Greeny News

Juliard and Herminio forth to smuggle themselves into a better life in the U.S.. Three weeks later, the body 1, as well as identity on the other hand, were found among 72 bodies, blindfolded in Mexico

Boston, on the east coast of the United States, was the destination when Hermínio Cardoso dos Santos and his friend, Juliard Aires Fernandes, left their sleepy rural town in south-east Brazil on 3 August. The two young men had relatives there: they dreamed of earning a good wage in a vibrant city that boasts a sizeable Brazilian community.

Warning signs litter the road they took out of their home town, Sardoá, which cuts through the mountains towards Governador Valadares, the nearest city. "Dangerous curve ahead," the rusty green signs advise. "Attention! Wild animals." But when 24-year-old Hermínio and 19-year-old Juliard boarded the bus, they could have had little real idea of the mortal danger that lay ahead.

"Hermínio left the house and said: 'Dad, God willing I'll go and work there and get some money together, and then God willing I'll come back,'" Antonio Ramos dos Santos, Hermínio's 64-year-old father, told the Observer at the family's small ranch. "I said: 'God be with you. Be happy'." Hermínio's sister, Marlene, fought back tears. "They both had the same dream: to go to the United States. And then this happened."

Three weeks after the two Brazilians left Sardoá, on Tuesday 24 August, Mexican troops discovered the corpses of 58 men and 14 women, bound, blindfolded and lying in the grass along the edges of a breezeblock barn in Tamaulipas state. Their bodies were riddled with bullets.

According to the testimony of an Ecuadorean migrant who escaped the scene with a bullet wound in his neck, the dead were economic migrants who were kidnapped on their way to the US by gunmen from the notorious Zeta gang; the latest victims of the brutal, frightening drugs cartels of northern Mexico. According to some accounts, they would not or could not pay a ransom to their captors. Another version suggests that the migrants refused to be recruited into the cartel. There are rumours that the killers may not have been Zetas at all, but members of a rival cartel, trying to give the Zetas a bad name.

What is certain is that kidnappings of desperate and vulnerable men and women seeking to scramble across the Mexico-US border are commonplace. Mexico's National Human Rights Commission estimated in a report presented last year that nearly 20,000 migrants are kidnapped annually, based on the number of reports it received between September 2008 and February 2009. The government disputes these figures.

Since the macabre discovery of the bodies near the Mexican border town of Reynosa, the dismal process of identifying them has begun. Six hundred Honduran families have reported relatives missing who had set out for the US. It has been established that there were also Salvadorians, Guatemalans and Ecuadoreans among the dead. And, almost certainly, two Brazilians.

The body of Fernandes, who would have turned 20 on 8 September, has been positively identified. That Dos Santos was also among the dead has yet to be officially confirmed. Mexican authorities reportedly found his identity card at the scene but have not yet been able to match it to one of the corpses.

Sardoá is a small town lost in the rolling hills of eastern Minas Gerais state. Famed as one of the largest departure points for Brazilian migrants, the region was also home to Jean Charles de Menezes, another local boy who met an untimely end abroad when British police mistook him for a terrorist on the London Underground in 2005.

Almost exactly five years ago, Menezes's funeral cortege passed through Sardoá on its way to his hometown of Gonzaga, around 20km away, where he is buried. Then, the town's main square was decked with placards and flags in tribute. Hundreds of local people took to the streets to watch his body being driven by on top of a bright red fire engine. Now, five years on, a white banner hangs from two palm trees in the same square, a homage to the region's two latest victims. "Juliard and Hermínio," it reads. "Suddenly silence."

Growing up near Governador Valadares, a city of around 270,000 residents nicknamed "Vala-dólares" in reference to the amount of US currency supposedly flowing back to it from abroad, all three young men would have dreamed of making their fortune overseas. "Lots of people from this region go there in search of their future," said Marlene, Dos Santos's sister. "For some it works out, but others come back with nothing. It's a place that tricks you. People here think it is going to be one thing and they get there and find it is just like here, without proper work. Sometimes fathers even leave their families behind to try to offer something better," she added. "Because here there are no jobs â€" who wants to work for 25 reals [£10] a day?"

Amilton Leite, Sardoá's social services secretary, estimates that between 15% and 20% of the town's population, which numbers around 5,000, currently live overseas. The majority become illegal immigrants in the US, forced to risk the treacherous passage through the Mexican desert to get there. Around 80% of those who take the plunge are young men like Dos Santos and Fernandes, he believes, for whom working in the US has become a rite of passage.

