That’s more than her homeland looks. Padilla is one of thousands who fled the devastation of Hurricane Mitch, which killed at least 9,000 people in Central America last October. When President Clinton tours Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala this week, he will promise continued U.S. support for rebuilding; his administration has already announced $1 billion in aid. Washington is motivated, in part, by concern that more refugees will attempt Padilla’s journey. From November to the end of January, U.S. agents along the Texas border, where most of the migrants cross, caught 6,555 people described as “other than Mexicans,” nearly all from Central America; that’s 86 percent more than a year ago. Agents won’t even guess how many got through undetected.
The United States isn’t fighting the battle alone. Between Nov. 1 and Jan. 31, Mexico caught and expelled 31,995 migrants at its five busiest immigration stations, a 70 percent increase over last year. Guatemala has been rounding up refugees, too–in one case, with direct U.S. assistance. On Dec. 12, authorities there nabbed 600 illegals and sent them back to the hurricane zone in buses rented by Washington. Mexico and Guatemala say they are acting in their own interests. But the results are clear: the U.S. border, in effect, has been pushed south.
Back in Honduras, it’s easy to see why people want to leave. Padilla and her daughter Yesenia, now 2, lived in a one-room shanty on a bank of the Mezapita River. When the rains started, they fled to higher ground. After the flood receded, Padilla found no trace of her house. Fields where thousands of people used to work were graveyards for dead banana trees.
Padilla’s father went north three years ago, illegally, and ended up in North Carolina. He sends home at least $100 every month. But since the hurricane, that hasn’t been enough to take care of his seven children or the cousins who congregate on the crumbling concrete porch of the family’s variety store. So on Nov. 25, Padilla set out with the equivalent of about $50 her family had borrowed from friends at their Pentecostal church. The next day she crossed into Guatemala–only to be detained by police and ordered to return to Honduras. Trying again, she eventually made it into Mexico via buses and hitching rides, but twice she was arrested and sent back to Guatemala. “I didn’t expect this,” she says. “I thought I could just make my way across Mexico.”
Broke and discouraged, Padilla decided to go home and spend Christmas with her family. She left again in early January, this time with slightly more money and three companions: her uncle, his wife and their 16-year-old daughter. She lived on about $2 a day, begging for cookies and sodas from shops along the highways. The four reached the Texas border on Jan. 31, and just before dusk, climbed a grassy bank onto Texas soil. They didn’t try to run when the Border Patrol car arrived. They remembered the rumors they had heard back home about help for immigrants who made it to the United States. So they climbed into the car.
Now Padilla is a prisoner at a detention center in El Paso, and deportation proceedings against her have begun. “I hope the judge will have pity on me so I can stay in the country,” she says. And if she is deported? “I will probably try again.” So will thousands more victims of Hurricane Mitch. The governments of Guatemala, Mexico and the United States will be waiting for them.
