Mothers caravan on sad, dangerous trek
Annual search for missing relatives spurs long journey
“We’re almost at the end, and I don’t have a single lead on my son. ... But I feel that I’ve left behind a seed. Someone has to have seen his photo; soon that seed will bear fruit.” Angela Lacayo Alfaro, 46, of Honduras
HUIXTLA, Mexico — María Mercedes Lemus raised her daughter the old-fashioned way, rooted in family and faith.
Yet late one December night, the 60-year-old Honduran found herself standing in the greasy yellow light of a brothel entrance in southern Mexico, praying that her daughter was inside.
Ana Victoria Lemus had set out for the United States in March 2010 at age 17, chasing the promise of a life better than the one she had in Honduras. She phoned her mother from the northern Mexican border city of Reynosa, saying she was to be smuggled into Texas the next day. Then she vanished. While many Central American parents are left to wonder what has become of their disappeared loved ones, Lemus could not let it go. She uncovered a few leads, but nothing came of them.
In desperation, she joined the XII Caravana de Madres Centro-americanas, a group of mostly mothers who make an annual trek through Mexico on a seemingly impossible mission: looking for the missing.
It was another woman in the caravan, following a lead for her own relative, who had unexpectedly run across signs of Lemus’ daughter.
‘We all felt the danger’
On a sweltering night earlier this month, more than 1,000 miles from where she’d last heard from her daughter, Lemus stood in a red-light district, wearing a laminated photo of Ana Victoria around her neck. A couple of prostitutes said they recognized the girl, though they knew her by a different name and said she was working in a guarded brothel.
Just outside, a man with two young women at his side strolled past Lemus, a bodyguard missing an eye following closely behind them. Lemus steeled herself and asked to be let in.
“If you go in, you aren’t coming out,” the doorman warned her and three others accompanying Lemus that night.
“We all felt the danger,” Lemus said, explaining why she and her small group had little choice but to turn back. Yet the disappointment was tempered by renewed hope, however tenuous.
The caravan’s heartwrenching journey is such that the mere prospect of finding a daughter as a possible victim of sex trafficking is seen as one of the few highlights after three weeks on the road, searching across more than 3,000 miles of Mexico.
By most estimates, at least 70,000 Central American migrants have forcibly disappeared in Mexico over the past decade. Others say the number of disappeared is well above 100,000, but no one knows for certain.
Desperate exodus
Migrants’ undocumented status, and the routes they navigate through hotly contested drug-trafficking corridors, make them an easy, and profitable, target for kidnapping and extortion.
The situation has dete- riorated since the start of Mexico’s Southern Border Plan in late 2014. Pressured by the United States to stem the tide of migrants fleeing the violenceplagued Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, immigration officials pinched off well-trodden routes, pushing vulnerable people further into the shadows.
Mexico now apprehends more Central Americans than the United States — 190,000 in Mexico compared to 117,000 in the U.S. from October 2015 to September 2016 — which critics say has largely exported the refugee crisis to its neighbor. In spite of the crackdown, the exodus of desperate people casting their lot with smugglers continues unabated. Many migrant communities fear conditions will worsen under President-elect Donald Trump.
In this increasingly hostile environment, the mothers’ caravan, which this year included a few fathers, sisters and brothers, scoured prisons and brothels and applied pressure to law enforcement and politicians in an effort to call attention to their missing family members.
Disturbing phenomenon
Desperate Central American mothers began venturing into Mexico years ago to look for their missing sons and daughters. Eventually, families of the disappeared organized in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
A dozen years ago, activist Marta Sánchez Soler of Mexico co-founded the Mesoamerica Migrant Movement, which organizes the annual caravan. This year’s edition adopted the maxim, “We look for life on roads of death.”
In the early days, the grass-roots social movement toiled in relative obscurity and at no small risk to its members. Then in 2010, a bedraggled Ecuadoran immigrant stumbled into a military checkpoint in the northern Mexican border state of Tamaulipas.
Through parched lips, the man spoke of horrors on a remote ranch near the town of San Fernando. There, marines found the decomposing remains of 72 Central and South American immigrants who were executed for refusing to join the Zetas, a savage drug cartel operating with near total impunity in the region.
Through this chance encounter, a nation awoke to a disturbing phenomenon. The following year, 193 more migrants were unearthed in dozens of mass graves across Tamaulipas, and still more were discovered in Nuevo León in 2012.
In a nation facing its own epidemic of disappearances, Mexico’s National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons has registered just a couple of hundred cases of disappeared migrants. Meanwhile, the National Human Rights Commission reports migrant kidnapping has soared into the tens of thousands.
“The majority of disappeared cases over the last 10 years were completely forced,” said Rubén Figueroa, who grew up in Tabasco, an activist with the movement and investigator of disappeared migrants. “Many of them are probably dead.” Raising awareness
This stark reality hasn’t kept Figueroa from searching.
Ahead of each caravan, organizers pore over official documents, photos and letters, and they meticulously interview family members, anything that might give rise to a lead. Over the past several years, Figueroa, a former migrant, has been at this chaotic epicenter.
At age 16, Figueroa packed his birth certificate and joined migrants headed north. He made it across the border into Texas on his third attempt, eventually settling in North Carolina.
