Osveli's journey

The story of a Guatemalan boy whose desperate bid for a better life ended on a lonely Colorado highway

Mike Anton, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 14, 1999 at 2:32 p.m.

He was 14, already a man. Osveli Sales left the crushing poverty of Guatemala for the United States, looking for a better life. Two months later, after passing through Colorado, he came home in a box.

The door swings open and the light of America pours in, washing over the two young men. They had left Guatemala searching for a better life. Instead, they found death on the Colorado prairie.

They lie on stainless steel gurneys, their eyes closed as if in peaceful sleep, their faces rubbed raw by the crash of a van at 62 mph.

They are dark-skinned, thin-boned and small, not much more than 5 feet tall. One is 22, the other 14. Boys, really, although their hands tell a different story. Thick with calluses, they are the hands of men.

"Tells me they worked hard all their lives," says Neil Harmon, the owner of the Springfield funeral home where they had been brought after the wreck.

Harmon is the deputy coroner of Baca County, a desolate expanse of dry ranch land in southeastern Colorado through which thousands of illegal immigrants pass every year.

U.S. 160 is the pipeline, a shoulderless strip of anonymous asphalt that has come to connect two worlds. One filled with desperation. The other offering hope.

Two days before Christmas, Osveli Sales Vasquez and Raquel Jimenez Aguilar came through this well-worn route stuffed into the back of a van with 11 other illegal immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico.

They were strangers to each other - and to most of the others in the van. In the cold half-light of dawn, the passengers, including two small children, were asleep, nearly on top of one another.

Osveli was 2,000 miles from home and 23 miles west of Springfield when the van sailed off the road and rolled, killing him.

His trip was over. But really, it had only just begun.

The beginning

The journey would take the better part of a month, so they traveled light.

The clothes on their backs. Tennis shoes. Backpacks with some food. A wad of cash.

It wouldn't last.

The food Osveli Sales and his 19-year-old brother Noe brought with them was gone within days. Most of the money ended up in the pockets of smugglers, who guided the brothers up Mexico's spine and across the U.S. border into Arizona and beyond.

Into the promised land.

Other family members had come first, establishing a foothold. An uncle in South Carolina, another in New York. A brother in Georgia, another in Maryland. Four years ago, their sister Irma arrived to work in the farm fields that separate Naples from the Everglades in southwest Florida.

"One suffers a lot during these journeys," Irma Sales says. "They didn't know how much they would have to suffer to get here."

It took Irma months to raise the money for her brothers' trip, much of it earned by selling tamales on the street at night after her day in the fields was done.

The money was a fortune back home in Cucuna, a tiny village of adobe homes in the western highlands of Guatemala, a place without telephones, electricity or plumbing, where children leave school after the sixth grade. There, in the shadow of an active volcano, Irma's parents raised 12 children while growing wheat, potatoes and corn.

For 36 years, Guatemalans left their homes for the United States to escape a civil war that killed more than 150,000 and crippled the economy.

A peace agreement ended the conflict in 1996. Yet Guatemala remains a nation of grinding poverty. Per-capita income is $1,500 a year. The infant mortality rate is seven times higher than Colorado's.

"Things are so hard we can barely put food in our mouths," says Santos Hernandez, a Cucuna farmer who has worked as a migrant in the United States. "In the end, we are willing to risk our lives to have something we don't have here. I would tell my son to go."

Osveli and Noe planned their trip for weeks. But when Dec. 5 came and they finally slipped across the border into Mexico, it was no easy decision.

"We left Guatemala because over there there's nothing. There's no money - nothing," Noe Sales says.

"My mom just cried. But she felt it was best that we go."

The brothers met the first smuggler at the Mexican-Guatemalan border. Transito Diaz was his name, and he was no stranger to the Saleses.

Transito - literally transit - is well-known in and around Cucuna. He lives in a village about an hour away, and his men cruise the shabby border town of Tacana looking for customers from the countryside.

"He can be cruel, and he can be mean. He can be kind, and he can be good," says Elia Escalante, a waitress in Tacana.

For $1,400, he led Osveli and Noe across the rugged mountains of southern Mexico to Mexico City more than 600 miles north. They hitchhiked and paid motorists to ferry them, but a good deal of it was done on foot - up and down trails, through jungles and across rivers. They slept in their wet clothes.

"Osveli seemed to be very happy for most of the way," Noe says. "He always remembered our mother and our father. We thought the trip was going to turn out fine."

In Mexico City, they boarded a bus that dropped them off in Altar, a dusty speck of a place in the desert an hour south of the United States. Altar has become a primary staging area for illegal immigrants.

They had been on the road for nearly two weeks and hadn't eaten in days. They were hungry, but food would have to wait.

They met a second smuggler. For $700, the last of the money, he led Osveli and Noe through the desert to Nogales, Mexico - hard against the border and maybe the end of the line.

The next hours were a blur. Noe called Irma in Naples and begged for more money. She scraped together $1,400 and sent a wire - enough to get them into the United States in the dark of night. They were shuttled to a safe house near a big city. Noe heard the name Phoenix, but he couldn't be sure. There, two smugglers demanded more: $1,200 to drive them to Florida. Noe pleaded with them. I don't have it, he said, but I can get it once we're there.

The smugglers pondered these terms. They accepted.

Quickly, the brothers were herded into the back of a filthy van with 11 others. They were handed a bottle. If you have to go, go in here, they were told. Then they were handed another bottle. If you get thirsty, drink this.

Noe opened it. It smelled like gasoline. He'd just stay thirsty.

The smugglers told the group to keep out of sight, down on the floor and behind the tinted glass.

Noe needed no encouragement. He lay down to sleep and looked over at Osveli. He could see pain on his little brother's face, the hunger in his eyes.

It was the last time he would see his brother alive.

A deadly turn

The highway shoots across Baca County like a bullet, straight and narrow for mile after mesmerizing mile.

Then, about 20 minutes west of Springfield, the road ricochets, and, in an instant, U.S. 160 turns north nearly 90 degrees.

"The sign there says 35 mph, and you better believe it means 35 mph," says Dean Ormiston, a rancher and paramedic who's been to more wrecks there than he can remember.

An island of dirt south of the highway has become a graveyard for vehicles driven by disbelievers. It's littered with slices of blown-out tires. Pieces of bumpers. Shards of glass. A big pile of rotting potatoes from a truck that overturned.

And then there are the reminders of the curve's most recent victims. A little pink comb. A couple of disposable razors. A bloodied pant leg. A plastic bottle of car deodorizer, its label in Spanish.

The deadly December rollover wasn't the first involving illegal immigrants at the spot.

A couple of years ago, a U-Haul truck overturned there. Locked in the back were 26 illegal immigrants who had been in the dark for 20 hours since leaving California en route to Florida.

"It didn't smell too good back there," Ormiston remembers. "We treat our cattle better than that."

That group was put up in a Springfield motel to wait for the INS. The next day, the call came: Cut them loose. Soon, a Mercedes and another U-Haul truck pulled into town. The immigrants climbed aboard and were gone.

"I really hated for them to get into that truck and leave," Ormiston says. "I mean, they could've died before they ever got to Florida."

Osveli and Raquel Jimenez did. They lay dying on the curve as the sun came up Dec. 23. Many of the others in the van were battered.

Marilyn Chenoweth had never seen anything like it in the 12 years she has worked as a nurse at Southeast Colorado Hospital.

"It was quite a day," she says. "The initial call we got said three were injured. We had no idea how many were coming in."

Six nurses and one doctor were on duty when the victims began to arrive. Within a half-hour, the halls of the 25-bed hospital were filled with medical staffers and 14 frightened patients who were cold, hungry and hurting.

"As they came in through the door, I took the boy because he was in the worst shape," Chenoweth says.

