Meeting Danger Well South of the Border

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Journey to the Border
For tens of thousands of impoverished Central Americans who sneak into the United States each year, the "border" begins at Guatemala's frontier with Mexico. This is where many begin the dangerous trek through the desert into Arizona or Texas.

For a moment there was total silence. Then the locomotive roared to life, and the train began to lurch forward with gathering speed.

Pineda and Valencia cheered from their perch atop a tanker car. "Woo-hoo!" the two friends could be heard yelling as the train thundered out of the station. "God is with us! To the North!"

The Shelter at Tapachula

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Alan Delgado gripped the edge of his mattress and clenched his teeth in agony. His right leg had been amputated above knee. Yet the nerves in his thigh continued to tingle and spasm as though it were still there. His friend Julio Cesar Lambert gave him an understanding smile from the next bed over. Lambert was missing his left leg.

Twelve days earlier the two Hondurans had boarded a 10 p.m. freight train from the same station in Arriaga that Pineda and Valencia had just left. Now they were the newest wards of the Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd, a refuge for injured migrants in the town of Tapachula, back toward the Guatemalan border. Police and hospital workers send at least 40 mangled migrants a month to the shelter, a collection of whitewashed concrete-block rooms.

Delgado, a short 22-year-old with impish features, said he could still remember the relief he'd felt as their train pulled out of Arriaga. But his optimism had been tempered by the pouring rain and his awareness of the 11-hour ride ahead.

About an hour-and-a-half into the journey, Delgado said, four masked bandits armed with guns emerged from a hiding place on the train and began leaping from car to car. One migrant apparently refused to give them his money. Three more simply had nothing to hand over. Delgado said the bandits grabbed each man by the shoulders and hurled him off the train.

The next morning, at the train's last stop in the town of Ixtepec, Delgado and Lambert said they hopped on a shorter train containing only a few freight cars. Soon afterward it rounded into a sharp curve so fast that the cars began to buck and sway with a sickening squeal. Sensing an impending derailment, Delgado tried to leap off.

The next thing he knew he was lying on the ground, a chunk of his right foot still stuck on the ladder of a freight car several feet away, the rest of his leg dangling from his thigh by a bloody shred of skin.

Lambert's leg had been severed completely. So was that of a Honduran woman also brought to the shelter.

In the distance they could see the torso of a migrant whose body had been sliced in half. Two more migrants were crushed to death by a freight car, blood pooling from underneath.

For the next three-and-a-half hours Delgado and the other wounded waited for help under a broiling sun, wracked with a pain Delgado said was "indescribable, just un-erasable from your brain."

Delgado remembered screaming over and over again to keep from slipping into death.

When he came out of surgery that evening, Delgado said he wondered why he had struggled so hard.

"I looked at this stump and said, 'I'm a useless person now,' " he recalled. " 'What will I do in the world?' My American Dream ended on that train."

A few beds over, Hanibal Rodriguez, 28, had other plans. A burly Honduran headed to a landscaping job in New Jersey, Rodriguez said he was robbed and shot in the leg three times several weeks earlier by uniformed police near Arriaga.

But his wounds were healing nicely. He'd be ready to return to Honduras in about a week.

"I'll stay for two, maybe three months to recuperate," Rodriguez said. "After that," he added, flashing a toothy grin, "It's back to the north."