Story and photos by J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

One gram of bone is all Dr. Lori Baker needs to find the truth.

The bone chips arrive in FedEx packages at her Baylor University lab from a morgue in Tuscon, Arizona. They’re samples from the unidentified remains of illegal immigrants who died in desert crossings.

Jerry Larson photo/Waco Tribune-Herald

She crushes the bone and from the mitochondria of a single cell strips out a double-stranded molecule of DNA. She unravels the strands: The length of a snowflake but too thin to see, a twisted ladder of chemical code.

A forensic anthropologist, Baker homes in on a minute section of that tiny molecule for the answer: in the end a simple yes or no to an anxious family waiting to hear whether the victim’s DNA resembles theirs.

Behind every bone is a story. Dr. Baker would rather not know. She’s a scientist, after all. She’s also a young mother, and the weight of all these tragedies keeps her up at night thinking about her own family.

Still, if you could strip out and unravel one of these stories from the bone, it would stretch back thousands of miles, to the desert, then perhaps to the heartland of Mexico. You might find a family devastated by the loss of a son or daughter, a husband or brother. A promise lost, a dream wasted.

M ARANA, Ariz. — Faustino Francisco Galvan squinted up at the face of his son, now a dark blur against bright desert sky.

“I want to stay with you,” he heard the boy say, as in a dream.

Struggling to focus his eyes and thoughts, the man could sense the boy’s hesitation. Thirteen years old, a babyfaced kid, Eloy was weighing life and death.

BROKEN PROMISE LAND

Part 1 of 4

• Audio slide show → Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

About this series

This project examining the perilous crossings of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border was made possible by a World Affairs Journalism Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C.

For three weeks last summer, Tribune-Herald staff writer J.B. Smith traveled to three towns in Mexico to interview families of dead illegal immigrants identified in Waco by Baylor University forensic DNA scientist Lori Baker.

He also spent five days in September visiting southern Arizona, where all of those immigrants died. He traveled into the desert with Border Patrol agents and volunteers from a locally based humanitarian group and visited the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Smith continued his research well into December, conducting interviews with anti-illegal immigration activists and policy-makers, including the head of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Beginning today and running through Wednesday, this series explores the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

TODAY: Part 1 Hoping to find employment in the United States, two cousins and a father from Tehuacán, Mexico, cross the Arizona desert, where their dream threatens to turn deadly.

MONDAY: Part 2 In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s pursuit of illegal immigrants is a cat-and-mouse game where the cat often saves the mouse. As border enforcement increases elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, so do migrant deaths in southern Arizona. Critics say the effort to curb border crossings isn’t working.

TUESDAY: Part 3 As Arizona morgues fill up with unidentified bodies found in the desert, a Baylor University scientist uses DNA to help crack some of the toughest cases.

MORE: Two among hundreds: Teenagers' dreams die in Arizona desert

WEDNESDAY: Part 4 A family in Tehuacán, Mexico, deals with the emotional aftermath of a disastrous border crossing, all while offering a south-of-the-border perspective on the personal and economic motives that cause Mexicans to risk their lives in the Arizona deserts.

Faustino Francisco, 37, was diabetic, and his body was shutting down. He had hiked four days through the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona with a group of about 15 Mexicans and Guatemalans. They hadn’t slept more than an hour since leaving. Their water bottles had run dry 30 hours ago. The piece of barrel cactus pulp he had chewed on for moisture yesterday only made him vomit.

Now on this late morning of May 19, 2006, the blazing sun promised another 100-degree day. Faustino could go no farther. His blood sugar was soaring. He was losing his sight. He was losing his mind. For his own life, he was fast losing hope.

But the boys could not die.

In this undated photograph, Faustino Francisco (center) holds his son, Eloy. As the boy grew older, he traded his dream of engineering school for the quicker payoff of manual labor in North Carolina.

Not Eloy, his oldest son, the soccer player, the ambitious one who had traded his dream of engineering school for the quicker payoff of manual labor in North Carolina.

Not Rosario, his 16-year-old nephew, the factory worker who had persuaded Eloy to come along on this misbegotten trip to the United States.

Only a couple of hours more, said the coyote, the smuggler of illegal immigrants. Just behind those hills lies Tucson, he said. A man will be there with water and roasted chicken and beer.

Ahorito regeso. We’ll be right back to rescue you.

Faustino had heard enough of the coyote’s lies the last few days. The group was lost. And to remain here was certain death.

But for Eloy and Rosario, perhaps there was hope.

“Go on,” Faustino said to the shadow that was his son. “Go save your life.”