"It is extremely rare for someone from Sardoá to get a visa, so 99% go through the Mexican border," Leite said. Migrants usually must work for at least 18 months just to pay off the traffickers who take them there. "It's like a gold rush. People think they will become millionaires, that their dreams will come true. But dreams don't always come true."

Fateful decision to go to the U.S. is not the first time Dos Santos tried his luck abroad. Grew up in roça, Brazil's impoverished countryside, working the fields with his family, he had set his sights on an adventure overseas.

After dropping out of school in his early teens and being unable to raise enough money to pay the traffickers, known as coyotes, to smuggle him into the US, he looked to Europe. Four years ago he flew from Brazil to Italy, but was arrested by Italian police and deported within months. "He said they handcuffed him and made him sleep in the police station. When he arrived here he couldn't even move his fingers," said his father, adding proudly: "I'm 64 years old and thank God I've never ended up in a police station."

Almost immediately, Dos Santos and Fernandes turned their thoughts to America and set off in search of their local consul â€" the colloquial name given to the middlemen in Governador Valadares who negotiate migrant smuggling with their contacts in Mexico. "The consuls are an open secret," said Leite. "Nobody knows exactly where they live or what their full names are, but if you want to find one you can do it very quickly. You just have to ask someone: 'Who is taking [people] at the moment?' "

When the two men left their homes on 3 August and sat on the bus to 6 pm, Governador Valadares, they are going to meet consuls. The men promised to smuggle them into the US for a fee of around 24,500 reals (£9,000). From Valadares, family members say, the two men had planned to travel to São Paulo before flying into Guatemala â€" a country which, unlike Mexico, does not demand tourist visas for Brazilians. In Guatemala they were to be met by a contact of their consul who was to accompany them to the Mexico-US border by road. Once safely inside the US, the men would head to Boston to find the relatives who would help them begin a new life.

Born and raised in a hotbed of ambition and migration, Dos Santos and Fernandes can have been under no illusion as to the risks their journey might involve. In an interview last week with Brazilian Voice

By his account, the nightmare continued even after the team moved to Texas. He told the newspaper that he and his comrades were "stolen" Armed men dressed as police officers and held captive for 13 days.

"You couldn't even sit on the sofa, or they would beat you. You couldn't turn on the tap, or anything. If you used the bathroom, they would beat you. They said if we used too much water the police would find us." Finally, G said, the group were freed after paying around $6,000 each to their captors.

But, despite the risks, family members say they thought little of the lack of contact from Dos Santos and Fernandes and were not overly worried about their wellbeing. In Sardoá, most families are used to seeing relatives make the dangerous and lengthy journey into the US.

On 25 August that sense of calm was shattered. Reports of the massacre near the Mexican border reached Sardoá via the nightly television news, and the anxiety began. "Everybody was worried because nobody knew what had happened to him," said Rosângela Marques, Fernandes's cousin, who is also a distant cousin of De Menezes. "As soon as news [of the massacre] got out we were apprehensive, fearful that he was involved."

In an interview Estado de Minas newspaper, Fernandes's aunt, Maria da Glória Aires, 48, said she believed that the immigrants had been killed after refusing to help smuggle drugs into the US.

\\ "We all know that their hands and feet were tied and they were shot," she said.

In the small, rural Brazilian community, the sense of shock and grief at the massacre in Tamaulipas is palpable. But Leite does not believe the killings will deter the ambition of Brazilians who have fallen for the American dream. "This will make people nervous but it won't stop people going," he said. "It's about necessity."

For the Dos Santos family, Hermínio's apparent death represents the second major tragedy to hit their household. Aged 23, his only brother killed himself. Their father found his body swinging from a eucalyptus tree in front of the family home.

"This is life," said Antonio Ramos dos Santos, a devout Catholic who has nailed a wooden crucifix at the side of his wooden front door. "It's God who takes care of us. It's God who decides things for us."

In the living room of his modest brick house, the black cover of the Old Testament were opened to the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 29. On the lay public appeared to sound a warning to any temptation to risk a journey through the heart of drug cartels in northern Mexico '.

"Better is the life of a poor man in a mean cottage, than delicate fare in another man's house," it read. "Be it little or much, hold thee contented, that thou hear not the reproach of thy house."

Greeny NEWS