The Morning Blend
Welcome
Complete Media Kit
Ecatepec, State of Mexico — Pedro Soto lost nearly everything on his two-week trek from Honduras to Mexico.
“When we came to Tabasco, thieves took my last 400 pesos and my cellphone,” he said. “Then in Veracruz, immigration police picked up my brother. He’s only 15, and I don’t know where he is.”
An estimated 500,000 undocumented Central American migrants pass through Mexico on their way to cross the U.S. border each year. Like most, the 25-year-old Soto has dodged authorities as well as thieves — the two sometimes wearing the same uniform, he said.
But here in Ecatepec, he has been able to come out of hiding.
  
|
Two meters from the track of a freight train that brought Soto halfway to the border is a two-bedroom, two-bath shelter and a welcome sign that can be read from the boxcars that roll by almost every hour: “In support of our fellow Latin Americans.”
The cement hut is guarded by local police and endorsed by the city mayor — who in December declared Ecatepec a migrant sanctuary.
“We do not help, collaborate on, or tolerate the abuse or humiliation of migrants,” said José Luis Gutiérrez, the mayor of the high-crime city of close to 3 million residents just outside of Mexico City.
In addition to not arresting or harassing migrants, city police have been instructed to restrain any state law enforcement authorities that they catch extorting the Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans that pass through on the train.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve detained patrols,” Gutiérrez said. “In the end, they were handed over to their superiors under the condition that they don’t mess with us again.”
Ecatepec is a city of migrants, Gutiérrez said when asked why he launched the controversial initiative last year. According to the mayor, 80 percent of Ecatepec’s residents came to the city from other parts of Mexico to seek their livelihood in the nearby capital, and two out of three families currently have relatives living illegally in the United States.
“This city considers work to be sacred, and it believes migrants are workers, not criminals,” he said.
A history of helping
Migrants have received help since they first started arriving in Ecatepec, and Rosa Benavente, 62, is among those who have lent a hand since long before the shelter opened.
“I would give them beans and tacos and let them get cleaned up and handsome,” said Benavente, who lives with her 15 grandchildren in a rusty boxcar near the tracks that divide her working class neighborhood of Xalostoc. In the past, she said, police have fired their guns into the air to scare off migrants. “I was worried that they’d arrest me too,” she said.
Since the shelter opened, more than 900 Central Americans have stopped by to eat, shower and sleep before jumping the trains again, said its director, Arturo López García.
One good night’s sleep can prevent the accidents that maim and kill scores of train riders each year, he said. In the year and a half before the shelter was built, 15 migrants lost their limbs in Ecatepec, he said, while over the past six months, only one man was hospitalized after falling on his stomach from a freight — which migrants have dubbed “The Beast.”
Having lived illegally in the United States at various times over a period of 25 years, López García, who is from Ecatepec, said he chose to run the shelter as a way to help immigrants whom he says his government mistreats simply because they aren’t Mexican.
“[President Felipe] Calderón goes to the United States and says he wants to help migrants. Why not start at home?” he said.
Congress passed a bill in April decriminalizing undocumented migration and removing prison sentences of up to 10 years from the penal code. The measure still awaits the president’s signature before coming law, however.
Employees at the shelter do not promote the dangerous journey to the border, López García said. He has convinced at least six people to turn back, including a 14-year-old Honduran girl who had told her mother she was visiting her sister in a nearby town and instead headed north, alone.
López García also has orders to weed out and arrest human traffickers and Central American gang members, such as the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, some of whom pass through the shelter and can be spotted by their tattoos and cell phones. One in every 100 guests at the shelter is a gang member, according to the mayor.
In transit
Ecatepec’s status as a haven for the undocumented may not last much longer. In 2009 a new mayor will be voted in, and Gutiérrez says he has set up citizen’s committees to help run the shelter once he’s gone.
But only the incoming mayor can decide whether to continue helping migrants or to crack down on them, he adds. In the meantime, migrants like Oscar Santiago García can still take advantage of a brief respite while passing through Xalostoc.
Santiago crossed into Mexico from his native Guatemala floating on a tire across the Suchiate River. Then, due to the fact that the southern border rail line has been out of operation since last year, he had to walk more than 200 kilometers to hop the train in northern Chiapas.
Once on the train, he encountered railyard guards who passed around jars for riders to pay fees or get thrown off. Thieves stationed at a mock roadblock fired guns at the train and cracked Santiago’s friend’s head open with the butt of a rifle.
“He’s gone home now,” said Santiago, explaining that the rules of the migrant trail assert that one keeps going no matter who is left behind.
In Ecatepec, the freight sped past the shelter as dozens of riders hanging on top of boxcars whistled their encouragement to the boys below who were trying in vain to hop the train.
“It’s going too fast!” Soto, the Honduran, said. He and his friends instead decided to risk a microbus across town to catch the train at the next stop in the city of Tultitlán, where they would once again have to dodge police.
Nacha Cattan is a reporter with The News, an English-language daily in Mexico City, which is edited by former Herald/Review reporter Jonathan Clark. She can be reached at nacha.cattan@thenews.com.mx.
Old Marine wrote on Jul 14, 2008 6:06 PM: