Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Nogales, Sonora

Sacha Feinman, for the Pulitzer Center. Photo by David Rochkind

Their stories are infinite in variety.  Jose Arturo Romero got separated from his group and was left to fend for himself in the middle of the desert, picked up by the Border Patrol after four days of what had seemed like aimless wandering.  It was his third attempt, and he had yet to make it the 60 miles to Tucson.  Dehydration and the near-death experience be damned; he was ready to try again.  Jorge Flores had been successful in his one and only crossing 22 years earlier.  More than two decades later, an entire life came undone in Raleigh, North Carolina when he ran a red light and was found to be driving without a license.  Some are trying to get to their families in New York or Chicago, believing that opportunity awaits if they can just complete the journey.  Others have no one to call on and no idea what to expect once they finish moving.

The stories vary save in a single detail; each narrator hired a "pollero", or guide, to bring them across the border and safely install them in the U.S.

These days, human smuggling to the U.S. is a big business, one that has undergone a profound transformation over the last 10-15 years.  What were once "mom and pop" enterprises only found on the U.S/Mexico border have been replaced by far more sophisticated brokers who now interact with the country's deadly narcotraffickers.

The hiring of a pollero represents a remarkable moment in a migrant's journey.  Life savings, not to mention lives themselves, are given over to a total stranger.  And there is no criteria by which one might judge which guide is trustworthy and which is trouble.

"It's luck, picking a pollero.  Luck and faith in God," advises Melvin Castañeda, a 34 year old migrant from the state of Sinaloa.  "There are a few little things that can help.  Never pick a young guide, for example.  Older guides have been around longer and know better how to get around.  And they don't walk as fast.  But luck; that is really all you have."

"The border crossing is more dangerous today than ever before," says Enrique Enriquez, the local coordinator of the governmental agency Grupo Beta.  Working to provide medical attention and travel advice for would-be crossers, the organization's members are in a unique position to testify on the dangers facing migrants looking to smuggle themselves across the U.S./Mexico border.

According to Enriquez, increased security measures by the U.S. Border Patrol has resulted in an equal but opposite reaction on the Mexican side.  While U.S. authorities have militarized the border in an attempt to bring order to the region and stem the flow of undocumented workers in to the U.S., their actions have made the journey more dangerous for migrants.

"Polleros are pushing these groups further and further into the most deadly regions.  The Border Patrol is a stronger presence along the most obvious routes, so the polleros have to travel into the most inhospitable areas, routes that are controlled by the narcotrafickers.  The polleros are forced to pay taxes to the narcos, and they put the migrants in a much more dangerous situation."

As Enriquez sees it, this interaction between drug smugglers and people smugglers is a relativly new development.  "We have really only started to see it in the last 2-3 years.  As the narcos have gone and consolidated their total control of the border, they are more visible in the migrant buisness."

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Poetry Month: Vote LiveHopeLove for a Webby!

Vote today for LiveHopeLove.com as the People's Voice Award at the Webbys! Voting ends tomorrow April 30! Learn how to vote here

The final poem for Poetry Month 2009 is "Hope's Hospice" by Kwame Dawes:

Hear last week's poem>>>>

Delhi’s Dark Waters

Text and video by Alex Stonehill with reporting by Ernest Waititu, for the Pulitzer Center

Like many world cities, Delhi was born on the banks of a river.  The Yamuna, a tributary of the Ganges, originates in the pristine foothills of the Himalayas, and flows south through farmlands until it feeds into the Indian capitol city. 

But as Delhi’s population has exploded – increasing sevenfold in the last 50 years, the river has become little more than a massive sewer, sucked dry of its clean water just as it enters the city, and filled back up with mostly untreated waste water just a few hundred meters later.

The scene on the banks of the Yamuna, near the Waziribad Bridge, is one of tragic irony.  Hindu worshipers, who believe it is holy, “wash” themselves in water that has officially been declared unfit for human or animal contact, while destitute migrants sift through garbage and religious offerings that have been dumped into the river, in search of anything of value that they can resell.

Finding your way to the river isn’t hard: you catch a sulfurous scent in the air, and follow one of hundreds of open drains – slow moving streams of dark gray water flanked by mountains of garbage – which join together like capillaries, building size and speed until they finally pour into the river itself.
But finding a place to cast blame for Yamuna’s dismal state isn’t so easy. 

