The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures. This article was published more than 10 years ago. Some information in it may no longer be current. Felix, a baby-faced year-old from El Salvador, lost everything down to his shoes when he was robbed while making an illegal river crossing into Mexico from Central America one recent dawn.
A few days later, penniless and hauling ice at a brothel in a dingy red-light district just inside Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, he had abandoned his quest to reach the United States, holding on to the hope of making it home one day.
He did not know how much he was being paid but he had plastic sandals on his feet courtesy of his new employers, the Foco Rojo Red Light bar. It is one of a row of establishments in a dirt-road "zone of tolerance" on the edge of the southern city of Tapachula, which has become a first stop for thousands of ragged Central Americans fleeing poverty in their homelands in a quest to reach the United States and the dream of prosperity. Nearly 86, illegal Central American immigrants were caught in Mexico in the first half of , up 28 per cent from the same period last year, according to Mexican immigration authorities.
Sixty per cent of them were detained in Chiapas. Some simply cannot continue, like Felix and his co-worker, a girl barely out of her teens who lives and works as a prostitute at the Foco Rojo. She abandoned her trek after she was robbed four years ago.
Now she has two children. Those who continue north may be charged thousands of dollars by smugglers, called polleros ,or chicken-runners, on a perilous and sometimes deadly journey across Mexico. Many impoverished Central Americans, still racked by the effects of civil wars and Hurricane Mitch's rampage, depend on dollars sent home by relatives who have reached the United States.