Over the next six years, he worked in factory and construction jobs. The experience awakened in Figueroa a profound sense of injustice, pulling him inexorably back to his roots and the migrant trail.
One day while back home in the tropics of Tabasco in southern Mexico, Figueroa’s eyes welled with tears as he gazed upon dozens of migrants riding atop a northbound train. He made up his mind then to do something.
Figueroa now is 34 and thickset with a swirl of dark hair. He made a name for himself tracking smugglers by their distinctive tattoos and scars, or colorful nicknames. They learned how smugglers reeled in unsuspecting migrants, and they believed they were making a difference.
But everything comes at a price.
Word had come down the Zetas were looking to kill Figueroa and his mother. Figueroa skipped town for a few days until things calmed down. In his view, in spite of the sacrifices he and other activists have made, migrants are more exposed than ever.
“There is a policy of repression, of militarization, that’s why people die, not just because the border is dangerous,” Figueroa said. “The authorities can say that traffickers do these things, but the policies of migration force immigrants into their hands.”
Mexico’s attorney general’s office has established two units to investigate crimes against migrants and cases of the disappeared, known simply as the Unit and the Mechanism.
Leonor de Jesús Figueroa Jácome heads up the unit. She touted successfully breaking up rings of kidnappers, but acknowledged that significant challenges remain. Her office has registered barely 120 complaints.
“Many legal departments operate in isolation, and they don’t share information, or they don’t upload it to the attorney general’s office,” Figueroa Jácome said. Complaints of abuse
Advocates say greater visibility means little in the face of tough immigration enforcement. It wasn’t long after the Southern Border Plan took effect that immigration officials began sweeping up migrants by the thousands.
The U.S. State Department funneled $70 million of its Mérida Initiative assistance during the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years, earmarked for inspection equipment and canine teams, with tens of millions in additional funding requested for continued operations on Mexico’s southern border.
In October 2014, a new shelter opened in Chahuites, Oaxaca: the Centro de Ayuda Humanitaria a Migrantes.
Between 2014 and 2015, the shelter workers filed 900 cases of abuse with state authorities. In 2016, the number of formal complaints has grown to more than 1,000.
Despite the staggering number of complaints, Jéssica Cárdenas Canuto, the coordinator of the Chauites shelter, says it should come as no surprise that little has come of their efforts. Among the more frequent complaints by migrants is that of bribes paid to Mexican officials. Earlier this year, around two dozen police officers in a neighboring community were arrested in October for kidnapping migrants.
“Despite the high number of complaints since the Southern Border Plan started, not one person has been detained,” Cárdenas said. “It’s very suspicious that in all of this time, two years, the public prosecutor’s office hasn’t found anyone.” ‘Bridges of Hope’
Not everyone is forcibly disappeared. Some choose to disappear out of shame or circumstance, but some long to reconnect.
Seven years had passed since Juana del Carmen Amaya’s husband forced her to sever communication with her mother in El Salvador. But when the caravan was in Chahuites, Oaxaca, last year, where Amaya, 29, was living, she was able to get a local priest to reach out to the caravan leaders for her while her husband was away.
Figueroa tracked down Amaya’s mother, and a reunion was arranged for this year. Near the end of the caravan, the mother and daughter met in a tearful embrace. Reyna Amaya, 45, met the two grandsons she’d never known, and her contrite son-in-law.
The movement calls these reunions “Bridges of Hope,” and there have been 269 over the years. They are meant to give the others hope. Realistically, however, most of the families on the caravan face the grim reality that they will never know what has become of their disappeared.
One afternoon, Nohemy Alvares found herself staring out over the border. Her son, Darwin, had warned her of the ugly things that visited migrants in the desert, yet seeing a group of migrants huddle under a tree for shade, preparing to cross the international line, Alvares’ eyes welled up with tears.
“I imagined my sons,” Alvares said. “I imagined them on the run through the hills, hiding.” ‘Going home sad’
The caravan tested the emotional stamina of its members. It was a roller coaster of laughter and camaraderie, sorrow and introspection. Morales scribbled poetry on a folded sheet of paper. She found beauty and pain in an old woman resting her tired feet on the railroad tracks. And in the throngs of strange faces, she searched for Jaqueline.
There was José Ricardo Ramos, 76, known to all as grandpa, who danced to the beat of cumbia to everyone’s delight. And María Loria Cabrera, 64, who sang an uneven, yet apropos rendition of “Cansada del Camino,” or Tired of the Road.
María Lemus kept a journal, musing on Mexico’s variegated countryside. Its splendor masquerading the turbulent undercurrent of migration. Angela Lacayo Alfaro celebrated her 46th birthday on the bus. As the honeyed sound of Las Mañanitas floated through the bus, the sentimental Honduran mother held a photo of her son, Jarvin, who vanished in Piedras Negras earlier this year, and cried.
“We’re almost at the end, and I don’t have a single lead on my son,” she lamented. “But I feel that I’ve left behind a seed. Someone has to have seen his photo; soon that seed will bear fruit.”
The caravan had brought Alvares closer to her son, and yet somehow he felt further away. The prospect of returning home to an empty house was almost more than she could bear.
“I woke up last night thinking of him,” she said, standing near the banks of the Suchiate River, which demarcates the international line with Guatemala. “I’m going home sad.”