Thread: NC: Landscaping company pays coyotes for IA's

Faced with death in desert, father, son split up
The busiest corridor in recent years for illegal immigration along the Mexican border is also a deadly one.
RELATED: Articles, videos and more from this special series
Listen to this article or download audio file.Click-2-Listen

By J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald

Sunday, January 27, 2008

ARANA, Ariz. — Faustino Francisco Galvan squinted up at the face of his son, now a dark blur against the bright desert sky.

"I want to stay with you," he heard the boy say, haltingly. Eloy, 13, was weighing life and death.
Extras
Latest headlines

* City employees help one of their own
* Checkpoint nets impaired drivers, drugs
* Coroner: Crash passenger tests positive for cocaine
* Juvenile rape suspect released with electronic monitoring device
* Friends gather to help friend with head-shaving party

RSS feedsGet latest headlines via RSS feeds

Faustino Francisco, 37, was diabetic, and his body was shutting down. He had hiked four days through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona with 15 Mexicans and Guatemalans. They hadn't slept more than an hour since leaving Mexico. Their water bottles had run dry 30 hours ago. The piece of barrel cactus pulp he had chewed on for moisture only made him vomit.

Now on this late morning of May 19, 2006, the blazing sun promised another 100-degree day. Francisco could go no farther. His blood sugar was soaring. He was losing his sight. For his own life, he was fast losing hope.

But the boys could not die. Not Eloy, his oldest son, the ambitious one who had traded his dream of engineering school for the quicker payoff of manual labor in North Carolina.

Not Rosario, his 16-year-old nephew, the factory worker who had persuaded Eloy to come along on this misbegotten trip to the United States.

Only a couple of hours more, said the coyote, the smuggler of illegal immigrants. Just behind those hills lies Tucson, he said. A man will be there with water, roasted chicken and beer.

Francisco had heard enough of the coyote's lies the last few days. The group was lost. To remain here was certain death.

"Go on," Faustino said to the shadow that was his son. "Go save your life."

Faustino's sister, Clara, also was unable to go farther because of her heart condition. Her friend Elisa, exhausted, also stayed behind. The three watched as the boys and the rest of the group staggered off into a purgatory of brush, rocks and thorns.

Faustino Francisco lay back, waiting to die, another grim statistic in the unfolding tragedy of the U.S.-Mexican border.

A decade ago, few immigrants dared to cross this harsh stretch of desert south of Tucson and Phoenix. Today, because of increased enforcement elsewhere along the border, it's the busiest corridor for illegal immigration. It's also the deadliest.

The Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson last year received 205 bodies of unidentified migrants. The number is 10 times the annual rate of the 1990s.

"They used to cross in Texas or California or New Mexico, in safer places," said Dr. Bruce Anderson, the office's forensic anthropologist, who oversees the autopsies. "The Sonoran Desert is not a safe place to cross any time of year. In the summertime, it's lethal."

Anderson's staff of 10 investigates each death, and works with the Mexican Consulate to find relatives back home.

The hardest cases go to Dr. Lori Baker in Waco, Texas, for mitochondrial DNA testing. With funding from the Mexican government, she analyzes bone samples from 200 border-crossers a year and blood samples from 50 families in Mexico. The Mexican government uses a database to match the families with the bodies. Since 2005, more than 50 of Baker's samples have been matched.

Faustino had made the trip before. In 1999, he crossed illegally near Tijuana en route to Oregon, where he worked harvesting cherries, strawberries and cucumbers.

Now Eloy wanted to go. He hoped to work at a landscaping company for a couple of years, save his money and come back to Tehuacan, his hometown in the south-central Mexican state of Puebla.

Elroy told his father that he was going, with or without permission.

"OK, I'm going to accompany you and see what kind of person is taking you," Faustino said. He made the call to Maximino, his brother-in-law. Maximino arranged the trip through a coyote he knew. Through Maximino's boss at a North Carolina landscaping company, they arranged to pay the coyote $1,700 apiece for smuggling them into the United States.

Faustino, Eloy, Rosario, Faustino's sister and his sister's friend and two other Tehuacan men traveled by bus to Altar, Sonora, a northern Mexican town known as a staging area for border crossings. Nicolas, 35, the Mexican coyote they had hired to take them into the desert, met them there. On May 16, the group traveled to the border town of Sasabe. That evening they crossed into the Altar Valley of Arizona. They took the roughest terrain to avoid Border Patrol agents.

Each man and woman carried 2.6 gallons of water, a small container of rehydrating serum, a Coca-Cola, cans of food and a change of clothes.

Every day the coyote would tell them that they were only a few hours from their destination, the small town of Marana. A map would have shown them Marana was 70 miles north of the Mexican border.

The first two days, Eloy, Rosario and a young Guatemalan chatted and joked as they walked. By the third day, thirst choked back any laughter. Their water containers had run dry.

The coyote wanted to keep moving, but some of the travelers stopped to open a barrel cactus. The cactus was covered with inch-long thorns, and it took great effort to break it open with sticks and cow bones. Faustino and others chewed on the bitter pulp, seeking its moisture. But he vomited. Later he would develop diarrhea — a dangerous loss of water for a dehydrated man.

In his delirium, Faustino envisioned himself back in Tehuacan. He heard the voices of his mother, his children and his wife, Constanza. He felt overwhelming grief and dread after the boys left, and he pleaded for forgiveness for taking the boys on a journey into hell.

"Forgive me, my wife," he cried. "I have failed you."

At that moment, three agents with the Border Patrol's Border Search Trauma and Rescue team were flying overhead in a helicopter, looking for stranded border-crossers. At 9:40 p.m., passing over the edge of the Tohono O'Odham reservation a few miles north of the tiny village of San Pedro, they spotted Faustino on the desert floor.

Faustino had heard stories of immigrants being shot and he was fearful. Still, he sat up and began waving an empty water jug to attract attention.

The helicopter team administered intravenous fluids. Faustino and Elisa were taken to St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson and Clara to Border Patrol headquarters to document her and send her home.

But Faustino wouldn't tell authorities that he had a son and a nephew who went on. It was the rule of the border: Don't tattle. Tell them you were crossing the desert alone.

On Monday, he called William, his brother-in-law's boss in North Carolina. He asked about the boys. No word yet, William said.

That same day, the Border Patrol loaded Faustino on a bus with other captured illegal immigrants and sent him tback to Mexico, dejected and exhausted. He had failed.

But he hoped that in a few days he would hear the boys' excited voices, telling him of their new home in the United States.

legalatina - Sorry to be the proverbial 'thorn in your side', but... we need the source link if we are to keep it posted...

Faustino Francisco Galvan squinted up at the face of his son, now a dark blur against the bright desert sky.

This article starts off sounding like a cheap romance novel.

W

It reminds me of the Book All the Pretty Horses. The Writer would be much more successful as a fiction writer than a news writer.


Here is the link to the article

www.wacotrib.com

Maybe that's because it is fiction, perhaps...?

It is obviously a two parter with more coming later on how the boys did in North Carolina.

Many of the comments posted under the article are supporting the illegals. Maybe we need to enlighten some folks...

Always take EXTRA water.

OK this is obviously a part of the campaign to change Americans citizens minds about IA's.If you go read the comments I think they are plants because toooo many are IA friendly and anti citizen.

I left a comment and I hope others here will do so too. We need to fight this propoganda.