Faustino’s sister, Clara, also hunkered down on the ground, unable to go farther because of her heart condition. Her friend Elisa, exhausted, also stayed behind. The trio watched as the boys and the rest of the group staggered off into a purgatory of brush, rocks and thorns.

Faustino Francisco sprawled on his back in the shade of a giant saguaro cactus, praying and waiting to die.

* * *

Odds are that a man in Faustino’s condition would become another grim statistic in the unfolding tragedy of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Francisco family at home in Tehuacán. Right to left: Faustino; his wife, Constanza; a young relative; Faustino's 12-year-old son, Efraim.

A decade ago, few immigrants dared to cross this harsh stretch of desert south of Tucson and Phoenix.

Today, because of increased enforcement elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s the busiest corridor for illegal immigration. It’s also the deadliest.

The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson last year received 205 bodies of unidentified migrants. The number is at an all-time high, 10 times the annual rate back in the 1990s.

“Something has funneled people into the Sonoran Desert,” says Dr. Bruce Anderson, the office’s forensic anthropologist, who oversees the autopsies.

“They used to cross in Texas or California or New Mexico, in safer places. The Sonoran Desert is not a safe place to cross any time of year. In the summertime, it’s lethal.”

In this desert vastness, the end can begin with a sprained ankle, a missed turn or an empty water bottle.

An abandoned body might be found months later, skeletonized or partly mummified with blackened skin and a ghastly grin, or torn apart by wild animals.

Anderson’s staff of about 10 investigates each case, usually performing an autopsy, and works with the Mexican Consulate to find relatives back in Mexico.

The hardest cases go to Dr. Lori Baker in Waco for mitochondrial DNA testing. With funding from the Mexican government, she analyzes bone samples from 200 border-crossers a year and blood samples from 50 families in Mexico. The Mexican government uses a database to match the families with the bodies. Since 2005, more than 50 of Baker’s samples have been matched.

* * *

Faustino Francisco knew the long trip could end badly. That’s why he came along.

Eloy had come to him with the idea back home in Tehuacán, a city in the south-central Mexican state of Puebla.

Rosario, Eloy’s cousin, was planning to go to North Carolina to join his father working at a plant nursery.

Rosario had talked his dad, Maximino, into arranging the trip through the same coyote who had guided Maximino earlier that year.

Like his older cousin, Eloy had big dreams: to work at the landscaping company a couple of years, save his money and come back to Tehuacán with a car. A teenager with his own car: That would turn some heads in a neighborhood of unpaved streets and loose chickens.

No, Faustino told the boy.

“It’s too much risk for you,” he said.

Faustino had risked his own life before in crossing the border. In 1999, he crossed illegally near Tijuana en route to Oregon, where he worked harvesting cherries, strawberries and cucumbers.

The group had run out of water on that trip and suffered from dehydration, and that route wasn’t even desert like southern Arizona.

But Eloy wasn’t afraid.

“Look at my physical conditioning,” the boy told him. “I play soccer, I can run and jump. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

The boy, normally polite and obedient, made his position clear: He was going, with or without his father’s permission. Faustino finally gave in.

“OK, I’m going to accompany you and see what kind of person is taking you,” Faustino said. He made the call to Maximino, his brother-in-law. Through Maximino’s boss, they arranged to pay the coyote $1,700 apiece for smuggling them into the United States.

They gathered at the bus station in downtown Tehuacán on May 13: Faustino, Eloy, Rosario, Faustino’s sister and his sister’s friend and two other Tehuacán men making the journey.

Rosario was so keyed up for the trip that he hardly touched the hearty breakfast his mother, Cecilia, prepared for him.

At the bus station, she pleaded with him once more. He was young, without responsibilities, and the family could make it without him sending money home from El Norte, she said.

“I said, ‘Don’t go, my son. Don’t go,’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Don’t cry, Mama. I’m happy. I’m going to work and earn money.’ ”

Scott Fagner graphic/Waco Tribune-Herald On May 13, 2006, Faustino Francisco Galvan left his home in Tehuacán, Mexico, to accompany his son Eloy, nephew Rosario and sister Claraon a 1,260-mile journey to the United States, where the boys planned to get jobs. For Faustino, it ended a week later in the Sonoran Desert, southwest of Tucson, Ariz. (Note: Family's route from Mexico City to Altar is based on speculation).

Rosario hugged her and his sister and said goodbye.

He called her from the city of Puebla, then from Mexico City. A couple of days later, he called from Altar, Sonora, a northern Mexican town known as a staging area for border crossings.

