All-time high migrant death rate along US-Mexico border: prevention in immigration reform?

[Judi Lynn]

1. Walking the Line of Death

Walking the Line of Death
By Virgil Grandfield

Americans call it the Rio Grande — the Big River. Mexicans call it el Rio Bravo, the Angry River. To the millions who secretly defy its deadly currents and quicksand — refugees and dreamers from as far away as Brazil, Russia or China — it is "la Línea de la Muerte" — the Line of Death.

Antonio Zenon Urgia rests on a sheetless mattress and wonders aloud how he should cross the river when his time at this crowded migrant hostel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, runs out. He has three days.

The 39-year-old Honduran construction worker cannot swim and has no money for even the cheapest smugglers under the bridge, where submerged, jagged bars of crumbled old bridge footings devour lives like iron crocodiles.

A Mexican Red Cross paramedic has just given him more bad news: crossing the polluted river will further infect the wound on his swollen left leg and perhaps leave Antonio stranded to die in the immense southern Texas mesquite and cactus thickets across the river.

Antonio burrows under his blanket. "You suffer so much on the journey," he says. "It is hard to recall any of it."

Antonio's three travelling companions gather around his bed and gently help him tell the story of what a person — someone like themselves and millions of other undocumented migrants crossing rivers or fences, deserts, continents or oceans — will endure for a simple dream.

More:
http://www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2004_2/4-9.html