houston emergency room overcome with panic.

One smuggler immediately turned on Ms. Chávez, blaming her to the victims'
families, who alerted immigration agents.

Ms. Chávez fled to her family home in Honduras, a refuge where American
agents tracked her until her arrest on June 14, after she had left Honduras
for Guatemala. She has been charged with recklessly causing the deaths of 17
of the immigrants who were immediately identified. Prosecutors have said
they may seek the death penalty.

"You do not know what awaits me," Ms. Chávez wept to a relative who tried to
reassure her when she called Honduras from a Houston detention center a few
days after her capture. "I think they are going to kill me."

In interviews in Honduras, Ms. Chávez's relatives recalled a time when she
was a sixth-grade beauty queen and devoted Sunday school student. She left
home when she was a teenager, with only a sixth-grade education. But she was
already a veteran on assembly lines in blue-jeans factories in Honduras.

Making Neighbors Aware

In Combes, Tex., a run-down suburb north of Harlingen, Ms. Chávez announced
her presence in a neighborhood of plain-colored homes by painting her own
bright pink, prompting neighbors to call it "the Barbie house."

Neighbors said they noticed a steady stream of vans and pickup trucks at the
house, which Ms. Chávez had shared with Heriberto Flores Rebollar, the
Mexican man she called her husband. He was the father of her three children,
although law enforcement officials said they believed the couple never
married.

In a neighborhood where people commonly gather out front after sunset, Ms.
Chávez and Mr. Flores kept to themselves, and put up a six-foot wooden fence
around their house about a year ago.

"We knew something was going on — this town is too small," said the Combes
chief of police, James B. Parker, "but we didn't know what."

Still, the neighbors' suspicions were softened by their view of Ms. Chávez
as a working mother, watching over her young sons as they rode tricycles in
the street. She sewed blue jeans at a nearby Levi's plant until it closed
last August, according to neighbors and a statement she gave to her lawyers.

Neighbors recalled that on Mother's Day — three days before the deadly
incident — a group of men gathered in front of Ms. Chávez's house to
serenade her in Spanish, the only language she spoke.

"I figured if anybody was doing anything, it's the men," said Sandra Vela,
who lives across the street. "She was too nice."

The authorities say it remains unclear how Ms. Chávez got into smuggling.
But court documents show that Mr. Flores had been on law enforcement radar
as a smuggler even before Ms. Chávez arrived in this country.

Mr. Flores had left his home village, in remote mountains in the Mexican
State of Guerrero, when he was 13, dropping out of school after second
grade, his sister and mother said in interviews there. After he settled in
the United States, Mr. Flores was deported to Mexico three times — in 1989,
1995, and 2001 — after he was convicted or pleaded guilty to smuggling
charges under a long list of aliases.

He kept coming back. The couple bought the house in Combes, paying $49,500,
shortly after he returned from his third deportation. Apparently he felt so
little concern about being caught at the border that he and Ms. Chávez made
a vacation trip to visit his family in Mexico last summer.

But last October, Mr. Flores turned up in the Cameron County Jail in
Brownsville, Tex., where he was caught by Border Patrol agents in a raid for
illegal immigrants. He pleaded guilty in federal court to violating his
deportation, and in April was sentenced to 70 months in prison.

Ms. Chávez has told relatives in Honduras and her lawyer, Jeffrey Sasser,
that she and Mr. Flores had split up before he was incarcerated. Mr. Sasser
said she claimed that she did not know where he was in prison.

No Criminal Record Found

So far, her lawyers have not found that she has any criminal record. Law
enforcement officials said the fatal operation appeared to have been her
first major smuggling run.

"It seems to me that this might have been her first big job since her
boyfriend's arrest, and it went terribly wrong," one immigration official
said. "Rookie hour turned deadly, and now she's facing big-time punishment."

Officials compare the smuggling rings that ply their trade across the
Mexican border to drug cartels in terms of their proliferation and
international reach. But a law enforcement official in Mexico said immigrant
smuggling, in contrast to narcotics, was "ant's work."

The rings are loose-knit, ad hoc collaborations, with one group moving
immigrants into Mexico, another taking them north towards the United States,
a third taking them on the often perilous trip across the border, and no one
in overall command.

