Fair Trade or Slave Trade Coffee - A Matter of Life or Death

Families mourn migrant relatives

Associated Press Monday, May 28, 2001 Jo Tuckman

Mexicans found in Arizona fleeing poor coffee crop prices

San Pedro Altepepan, Mexico - Octoavia Fabian sobbed with helplessness and anger as the image of her husband dying in the Arizona desert along with 13 other Mexican migrants flew around in her head.

"I didn't want him to go," the 23-year old said over and over of her 29-year old husband, Enrique Landero.

The group was trying to enter the United States illegally but was abandoned by their smugglers near the border and spent nearly a week wandering in the scorching desert.  Twelve of the 26 survived after one of them waved sown a Border Patrol agent on Wednesday and begged him for water.

All but a few of the 26 came from Veracruz state on Mexico's Gulf Coast, where plummeting coffee prices have forced farmers from their land and fueled a growing traffic of illegal immigrants north, officials said.

Now, their relatives in Veracruz's lush, coffee-growing mountain villages are left behind to mourn - and wonder how they will survive.

The bodies have only been identified based on the testimony of survivors.  On Sunday, municipal authorities said they could not confirm a list of victims.  "Hope is the last thing that dies," municipal secretary Iginio Gonzalez, said.

Migration to the United States from Veracruz is a relatively new phenomenon.  Residents said it has intensified dramatically since coffee prices dropped three years ago.

With a few alternative jobs in this rural region, smugglers - known as coyotes - have moved in, promising to deliver people across the border safely for #2,000.

"There's no work here.  And with his coffee not even worth the cost of picking it, Enrique decided to go to the other side said Fabian's brother-in law, Marco Espiritu, in San Pedro Altepepan.

Typical of a first-time migrant, Landero was forced to turn to local moneylenders to raise the fee demanded by the coyotes.  Many of the debts were guaranteed with the titles from the migrants' land, leaving relatives back home wondering if they will lose their homes.

Unlike Landero, 54-year-old Raymundo Barreda had already worked picking vegetables in Mississippi and at a canning factory in Ohio before he set out this year from El Equimite village near San Pedro. Both villages are roughly 1,000 miles southeast of the U.S. Arizona border.

Barreda's first two trips helped him buy a pickup, install a telephone in his parents' house next door and add extra bedrooms to the family's concrete home.

This year he agreed to take his teen-age son, also named Raymundo.

The elder Raymundo called his daughter, Minerva Barreda, from the border town of Sonorita on May 19, four days after the group left the village and the same day they set off on the fatal desert crossing.

"He called to say that they had arrived at the border safely."