Mexico Hopes to Control Migration

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon receives a Mexican flag during the ceremony to mark the Flag Day in Mexico City, Saturday Feb. 24, 2007. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) (Eduardo Verdugo - AP)

Mexico said it detained 182,705 illegal migrants last year; the United States caught more than a million people illegally crossing Mexico's northern border.

Calderon sees it as a law-and-order problem: Central American gangs operate on both sides of Mexico's border with Guatemala, robbing migrants and running drugs, and migrants also are mistreated by Mexican police and immigration officials.

Last year, 187 migration officials were disciplined, said Cecilia Romero, Mexico's top immigration official. Her department's plan aims "to entirely eliminate this terrible situation" by improving detainees' access to lawyers and human rights defenders and prohibiting undocumented migrants from being held in common jails.

"It's harder to go through Mexico than getting into the U.S.," said Richard Garcia, a Honduran waiting for a northbound train in this industrial hub outside Mexico City. "At least in the U.S. they just pick you up and return you. Here you get robbed, beat up."

Garcia, 31, said at least a dozen men from his Atlantic coast village of Triunfo de la Cruz have lost limbs riding trains across Mexico.

Riding with him this time was Dilcia Ortiz, a 27-year-old mother of four from Tela, Honduras who was trying to reach her husband in New York City. Eighteen days into the trip, she had paid a $45 bribe to Mexican immigration officials and watched a female traveler slice her foot in half trying to jump on a train.

"I cried so hard," Ortiz said, recalling how the woman screamed in pain. "I thought of my husband when he did this trip, of all my people who have had to do this."

Wairon Adalis, 18, of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, said his friend turned back after gang members robbed him and fired a bullet that skimmed his head. Adalis said nothing would stop him from meeting his family in Houston _ even the chance to work legally in Mexico.

"If Mexico wants us to work here, then they have to pay in dollars," he said.

Garcia said he would consider joining a Mexican guest-worker program, "but I still don't understand why Mexico cares."

"We're passing through. We don't affect anything. It's obvious they're just trying to please Washington," he said. "They should let us through so we don't have to die falling off a train. We're all Latin Americans, so we should support each other in this."