AWFUL LOT OF WORK JUST TO FREELOAD:

By a Back Door to the U.S.: A Migrant's Grim Sea Voyage (GINGER THOMPSON and SANDRA OCHOA, 6/13/04, NY Times)

A red light, barely visible on the horizon, made the captain of the William turn mean as the devil.

It was the fourth day of an illegal sea voyage. Héctor Segura was at the helm of a creaky old fishing boat overloaded with 205 passengers: all migrants from Ecuador, all hoping to reach the United States. The distant flicker, Captain Segura thought, was the law on their tail.

He rushed his human contraband into the foul, cramped darkness below deck and warned them not to come out. From that night on, he cut their rations of food and water because he was worried that to avoid capture, he might need to stay at sea longer than planned, and he wanted to make the boat's meager resources last.

Their bellies aching, their tongues parched, some of the migrants began to call the captain "El Diablo."

But most accepted him as a necessary evil, a coyote, a link in the chain of smugglers who guide migrants from the highlands of Ecuador up the Pacific Coast to Guatemala, then overland across Mexico and through border deserts into the United States. Many of the travelers on his ship were headed to Queens.

In collaboration with The New York Times, a reporter from El Tiempo, a newspaper in Cuenca, Ecuador, took the eight-day voyage, covering 1,100 nautical miles from a cove near this scruffy Ecuadorean beach resort to the northern coast of Guatemala. Her journey as a client of smugglers — and sometimes a hostage — provides a rare look inside one small part of the vast pipeline that carries untold numbers of migrants to the United States each year.

What did you ever do to show how much you want to be American?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 12, 2004 3:12 PM