Central American Immigration through Mexico

Central American migrants brave a perilous journey to reach the United States. Before they face the technology enhanced fences and National Guardsman on the northern border, they must face the dangers at Mexico's southern border with Guatemala. Here one can cross a tranquil river for 10 Mexican pesos. A calm river crossing is hardly a harbinger of things to come. The migrants will face robbery by police, migration officials, bandits, gangsters, and ordinary Mexican citizens looking for an easy mark. Women are raped so often on the journey north that they start on birth control before leaving home to lessen the risk of pregnancy, if not rape. They hop freight trains heading north literally risking life and limb if they they tumble into the steel wheels below. And still they come. "It's a matter of math," they say, "they could build the great wall of China and still we'd come."