The profits are big. In Mexico alone, law enforcement officials estimate
that smuggling nets about $1 billion a year. But because there are so many
smugglers involved in each journey, each one gets just a small piece of the
pie.

The indictment against Ms. Chávez charges that she relied on a loose network
of other smugglers to connect with immigrants and bring them to South Texas.
Several of the 13 people who are accused of collaborating with her had been
convicted or pleaded guilty to smuggling charges.

According to court papers, the Rodriguez family — Víctor, his wife, Emma,
and son Víctor Jesús — brought immigrants across the border and held them in
their two homes on a busy Brownsville street. Claudia Carrizales, a cook at
a tiny taco restaurant that Ms. Chávez had rented a few weeks earlier, is
said to have taken food to the safe houses. Abelardo Flores and Alfredo
García are accused of recruiting Mr. Williams, whose truck was normally used
to transport milk and melons.

In most cases the deals were as simple as this: in a Fiesta Mart in Houston,
a shopper, Josefina González, overheard two strangers talking about
relatives who were going to be smuggled, and asked them how she might do the
same for her granddaughter in Mexico. They gave her the name of Norma
Sánchez, part owner of a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall in North
Houston.

Ms. Sánchez, according to court documents, offered the woman what she said
was a discount price for a first-time customer: $1,900. She told Ms.
Gonzalez to direct her granddaughter to a hotel in the Mexican border city
of Reynosa.

Death Near Destination

The trailer truck was to be the final leg of the journey for the young woman
and other immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican
Republic, who had reached Harlingen by a variety of routes and means. Many
of the Mexicans told investigators they took buses to the border and crossed
without the aid of a coyote. A guide from Ms. Chávez's hometown led a group
of 10 Hondurans on buses through Guatemala and trains across Mexico, then
helped them wade across the Rio Grande at night.

With heightened patrols since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the
smugglers' work no longer ends once immigrants cross the border. Now they
want to move clandestinely at least as far as Houston.

That was Ms. Chávez's work. Prosecutors said she made the decision that
enough immigrants were assembled in at least three safe houses to proceed
with the truck trip north. She is accused of working directly with the two
men who recruited Mr. Williams, who said in sworn testimony that he had been
offered $5,000 to transport the immigrants from Harlingen to Houston.

On the evening of May 13, at least two men loaded the immigrants — who may
have numbered as many as 100 — onto Mr. Williams's truck in an open field
and closed the door from the outside, while the driver remained in the cab.

In telephone interviews, two of the Honduran immigrants said they protested
and asked for smaller vehicles. But they said the smugglers told them that
the trailer was a better way to avoid detection by the border patrol.

Only three hours later, 17 of the people in the truck, including a
5-year-old Mexican boy, were dead of heat stroke and dehydration. Mr. Willia
ms opened the rear door at a gas station just south of Victoria, Tex., the
court documents show. An unknown number of immigrants fled into fields
around the station. Immigration officials took 55 survivors into custody,
including Ms. Gonzalez's granddaughter. Another two immigrants died later in
hospitals.

Ms. Chávez turned up days later at the adobe home of her eldest brother,
Carlos Alberto Chávez, in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. He and his
wife, Sonia, said in interviews that Ms. Chávez's homecoming was marred by
sleepless nights and outbursts of weeping. For 23 days, she almost never
left the house, they said.

Her father, Vicente Chávez, said his daughter spoke very little about her
new life in Texas, but mostly seemed content with small talk about old
times. Sonia Chávez lamented that Karla seemed to have developed a strong
taste for material things.

"The more you have, the more you want," she said."And it was not important
to her how she got it."

Ms. Chávez left her children in her brother's care, and was arrested when
she crossed from Honduras into Guatemala by car. After they learned of her
arrest, her relatives struggled to understand why she had come home to them.

"I think Karla came back to see who she was," said her father sadly,
"because she did not like the person she had become."

When she was arrested, Ms. Chávez was carrying the United States birth
certificates of her three sons. Her lawyer and her mother say she still
wants them to finish her dream, to grow up in this country, as Americans.