Posted on 12/06/2010 3:18:39 PM PST by moonshinner_09
TECUN UMAN, Guatemala — Juan Bautista Castañeda stepped aboard a makeshift raft to cross the shallow Suchiate River into Mexico from Guatemala, the beginning of a more than 1,100-mile trek he hopes will end on the South Texas border.
And not in abduction, torture or death.
On two earlier tries, he has been attacked by thugs and arrested by Mexican immigration agents, Castañeda said. But nothing good awaits the field hand back in his El Salvador village, so he has girded himself for another, perhaps final, attempt.
Pushed first by war and then by want, Central Americans for three decades have poured through Mexico by the millions on their way to hopeful, if illegal, futures in the U.S. Making their way north by rail and road, many have been robbed and raped, kidnapped and extorted, maimed and murdered.
"You see it every day — how difficult it is, how dangerous," Castañeda said. "But I'm going again. With the Lord's help, I'm going to make it."
Like other crimes in Mexico, the abuses against migrants worsened as authorities and the public downplayed them too often, ignored them too long. With stricter immigration enforcement in both countries, slipping across Mexico and into the United States unaided became tougher.
So traffickers' fees skyrocketed, as did demand for their services. More organized, armed and vicious crime syndicates - like the Zetas operating on the lower Texas border - pushed aside smaller smuggling groups.
Today the migrants, like many Mexicans, suffer the grinding grip of the gangs.
"After drugs, the activity that gives them the most money is human trafficking," said Fernando Beltran del Rio, Mexico's immigration director.
More than 20,000 migrants are kidnapped for ransom each year in Mexico, mostly by crime gangs, Amnesty International, the human rights group, estimated last month.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
oh boohoo... go home.
Boo F***ing Hoo!
Stay in your own country!
The Houston Chronicle....mouthpiece for the Dream Act!
Ya know, Johnny, with your job skills, you could start your own vegetable farm down in Guatemala and you wouldn’t have to leave your family or risk the trip to Texas.
The Republicans sat on thier hands while the Democrats gave Calderon a standing ovation. Sometimes the Republicans are not stupid.
Napolitano’s government employees can’t find illegal aliens in America. The “media” can find them before they even leave home in Guatamala. That’s some wild ****!
Ping!
My only question is why no American government has ever focused attention on what these South American countries and Mexico do to their citizens?
Bush 41 and 43. Clinton, Carter and the idiot in the Oval Office now never utter a mumblin word, but passively pretend that the illegal immigration problem is ours alone.
Something stinks and the American people need to know what is going on.
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