Free Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario Page B

demanded 100 pesos to let them go. Enrique was relieved that one of the fellow migrants had the money and handed it over. “You won’t tell anyone,” the officer warned.
    The mayor’s driver is not surprised. The judicial police, he says, routinely stop trains to rob and beat migrants. The
judiciales—
the Agencia Federal de Investigación—deny it.
    Enrique has already had other run-ins with corrupt Mexican cops. Once, he was just fifteen miles inside Mexico, in Tapachula, when two municipal police officers grabbed him and put him in the back of their pickup.
    â€œWhere are you from?” they demanded. “How much do you have on you? Give it to us and we will let you go.” They stole everything he had, $4.
    Four of five migrants who arrive at the Albergue Belén shelter in Tapachula have already been robbed, beaten, or extorted by police, says the shelter priest, Flor María Rigoni. At the Tapachula train station, fights break out between municipal and state police officers over who gets to rob a group of migrants. Migrants describe being locked up by police officers until a relative in the United States can wire the kidnapper’s fee and buy their freedom.
    For immigration agents, squeezing cash from migrants is central to day-to-day operations, helping underpaid agents buy big houses and nice cars. At highway checkpoints, agents charge smugglers $50 to $200 per migrant to pass through. The checkpoint boss typically gets half the take; his workers split the rest. Officials who try to stop abuses receive repeated death threats. One government worker in the Mexican state of Tabasco, who in 1999 denounced corruption by certain judicial police agents, was dead a few days later in a mysterious car accident. “If you speak out too much against police corruption, you wake up with a machete in your back,” says Father Rigoni.
    In San Pedro Tapanatepec, the driver seeking a doctor for Enrique finds the last clinic still open that night.
    PERSEVERANCE
    When Enrique’s mother left, he was a child. Six months ago, the first time he set out to find her, he was still a callow kid. Now he is a veteran of a perilous pilgrimage by children, many of whom come looking for their mothers and travel any way they can. The thousands who ride freight trains must hop between seven and thirty trains to get through Mexico. The luckiest make it in a month. Others, who stop to work along the way, take a year or longer.
    Some go up to five days without eating. Their prize possessions are scraps of paper, wrapped in plastic, often tucked into a shoe. On the scraps are telephone numbers: their only way to contact their mothers. Some do not have even that.
    None of the youngsters has proper papers. Many are caught by the Mexican police or by
la migra,
the Mexican immigration authorities, who take them south to Guatemala. Most try again.
    Like many others, Enrique has made several attempts.
    The first: He set out from Honduras with a friend, José del Carmen Bustamante. They remember traveling thirty-one days and about a thousand miles through Guatemala into the state of Veracruz in central Mexico, where
la migra
captured them on top of a train and sent them back to Guatemala on what migrants call
El Bus de Lágrimas,
the Bus of Tears. These buses make as many as eight runs a day, deporting more than 100,000 unhappy passengers every year.
    The second: Enrique journeyed by himself. Five days and 150 miles into Mexico, he committed the mistake of falling asleep on top of a train with his shoes off. Police stopped the train near the town of Tonalá to hunt for migrants, and Enrique had to jump off. Barefoot, he could not run far. He hid overnight in some grass, then was captured and put on the bus back to Guatemala.
    The third: After two days, police surprised him while he was asleep in an empty house near Chahuites, 190 miles into Mexico. They robbed him, he says, and then turned him over to
la