Then the calls stopped. A week passed.

* * *

In Altar, the travelers were picked up by some men they assumed had arranged their trip. It turned out the men meant to take them hostage and rob them of their money. The travelers stalled, claiming they were still waiting on a check to arrive, and they managed to escape.

They then found Nicolas, the coyote they had hired to take them into the desert. They spent the night at a cheap hotel on the outskirts of town.

The coyote was a 35-year-old Mexican who talked of his home and a girlfriend in Merida, Yucatán. Faustino noticed he had a nervous manner and seemed to jump at every noise.

On May 16, the group traveled to the border town of Sasabe. That evening, they crossed into the Altar Valley of Arizona. They took the roughest terrain to avoid Border Patrol agents.

Night gave them cover. The Altar Valley is one of the darkest places in North America — Kitt Peak National Observatory is perched on an adjacent mountain range for that reason — and on this night, the moon didn’t rise until after midnight.

With only starlight to guide them, they moved carefully over broken rocks, avoiding the cholla cactus plants whose ferocious barbs lodge in socks and skin.

Each man and woman carried 2.6 gallons of water, a small container of rehydrating serum, a Coca-Cola, cans of food and a change of clothes.

Faustino had no idea how long the trip would take, and the coyote wouldn’t give a straight answer. Each day, he would tell them that they were only a few hours from their destination, the small town of Marana. A map would have shown them Marana was 70 miles north of the Mexican border as the crow flies — perhaps half again that far for a group traveling clandestinely over land, sometimes by moonlight, sometimes off-course.

Daybreak revealed the lay of the land: ravines cutting through long stretches of blond grassland, with the purple Baboquivari Mountains just to the west.

A severe landscape, but also beautiful, Faustino thought. It reminded him of his hometown of Nopala, in the arid hills west of Tehuacán.

The grass and brush hid surprises: Bobwhite quail taking wing, jackrabbits bounding on their spindly legs. He saw cows here and there, and mottes of ironwood and mesquite trees that made him daydream of being a lumberjack.

Several days into the journey north through the Arizona desert, the thirsty group stumbled through rocky, thorny terrain. At left is a cholla, whose thorns lodge in skin and socks.

The first two days, Eloy, Rosario and a young Guatemalan chatted and joked as they walked. They sang a song from a soft drink commercial:

“Da, da, da, quiero Pepsi, mama/Da, da, da, dame Pepsi, mama.”

“You can’t have a Pepsi out here,” one boy chided the others.

By the third day, thirst was nothing to laugh at.

Their water containers had run dry. The coyote led them to a cattle pond where he knew they could refill their bottles. But as they dipped their bottles in the pond, they saw trucks.

“La Migra!”

The group scattered, eluding the Border Patrol agents but leaving some water containers behind. Soon afterward, they saw an unmarked van, which Faustino suspected was full of narcotraffickers. Later, he learned it might have been a humanitarian group that was trying to save their lives.

Exhausted, Faustino took out his frustrations on the coyote, telling him he had failed the group. The coyote cursed him and threatened to leave him behind.

Over the protests of the coyote, who wanted to move on, some of the travelers stopped to open a barrel cactus. The cactus was covered with inch-long thorns, and it took great effort to break it open with sticks and cow bones. Faustino and others chewed on the bitter pulp, seeking its moisture. But he vomited. Later he would develop diarrhea — a dangerous loss of water for a dehydrated man.

A Border Patrol agent walks the hills north of the site where Faustino collapsed because of severe dehydration after four days in the southern Arizona desert.

* * *

By the fourth day, Faustino’s condition was in free-fall.

In the dry desert heat, a hiker can lose half a cup to a pint of fluids every hour. To avoid dehydration, you would need to pack five or six gallons of water — at least 50 pounds — for a three-day trip. The most anyone can practically carry is four gallons, immigrant advocates in Tucson say.

As dehydration becomes severe, the body goes into hypovolemic shock in which multiple organs fail, shutting down in stages like someone turning off the lights in a house.

The blood thickens. Water stored between tissues in the arms and legs is robbed for use in the vital organs. The eyes lose water and go blurry.

Then the gastrointestinal system shuts down, making it difficult to eat or drink.

“You can’t hold down water, and you just start puking anything you drink,” says Gerry Carrasco, a paramedic with the Border Patrol’s Border Search Trauma and Rescue team — BORSTAR for short — in southern Arizona.

The heart may begin to lose its rhythm as the body loses electrolytes such as sodium and potassium.

