Free Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario Page A

outside.
    Enrique’s cheeks and lips are swelling badly.
He’s going to die,
Carrasco thinks. Carrasco drags a wooden pew out of the church, pulls it into the shade of a tamarind tree, and helps Enrique onto it.
    The mayor’s mother puts a pot of water on to boil and sprinkles in salt and herbs to clean his wounds. She brings Enrique a bowl of hot broth, filled with bits of meat and potatoes. He spoons the brown liquid into his mouth, careful not to touch his broken teeth. He cannot chew.
    Townspeople come to see. They stand in a circle. “Is he alive?” asks Gloria Luis, a stout woman with long black hair. “Why don’t you go home? Wouldn’t that be better?” Other women press him to return to Honduras.
    â€œI’m going to find my mom,” Enrique says, quietly.
    He is seventeen. It is March 24, 2000. Eleven years before, he tells the townspeople, his mother left home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to work in the United States. She did not come back, and now he is riding freight trains up through Mexico to find her.
    Gloria Luis looks at Enrique and thinks about her own children.
    She earns little; most people in Las Anonas make 30 pesos a day, roughly $3, working the fields. She digs into a pocket and presses 10 pesos into Enrique’s hand.
    Several other women open his hand, adding 5 or 10 pesos each.
    Mayor Carrasco gives Enrique a shirt and shoes. He has cared for injured migrants before. Some have died. Giving Enrique clothing will be futile, Carrasco thinks, if he can’t find someone with a car who can get the boy to medical help.
    Adan Díaz Ruiz, mayor of San Pedro Tapanatepec, the county seat, happens by in his pickup.
    Carrasco begs a favor: Take this kid to a doctor.
    Díaz balks. He is miffed. “This is what they get for doing this journey,” he says. Enrique cannot pay for any treatment. The migrants most badly mangled by the train run up bills of $1,000 to $1,500 each when they end up at a public hospital one and a half hours away. Why, Díaz wonders, do these Central American governments send us all their problems?
    Looking at the small, soft-spoken boy lying on the bench, he reminds himself that a live migrant is better than a dead one. In eighteen months, Díaz has had to bury eight of them, nearly all mutilated by the trains. Already today, he has been told to expect the body of yet another, in his late thirties.
    Sending this boy to a local doctor would cost the county $60. Burying him in a common grave would cost three times as much. First Díaz would have to pay someone to dig the grave, then someone to handle the paperwork, then someone to stand guard while Enrique’s unclaimed body is displayed on the steamy patio of the San Pedro Tapanatepec cemetery for seventy-two hours, as required by law.
    All the while, people visiting the graves of their loved ones would complain about the smell of another rotting migrant.
    â€œWe will help you,” he tells Enrique finally.
    He turns him over to his driver, Ricardo Díaz Aguilar. Inside the mayor’s pickup, Enrique sobs, but this time with relief. He says to the driver, “I thought I was going to die.”
    An officer of the judicial police approaches in a white pickup. Enrique cranks down his window. Instantly, he recoils. He recognizes both the officer with buzz-cut hair and the truck.
    The officer, too, seems startled. Both stare silently at each other.
    For a moment, the officer and the mayor’s driver discuss the new dead migrant. Quickly, the policeman pulls away.
    â€œThat guy robbed me yesterday,” Enrique says.
    The policeman and a partner had seen Enrique and four other migrants drying off after bathing in a river five miles to the south. “Get over here,” the buzz-cut officer barked, waving a pistol. One of the migrants bolted. Enrique obeyed, afraid of what might happen if he tried to run. The officers put the migrants in the back of their truck. They