I’m in Tucson staying with a friend.

Three weeks on the Arizona border has been a real eye opener. I'm so distant from the
reality that the migrants, the undocumented, have to deal with; yet I'm reeling
with emotions and they're intense. Often I wonder why I even want to do this kind of work—to hear grueling testimonies from people on the edges.

I'm still dealing with the story of a Honduran man.  He began by telling me that he's a
survivor. What he meant was that he left El Salvador with nineteen of his friends from a village in Honduras. He made it to the US, then was grabbed by the US Border Patrol and deported to Mexico where I met him.  Of the original twenty men, he was the only one who made it through a four-month trip alive; the rest were shot to death, or were killed when they fell off trains, or they died of thirst in the Arizona desert.

I can still hear him crying; I still see him taking the bottom of his T-shirt and wiping off the tears falling down his face as he tries to move from one word to the next to put together a sentence describing the horrific journey that turned into a nightmare.

The nightmare. We know almost nothing of the traumas millions of human beings a year
have to go through as they attempt to cross the US border. Never mind the suffering experienced along the Guatemalan-Mexican border.  Coming up through Mexico is where the real brutality takes place.

A Mexican human rights worker told me that unheard of violence takes place on
the Mexican side of the border. He didn't feel good about saying that. There's corruption, extortion, robbery, rape and gang violence waged against migrants, especially Central Americans. The worst violence takes place along the Guatemalan-Mexican border.

Tonight I’m headed to Tapachula, a city that borders Guatemala in the state of Chiapas, Mexico.  And I never thought that this would be happening, but it's the way life is—it opens surprises, one thing leads to another.

A woman in the Mexican Human Rights Commission found out that I was working on a migrant report. She mentioned a woman by the name of Dona Olga Sanchez. Dona Olga has a home in Tapachula and she takes care of minors, kids under the age of 17.

Dona Olga engages in extremely challenging work. She tends to kids who have lost hands, arms, legs and feet because they weren't able to grab on, and hang on, to a
train to take them north to cross the border.

When I hear a train now my body shivers because I think of the thousands who climb on them and face such risks. If they dose off while trying to hang on between freight cars, they fall off.  Migrants that shared their testimonies with me told me that they’ve had to stay awake for a couple of days riding the trains, hanging on, fighting sleepiness to stay alive. 

The Honduran man that I spoke with told me about Alicia, a fourteen-year-old who went with him and fell off a train and died. I've wanted to get close to the train lines but put it off, cowering at the challenge of getting close to the crucified; now here I am going to take a plane tonight that will take me from Tucson to LA, then to Mexico City and then off to Tapachula. And who knows what's going to unfold while I'm there for five days, perhaps I’ll go to the train lines to witness hundreds of impoverished human beings getting on them—desperate humans with a dream of making it to the states.

I was going to go on to New Orleans but I'm getting out of that part of the trip. I've got enough to process right now with all the interviews that I have, voices from the edge battering away at me--“folks without voice” is how Romero put it—I’m trying to take their stories and internalize them in my own flesh so that they become part of my own story.

Over the last few days I've pondered how we’re losing a sense of humanity in our
species, disconnecting with human beings uprooted from their homes by the very policies that Bush tried to tout unsuccessfully while in Argentina, pushing the FTAA, which looks as though it will never pass because people from below have had
enough of it. And here I am getting a chance to look into the faces of those who can’t bear it any longer and will risk everything to break with the grueling poverty that comes out of trade deals made in the US, drafted by the powerful and imposed on the weakest and frailest of our fellow human beings.

So many of the people who take me into their confidence and share their stories, mention the fact that the currencies of their countries have been devaluated. This means they work and sweat longer and longer for less and less; no wonder they take such risks and are willing to look death squarely in the face to defeat an economic environment that condemns them to such poverty by going to the US and finding work.

But when I'm in the desert and see how vast it is, it is most daunting that any human being would even consider an attempt to cross it. This staggers my imagination.

