They Come to Work, And To Send Money Home
he men are among the thousands of illegal immigrants who work under false identities in America's meatpacking industry – receiving a steady paycheck in exchange for constant and sometimes debilitating punishment to their bodies. Mr. Cus, a 23-year-old with broad cheekbones and full lips that seldom spread into a smile, paid a coyote $6,000 to guide him from the Quiché province in southeast Guatemala through the tropical terrain of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas – past gangs, border agents and to the banks at the Río Bravo in Ciudad Juárez.
To raise the money, he went to a Guatemalan loan shark, who now charges his family 10 percent interest monthly. By DIANNE SOLIS and DEBORAH TURNER for the Dallas Morning News.