From San Pedro Sula they traveled by bus to the Guatemalan border with Mexico, which they crossed through a river by boat. “I’m now a little closer to you,” she wrote in a text message to her husband. “We didn’t know, it didn’t cross our minds, everything we still had to go through,” Chávez recalled last October in an interview with Telemundo News. She spoke from Long Island, New York, where her family lives in uncertainty, after their asylum request was denied.
In Mexico, she said, they were taken to Villahermosa, a city in the state of Tabasco, where they expected to finally catch a plane. But there they had their phones taken and were forced to throw away their suitcases and board a trailer truck.
“We said: ‘We’re not going,’” Chávez recalled, “but by then it doesn’t matter if you want to get in or not: you have to go, because if you don’t, they threaten to turn you over the cartel.”
They hadn’t gone two miles when the truck stopped at a checkpoint and a child, around 2-years-old, began to cry. “Either you shut him up or I do,” a coyote demanded of the mother, while outside the vehicle was being inspected, according to Chávez. The smuggler, who was armed, snatched the boy from her, held him dangling by his head, and put one hand on the back of his neck and another on his face, covering his mouth: “The mother just started crying. Then the boy fell fast asleep,” she recalled.
They had barely any food or water. There were plastic buckets at each end of the trailer for those who couldn’t hold in their bodily needs: “People were fainting. A young woman told me not to let the children fall asleep,” Chávez said.
They crossed 900 miles (almost 1,500 kilometers) from Villahermosa to Reynosa, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. In four days they got off the trailer only twice. At one of the stops, already near the border, they walked for several hours up a mountain until nightfall to go around a police checkpoint. “It was so cold it was horrible,” Chávez said, “we felt so weak, I couldn’t walk as fast since I had my daughter. We hadn’t had water in two days.”
The 36-year-old woman claims that when she arrived in Reynosa, the coyotes who greeted them kidnapped her along with her children and her sister-in-law, who was traveling with two children, and held them in a hotel for two weeks with almost no food while they extorted her husband in New Orleans. Rosales paid $14,000 to have them released, she said. Finally, on February 3rd, after traveling for almost a month, Chávez and her children crossed the Rio Grande and surrendered to the Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