I was riding on the back of a four-wheel drive in the Mexican desert with two men and a huge water container that was used to fill up tanks at multiple water stations. These tanks are staggered around some the principle routes migrants take to head to north and then crawl under barbed-wired fences to cross more desert on the US side. Two men were on the truck with me. They’re both from a rehab center where alcohol and drug addicts go for treatment.

One man told me about his treatment. “It's saved my life and now I'm saving lives out here in the desert. Before I came to the rehab center I never gave migrants a thought. Now I'm in the middle of the situation. I feel good about helping."

We came across some footprints. Raul, who works full time on the water runs, points out the prints of a young child; families take the risk together. I have to push to get into that journey, visualizing them walking through the night.

In Annunciation House in El Paso I got some help in my visualization from parents who made the trip with their three year old and infant, only four months old. The mother tells
me that they had to walk through the dark of the night carrying their kids over mountains, worrying about being bitten by snakes, worrying about falling. And now they’re determined to make it to LA.

I learned that a mother with her five year old made the trip without assistance. Usually people pay hundreds of dollars to a “coyote” who leads them across the mountains and deserts. They have to go on faith that the coyote guiding them won’t abandon them. The whole thing challenges me.

One person who has helped me with the challenge is Fr. Cayetano, a priest on the Agua Prieta side of the Mexican border, who has dedicated the last ten years of his ministry to being present for the migrants. His parish has a migrant center.  

Cayetano tells me that if I want to use my time to the fullest while I'm down here on the border, I have “to be close to the crucified; take their pictures, show those photos to your people. Then there will be a change of heart."

”The signs of the times”, Cayetano tells me, "indicate that we need to be close to the immigrants." Over a million people try to cross over each year. Up to the present, roughly 288 have died trying to cross the Arizona desert.

Fr. Cayetano heard the wrenching testimony of the Honduran. He responded quickly. "Tonight we're going to the wall on the Mexican side where there are crosses, and recite the rosary as part of the Dia de Los Muertos commemoration. Between the decades of the rosary we're going to play five minutes of the testimony of the man who lost his friends. When the next decade comes, another five minutes."

Cayetano tells me that I've got to hang out with the crucified, that's where the hope lies. It was wonderful hearing him tell me that, because it's what I've always believed.

I tried to do it in Altar, a major crossing town. A woman who works with migrants tells me that during the summer in the town plaza a thousand or so migrants are preparing to pass over every day. When I got there I found thirty young people with back bags, an indication that they’re ready to move to al norte.

Eleven of them planned to cross together and they cared enough to talk with me. They even posed for a group picture: now they’re somewhere in the desert. They told me they had a coyote they could trust. The oldest was 44 and the youngest 21, all with the same story: shitty salaries, no work and in the states the possibility to find work and support their families. They just want to do some hard work and earn a living. But they've been demonized.

So please keep me in your prayers as I enter into the last part of this trip, going to where the action is, where the violation and humiliation occurs. People from Chiapas comprise a huge percentage of Mexicans coming to the north. They've had to deal with a hurricane that didn't get much press, coffee prices going down and then the familiar refrain: no work.

Fr. Cayetano told me the economic situation in Mexico is beyond belief—it’s disastrous and folks are leaving the countryside. He tells me that migration flows aren't going to come to end—on the contrary they're going to increase.

He has an idea of utopia cranking in him: that people will be able to stay on their land and work it, receive salaries with dignity attached to them. Yes, a new world is possible if we just get to the systemic rot; attack it with the love and compassion of the gospel.

On another note, very much related to what I’ve experienced down here: great to see Chavez speaking his mind. He’s the first Latin American President to do so in memory, perhaps he'll open a space for other presidents to get a little gumption and do the same.

One report said that Chavez, in jest, said he was going to get in front of Bush and scare him. I'm just trying to imagine what it's like for Bush to lay eyes on Chavez, never mind hear him say that there shouldn't be any trade deals with Washington and that Latin America should be creating their own zones of influence when it comes to trade. Kirchner has been giving Bush trouble as well, which probably means that Argentina is going to be on Washington’s shit list.

Please throw some energy my way as I head to Tapachula: I have no idea what
I’m going to find there and whatever I do, I hope I’m in a place where I can deal with it.

Paz,

Jim