As the fluids become depleted, sweating stops and the body loses its ability to cool itself. Heatstroke sets in when the body temperature reaches 104 or 105 degrees. At 108 degrees, severe damage begins.

“At that point, the victim is unconscious, and it’s basically cooking brain cells,” Carrasco says.

For a diabetic like Faustino, the cascade of failure is accelerated. The stress of dehydration can hasten a diabetic episode, in which blood sugar can soar to dangerous levels. The body begins urinating and sweating to get rid of the sugar.

As the body shuts down, the mind may also begin to go.

“People go into seizures and start hallucinating,” Carrasco says. “I’ve found guys hugging saguaros. I’ve found people completely naked. I’ve had females try to fight me.”

* * *

Faustino awoke. The shadow of the saguaro had shifted and he was broiling in the sun. In his delirium, he envisioned himself back in Tehuacán. He heard the voices of his mother, his children and his wife, Constanza. He felt overwhelming grief and dread, and he pleaded for forgiveness for taking the boys on a journey into hell.

“Forgive me, my wife,” he said to Constanza’s ghost. “I have failed you.”

Faustino Francisco Galvan, shown at home in Tehuacán, Mexico, with his granddaughter, recounts a disastrous desert crossing into the U.S. with his son and nephew.

* * *

Faustino struggles as he tells this story more than a year later. A quiet, thin man, he sits on a bed under a bare light bulb, in a tiny house he shares in Tehuacán with his wife, his children and his toddler granddaughter. While the little girl plays and giggles, he continues, with a painful smile. He has never told this story in its entirety.

“The truth is that there were very difficult moments,” he says in Spanish. “It’s not something I want to remember. . . . It was something frightening and macabre. If that is what death feels like, that’s why people don’t want to die. What I have learned is that God helped me greatly. I owe my existence to God.”

* * *

Rest revived Faustino’s sister, Clara, on that torrid May day in 2006. She broke another barrel cactus and pulled out the bitter pulp to give to her brother and her friend. Around sundown, she gathered twigs and dead cactus and piled them high, intent on building a signal fire.

Faustino summoned his last bit of strength and dragged himself over the rocks to the brush pile, giving his sister his lighter. The twigs crackled and flames leapt into the night sky.

Three BORSTAR agents were flying the desert that night in a helicopter, looking for stranded border-crossers to rescue. At 9:40 p.m., passing over the edge of the Tohono O’Odham Indian Reservation a few miles north of the tiny village of San Pedro, they saw a flicker of orange on the desert floor.

Down on the ground, watching the lights of the helicopter, Clara’s friend, Elisa, cheered.

“Look, mamita,” she said. “We’re saved.”

Faustino wasn’t so sure. He had heard stories about La Migra, that they were killers, that they shot immigrants. Still, he sat up and threw more twigs on the fire. The three began waving their gallon water jugs to attract attention.

The helicopter wheeled and began to descend. With the blades above him whirring, an agent stepped out onto a hanging ladder and called: “Dónde están?” Where are you?

“Aqui,” they shouted. Here.

Rescue beacons like this one in the Altar Valley allow stranded migrants to call the Border Patrol. But they are scarce, and migrants often fear "La Migra."

The Border Patrol rescue team quickly saw the three were in a state of severe dehydration and that Faustino and Elisa needed medical attention. They administered IV fluids and called a helicopter ambulance. The ambulance couldn’t land because of the terrain of rocks, saguaro and greasewood, so the agents arranged ground transportation to take Faustino and Elisa to St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson and Clara to Border Patrol headquarters to document her and send her home.

At the hospital, doctors found that Faustino’s blood sugar was 600, far exceeding the normal level of about 120. He lay in his hospital bed that weekend, recuperating and thinking about what had happened.

The Mexican Consulate in Tucson sent someone to the hospital to ask Faustino what happened.

Was there anyone else in your party who needed to be rescued?

No, he said.

He wouldn’t tell authorities that he had a son and a nephew who went on, would not ask about whether they made it to safety. It was the rule of the border: Don’t tattle. Don’t jeopardize the journey of others. Tell them you were crossing the desert alone.

On Monday, he called William, his brother-in-law’s boss in North Carolina. He told him of his ordeal in the desert and asked about the boys. No word yet, William said.

That same day, the Border Patrol loaded Faustino on a bus with other captured illegal immigrants and sent him to Nogales, just across the border. He would head to Altar, then back to Tehuacán, dejected and exhausted. He had failed, but the boys had gone on. They were still strong when he last saw them.

A few days and he would hear their excited voices, telling him of their new home in the United States.

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

757-5752