Behind the Scenes Update from Karachi Pakistan

Alex Stonehill, Sarah Stuteville and Jessica Partnow for the Pulitzer Center
April 28, 2009

In this video blog the CLP team takes a break to reflect on the first half of the Pakistan: Hearts and Minds reporting project.

Watch this video blog »
More about this reporting project »
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Ethiopia: Water wars, or peace?

Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center
 

ADDIS ABABA _ The premise of the Pulitzer Center's reporting project on East Africa water issues is explicit in the title itself -- WaterWars, the notion that increasing population and unequal access is a near-certain recipe for conflict in the decades ahead.

But what if the challenges of competition over water led to cooperation instead? What if the very essentialness of water to life means that otherwise opposed individuals, groups and nations may in fact be more likely to set aside narrow self-interest to pursue sustainable solutions for all?

A recent reporting trip to Ethiopia, under the auspices of the Geneva journalism organization Media21, offered intriguing evidence for this counter-intuitive view, from small-scale regional studies to issues as big as the Nile River basin.

Namibia: Poachers or Hunters?

Brendan Borrell, for the Pulitzer Center

Earlier this month, I met Colin Bristow, a bush pilot based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe who has spent 29 years running charters in countries ranging from Mozambique to Angola. He often flies tourists over the Lower Zambezi National Park in Zambia and sometimes visits the park on foot after most of the tourist lodges have shut down for the season. On a recent trip, he was shocked to count over 60 elephant corpses: their ivory tusks shorn from their heads.

It's become a yearly cycle, he says, when the lodges close, the poachers move in.  Some lodge owners may even be aware of the phenomenon, he alleges, but have so far have failed to raise a stink because the poachers have political ties.  It would have been just another unsavory rumor for me to file away from this eye-opening trip to southern Africa, but Bristow offered to email proof in the form of gruesome photos.  Here's the first one I have received, and I will hopefully post more later.

China: Desert Playground

Sean Gallagher, for the Pulitzer Center

Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Shapotou. Tourists enjoy themselves on the 100 metre high sand dunes that make the resort so unique.

As I enter the desert resort of Shapotou, signs beside the road boldly announce my passing into "The Desert Capital Of The World". Whilst seemingly quite an ambitious claim, the dramatic convergence of the Tennger desert,  the Yellow River and the "Fragrant Mountain" range, has created one of the most spectacular natural settings in all of China.

The secret is out on this unique location however, as is evident by the line of buses outside the entrance, all carrying groups of tourists eagerly anticipating a day of fun in the sand.

Northern Ireland: Last Impression

Scott P. Harris, for the Pulitzer Center

 

I've come to the end of my stay in Belfast and I would like to think that I've gained some understanding of the complexities in overcoming a long history of sectarian violence.

My final impression of Belfast came last night, as I walked down Shankill Road I saw two young boys, maybe 12 or 14 years of age, throwing rocks against a short wall in an empty lot next to the main road.  It wasn't a riot, it was just kids being immature.  But the wall was so short, it wouldn't have taken much for a rock to go sailing into the busy street.  When I saw them I grabbed my camera and got a quick shot.  The reason this stands out is that a random man walking down the street got quite angry at me and said, "Those are minors, you better not show their faces!"  This man, who was walking with his own children in the path of the flying rocks, cared more about me filming the act of vandalism, than he did about the kids committing the act of vandalism.

Northern Ireland: A Tale of Two Cities

Scott P. Harris, for the Pulitzer Center
It seems important to me to say that I believe there is more than one Belfast.  The City Centre looks and feels like any other British city.  It’s clean, there is nice shopping, and teenagers meet up after school to hang out in the park.  The kids in the park have one or two stories about the occasional sectarian dust up, but on the whole they talk about how they’ve moved on.  They have friends of both religions, and they don’t seem to be effected by the Troubles in the slightest, or if they are effected, it is only by how fed up they are with their parent’s generation.  The Belfast of The Falls and Shankill is a different animal altogether.

China: Yellow Skies

Sean Gallagher, for the Pulitzer Center

 
All images: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Shapotou.

You can smell a sandstorm. As I woke this morning, my throat was drier than normal and the smell of dust and sand had crept into my room whilst I was sleeping. I opened my curtains expecting to see the Yellow River out of my window but all I could see was a haze of yellow light.

Sandstorms have been one of the major problems as a result of desertification in China. As the spring winds blow, dry and degraded topsoil is picked up and thrown into the air to be carried in immense clouds of sand and dust.