They're bound and determined for U.S.

Despite the risk of capture and the danger of traveling in the intense desert heat, Mexicans by the hundreds still embark daily from here

BY LETTA TAYLER | LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT

August 13, 2006

ALTAR, Mexico - For four hellish days, Felix Aguilara and his wife, Yolanda, trudged 100 miles through the boiling Arizona desert in their quest to realize the American dream, at times hallucinating from exhaustion.

They had almost reached Tucson when U.S. Border Patrol agents scooped them up and dumped them across the border.

But rather than return home to southern Mexico, the couple immediately boarded a bus back to this dusty town 60 miles south of the border where they'd begun their aborted journey. Three days later, they were poised to sneak back into the United States.

"I thought I was going to die from the heat. But we'll keep trying until we make it," said Aguilara, 34, as the couple rested on a wooden platform in a stifling flophouse, flies swarming around their blistered feet. "It's that or starve."

Illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States has dropped as much as 31 percent since President George W. Bush began deploying National Guard troops at the southern border earlier this summer, but it is nowhere near stopping. From Altar alone, an estimated 600 would-be immigrants still leave daily to make the potentially deadly trip in search of jobs they can't find at home.

"If you deploy the National Guard, they'll slip around them. If you build a 60-meters-high wall, they'll find a 61-meters-high ladder," said Father Prisciliano Peraza Garcia, a Roman Catholic priest who runs a migrant shelter here. "Hunger is stronger than fear."

Altar is a testament to that will. When the U.S. Border Patrol began blocking easier crossing areas in the 1990s and again after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, undocumented workers began sneaking in by increasingly risky routes - particularly the Sonora Desert south of Tucson, a land so hot and treacherous that migrants dub it the "corridor of death."

This jumble of shacks and shops became their staging area, morphing in less than a decade from a one-horse town of 15,000 to immigration central.

Thousands on foot

In peak season, January through March, as many as 3,500 undocumented workers pass through Altar daily, sleeping in dozens of guest houses containing little but huge platforms stacked three rows high that sleep 20 people apiece.

Even in the current lull, scores of men and several women lolled around the central plaza on a recent day as the temperature soared past 100 degrees, the two or more plastic gallon water jugs by their sides signaling they were headed for the border.

Others queued at pay phones. "I love you," murmured one young man. "Wire me more money now!" begged another.

A fleet of battered vans idled nearby, ready to shuttle migrants along a potholed road to the border.

Surrounding stores offered everything they'd need for the journey - knapsacks, toilet paper, sun hats, sneakers and bandannas featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint, hovering above a cactus-strewn landscape with the Mexican eagle on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other.

The bandannas are stamped "Made in China," a reminder of job losses to Asia that help fuel this country's 50 percent poverty rate and the exodus of an estimated 400,000 undocumented Mexicans to the United States each year.

Inside the Church of Guadalupe, more migrants bowed their heads as Peraza prayed for their safe passage. "They are identified by many as dangerous and poor because they are strangers. By the grace of God, let us respect and value their dignity," he chanted.

Peraza tries his best to dissuade migrants from crossing. "Is it worth the risk?" asks a poster in his shelter illustrating tarantulas, rattlesnakes, scorpions and other poisonous creatures that lurk along the route.

A purple-and-white cross in his shelter's dining hall is made of more than 3,500 slivers of paper, one for each migrant who has died crossing into the United States since 1995, most from dehydration.

Thousands of others are robbed or raped by bandits or attacked by U.S. vigilantes, aid groups say.

The National Guard deployment - expected to reach up to 6,000 troops this month - and improved U.S. surveillance are definitely deterring some migrants, according to Grupo Beta, a Mexican aid agency that tallies crossings.