the following post is from Jim Conrad's website, http://www.backyardnature.net/n/07/070331.htm
A WETBACK'S SIMPLE QUESTION
At daybreak on Wednesday morning I was wandering streets around the bus station in Matamoros, waiting for my departure, when a man about 50 years old approached me.
"You speak Spanish?" he asked. "You live here? You crossing to The Other Side... ?" (Aquel lado.)
He was finding it hard to ask me what he really wanted to know. Finally, after coughing, rubbing his face, looking around, coughing again, he put his hands in the air and said:
"I have to cross to find work on the Other Side, and I don't how it's done. Can you tell me anything at all?"
He was from the southern Mexican state of Michoacán, an area so overpopulated and politically out of control (some refer to it as a narco-state) that the whole region has been on the verge of insurrection for years. You can read an article called "Indigenous Land Struggles in Michoacán, Mexico" at http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/0407/040714.htm.
I told him that it was easy to cross the river and go through holes in the fence, but then a few miles inside the US there's another line of customs control, and that's harder. You can try to go around stations and escape the constantly roving Border Patrol by going deep into the desert, but you can die there. In fact, unless you have friends helping on The Other Side, or you're smuggled professionally by "coyotes" you can trust, or someone has paid off a US border official (I'm surprised how many people have told me lately that that's how they get in), getting to where the jobs are is very dangerous, much harder than it used to be."
His face indicated that he'd heard the same from others, and had hoped I'd say something different.
Inside the bus station at Matamoros, where I overheard scraps of several conversations of people trying to get to The Other Side, the walls are hung with large posters aiming to dissuade people from crossing illegally. You can see the most convincing, showing a tight little band of folks about to wander into a hostile-looking, seemingly endless desert, each person carrying only a small bag and a plastic jug of water, at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/07/070331po.jpg.
In big letters, at the top the poster asks "How far can you get on a jug of water?" The words below say "Taking three days to cross through the desert can bring you to a fatal destination." You don't really need to know what the words are saying in order to understand what's going on. The people's body language and the desert say it all.
Other posters show in gory detail people who have been abandoned by their "coyotes" and who died of exposure, women raped by their "coyotes," and drowned bodies.
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