Children of the Storm

He took buses for pennies and hitched rides through El Salvador and Guatemala, and now counts the cities he passed on his fingers, rattling off their names in his rapid-fire Spanish: Salvador, Escuintla, Mazatenango, Quezaltenango. At Tecun Uman, a Guatemalan border town facing Tapachula on the Mexican side, the Suchiate river, calm and shallow, forms a natural border between the two countries, providing the only easy crossing point in an otherwise thickly wooded region.

Every two days an old freight train arrives in Tapachula, loaded with everything from corn and beans to gas. After sundown, it heads north again, empty except for the human cargo clinging to its sides. Immigrants with little or no money, like Jose and Walter, wait in the shadows for the train to pick up speed, then run fast and jump, reaching for one of the ladders that go up the side, swinging their legs out of the way of the boxcar's wheels.

"I was a little afraid of the trains at first, but then I got used to them," recalls Jose. "If you fall, you fall, and maybe you die, but if you don't, then you get a little closer to where you want to go.

"In Tapachula it was nice because there were so many people there; there were hundreds just from Honduras. The men there told me not to get on the train when it is going fast, but the immigration in Mexico will watch the train, and catch anyone who tries to get on. If you get on when it is going fast, they don't want to go after you, and they leave you alone. The men in Tapachula told me they had seen a man fall and lose his legs under the wheels of the train. I was afraid, but when I heard the train coming--Toot! Toot!" he says, pulling an invisible whistle, "I forgot my fright and the man who lost his legs, and I just ran and jumped and held on."

Sometimes trains will run for a whole day--12, 15 hours--without stopping. Those holding on can't eat, drink, or rest. Some of the boys say their hands feel numb after clenching the rattling boxcars for so long. That's when it gets really dangerous, says Elmer Delgado, a somber, curly-haired 14-year-old Salvadoran who also doesn't know where his parents are, doesn't even know whether they are alive. Elmer left El Salvador after being taken in by relatives who beat him, he says, and kept most of the money he made working.

"When I arrived in Tapachula, I met these men who were going to get on the train that same night. Later on, I saw them again, and they were dead. They had fallen because when the train goes very fast, the air currents suck you down, toward the wheels, and there you're killed. In the tunnels also, you can be crushed if you are not careful.

"Sometimes you can see the dead," he says, then stops himself. He is visibly uncomfortable talking about his journey, as if haunted by it.

Though Elmer made it out of Tapachula on his first try, many immigrants don't. Just like those hiding along the trails, waiting for the train, the Instituto Nacional de Migracion--the Mexican immigration service--knows the attraction of the border town. Most of the 150 agents who patrol the 650-mile border with Guatemala and Belize are concentrated in Tapachula. They were the first to be overwhelmed by the growing numbers of Central Americans, especially Hondurans, who were leaving their country in the wake of the storm.

Walter and Jose were among those captured in Tapachula and then deported to Tecun Uman, just over the river. After three days of being detained in a room with other immigrants--adults, men, women and children--eating only "really bad food," says Jose, he was released. "Then all I had to do was swim across the river again, and I was gone!"

So he left Tapachula for the second time, falling off the train once when his hands slipped, and he wasn't strong enough to pull himself back up. Mostly he traveled alone, but sometimes he joined groups of children--as many as seven--for protection. Even so, he says, "they came after us."

"They" to Jose, means any number of the adults, usually men, usually in uniform, whom he has learned to fear: Honduran police, vigilantes, Mexican immigration officers, the Mexican police--"the meanest in the whole world," he says, and the border patrol. All his stories about running from these men blend together in his mind and expose him as the scared, small boy he pretends not to be. Though he is safe now in the United States, he is still afraid "they" will take him away.