Article: Mexico's Trash

Hundreds live off Mexico's trash
Jobless rate pushes Guatemala migrants to try eking out survival at dump

Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Reporter

TAPACHULA, Mexico - Rosalinda Martínez Ramírez came from Guatemala to Mexico looking for a better life. Instead, she ended up in the trash heaps of a sweltering border town, picking through stinking truckloads of garbage to survive.

For hundreds of Guatemalan immigrants, the municipal dump west of Tapachula is the end of the road, the squalid bottom of a chain of immigration that stretches all the way to the United States.

As Mexico endures its highest unemployment in seven years, immigrants from neighboring Guatemala are finding it harder to get jobs in Mexico. Many try to move on to the United States. Some return to the crushing poverty back home.

Others end up in Tapachula, five miles inside the border in Chiapas state, collecting metal, glass, paper and cardboard to sell to junk dealers for $15 or less a week.

"There's nowhere else to go," said Martínez, 38, of Tacamulco, Guatemala.

Martínez stepped carefully through the trash with her 8-year-old daughter, Claudia Victoria, while carrying a plastic sugar sack and a long, sharp hook used for spearing aluminum cans from the garbage.

Nearby, dozens of black, knee-high buzzards hopped around a pool of blood from a slaughterhouse, pulling severed cows' tails from a green pile of manure. Hundreds of more buzzards wheeled overhead.

Insects covered a rotting squash. A scarred dog slept in the sun as flies buzzed and crawled over it. The stench of trash hung in the humid air.

The trash-pickers, known as chacharreros, live in shacks on the outskirts of the dump. Their numbers vary from 100 to 300 depending on the economy and the seasonal demand for farmworkers, said the dump's manager, Leobardo Pérez Sandoval.

Lately, the population has been on the rise, coinciding with a wave of illegal immigration from recession-ridden Central American countries. Mexico's National Immigration Institute says it has captured and deported more than 85,400 Guatemalans so far this year, compared with 72,600 in all of 2003.

Life at the dump revolves around the trash-collection schedules in Tapachula, a town of 272,000, and the arrival of the garbage trucks around noon.

One recent weekday, about a dozen trash-pickers followed each truck as it lumbered through the mounds of refuse.

They began hooking beer cans from the trash even as the garbage truck was opening up. Then they sorted quickly through the pile it left, pulling out the metal and glass with their bare hands.

Claudia Victoria, Martínez's daughter, watched from a nearby pile. She has a brilliant smile, but it dimmed when asked if she liked school.

"I haven't sent her to school," Martinez said. "There isn't time."

Looking at the ground, Claudia said she couldn't read.

A few feet away, 10-year-old Josué Reymundo Lan moved through the trash heaps with his two brothers. He rattled off the prices that junk dealers will pay: 3 pesos (about 25 cents ) for a sugar sack full of unbroken glass bottles; 8 pesos (70 cents) for aluminum cans; 25 Mexican cents (2 U.S. cents) for steel cans.

"We work from 7 in the morning until it gets dark, and we earn almost nothing," he said.

Reymundo has a habit of beginning his sentences with "well, look," which gives him a professorial air beyond his years. Asked if he can read and write, he leaned on the hook.

"Look, I went to school until the second grade," he said. "I know some words but not the others."

Older immigrants said life in Mexico was easier years ago when they could get jobs harvesting coffee in the small Mexican farms covering the Tacana volcano. But with the price of coffee depressed, many Mexican coffee growers are looking for work themselves, and the farms aren't hiring Guatemalans anymore.

Almost every night, Mexican authorities sweep through the train yards, arresting undocumented Guatemalans as they try to hop freight trains north to the United States.

Police raided the dump a few months ago, said Pablo Nejera Ventura, a junk dealer. They forced the trash-pickers to pay 40 pesos, or about $3.50, for credentials allowing them to continue working there, he said. All of them complied.

"We might earn only 200 pesos (about $17) in a good week, but, believe it or not, it's still more than we can earn in Guatemala," Adolfo López said.

He and four companions from San Marcos, Guatemala, have been here three years.

Nejera said the trash-pickers provide a valuable service to Mexico, sorting out tons of recyclable material from the trash every month.

"The authorities say these people are illegals and they don't want them in the dump," Nejera said. "But if they're not here, they're just going to be wandering around unemployed. All they want is a way to survive."

Posted by elcanche at December 1, 2004 12:00 PM