Guatemalans warned of border crossing risk
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Guatemalans warned of border crossing risk
Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 10, 2005 12:00 AM
Alarmed by the increasing number of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala dying in the Arizona desert, the Guatemalan government is warning its countrymen to stay home rather than risk their lives trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico.
Last week, several high-level officials from Guatemala along with a Guatemalan television crew toured both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border near Nogales to document the dangers involved with crossing illegally into the United States. U.S. Border Patrol officials have counted a record 199 deaths in Arizona since Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year.
"It's not as easy as it seems," said Milton Alvarez, acting Consul General of Guatemala in Los Angeles. He visited the Arizona border along with Guatemala's Secretary of Foreign Relations Jorge Briz and Deputy Secretary of Foreign Relations Juan Jose Cabrera.
"The smugglers are telling the migrants at the border they'll get them to Phoenix in three hours and the three hours can turn into three days or longer walking through the desert," Alvarez said.
Officially, the Guatemalan government has counted 10 migrant deaths in Arizona since May. But the government believes the actual number is "much higher" because many Guatemalans trying to cross illegally into the United States use fake Mexican documents to avoid being deported all the way back to Guatemala, Alvarez said.
After being caught by Border Patrol agents, undocumented immigrants from Mexico typically are returned across the border, and many try crossing again until they are successful.
In the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, apprehensions of Central Americans are up 84 percent from a year ago, to 8,590.
At the same time, apprehensions of Mexican border crossers are down 12 percent, to 377,682.
Tighter enforcement in the Tucson sector has pushed much of the traffic west. In the Yuma sector, apprehensions of Central Americans increased 808 percent from a year ago, to 1,090.
Apprehensions of Mexican border crossers increased 47 percent, to 117,926, during the same period.
Before setting out, most undocumented migrants from Guatemala are unaware of the risks of trying to enter the United States illegally, said Eliseo Dardon, president of Maya Tikal Organization, a Guatemalan community group based in Phoenix.
Besides temperatures that can exceed 110 degrees in the summer, migrants risk being robbed, raped, abandoned or killed by smugglers, who charge $5,000 or more for the trip from Guatemala to the U.S.
"What they see is (migrants) coming back after four or five years with money in their pockets," said Dardon, who was interviewed for the documentary to be aired as a weeklong special this month on Telediario, Canal 3, a major television network in Guatemala. "But they don't see the other side of the coin. This is not an American Dream anymore. It's become a nightmare."
Dardon and other Guatemalan community leaders estimate the Guatemalan population in the Valley has grown to between 35,000 and 40,000 people, fueled in large part by illegal immigration.
Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C-based organization that advocates for tighter restrictions on immigration, praised Guatemala's efforts to discourage people from trying to sneak into the United States, though he said it won't stop people from trying.
The United States needs to do a better job enforcing U.S. immigration laws against employers that hire undocumented immigrants, he said. That would send the message "that it's futile, that even if you do make it you aren't going to realize your goal of access to jobs," he said.