Osveli had deep cuts on his head and face, and when Chenoweth shined a pen light into his eyes, his pupils stared back at her, fixed and lifeless.

They worked on him for an hour, inserting a tube into his lungs for him to breathe, but he never regained consciousness. Eventually, his heart beat began to slow. Finally, it stopped.

"It's sometimes hard to tell what people look like when they have blood all over them," Chenoweth says. "But he had a very angelic face."

Out in the hallway, none of the patients spoke English. When they were asked their names, most just stared at the floor and put a hand up as if to say no. Nurses slapped numbered pieces of tape on their shirts to identify them.

News of the wreck raced through Springfield like a summer grass fire. A waitress at the truck stop on Main Street, herself a Mexican immigrant, left her tables to translate. A collection was taken up to buy a 10-year-old boy in the van a Christmas present. Others brought the victims food and clothing - new underwear, socks, sweats and winter coats. One family, their father near death down the hall from the commotion, left and returned with a box of food.

"They said they knew that's what their dad would've done," Chenoweth says.

Weeks later, the crash was still the talk of Springfield, a small farming town which, in some basic human ways, is not unlike the ones these immigrants were from.

"What do I know about Guatemala?" asks Chenoweth, a mother of three. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What I knew was that this boy is someone's child."

Springfield, population 1,400, is typical of the isolated towns that dot Colorado's eastern plains. It's a place where most people work hard on farms and ranches. A place where the young are apt to move away. A place where Main Street is pretty much the only street, and it's peppered with empty storefronts.

The December crash was reported in the local Plainsman Herald the next time it published - a week later: Five paragraphs next to a half-page photo spread of the high school's all-state football and volleyball players.

Springfield is easygoing, friendly. When the Rev. Pat Walsh took over from his brother at the Catholic church three years ago, the 66-year-old priest felt a bit uncomfortable in town. Everyone kept waving to him, even before they knew who he was.

"I felt a little ridiculous," Walsh says, but he soon got used to it. "You're not a stranger here. Even if you're from Guatemala."

Neil Harmon, the deputy coroner, deals with few strangers at Rich Funeral Home. "I bet I know 95 percent of the people who walk through my door."

On Christmas Eve, however, Harmon had two strangers on his hands.

It would take a week for the INS to identify Jimenez using a phone number they found in his pants and a scar on his stomach.

The person with the key to Osveli Sales' identity sat 260 miles away, eating alone in the Denver Rescue Mission.

Noe Sales was lost. He had woken up at Denver Health Medical Center a week earlier, flown in on a helicopter. He was disoriented and in pain from a severe head injury. But before immigration officials could talk to him, Sales was discharged.

"They gave me a bottle of aspirin, and they put me in a taxi," he says.

It was a quick, one-way trip to the rescue mission. There, he met Carmine Corica, who was working as a volunteer with his wife, Razz, and their daughter. They noticed Sales eating by himself - and the fresh cuts and bruises covering his face. They sat down with him.

Sales told the Coricas in Spanish that he had no idea how he had gotten to Denver. All he could remember was that he and his little brother were in the back of a van heading to their sister in Florida.

"But he had no clue what Florida was," Carmine Corica says. "He had no clue how far it was."

A homeless man had listened to Sales' story and remembered reading of the crash. He gave him a newspaper clipping; Sales pulled it out and handed it to Corica.

Perhaps his brother had made it to Florida after the crash, Noe Sales said. Or maybe immigration had caught him and sent him back to Mexico or Guatemala. Or maybe he was in jail.

"We felt we got to help Noe," Corica says. "This was a guy lost in a lost world."

The Coricas began making phone calls - to Guatemala, to Florida - trying to track down Osveli.

No luck. Carmine Corica reminded Sales that the Baca County coroner still hadn't identified the two who had died. Could one of them be Osveli? They decided to drive down and see.

When they walked into Harmon's funeral home, Noe Sales was nervous. The more questions Harmon asked, the edgier he got.

Then Harmon pulled back the white sheets.

Sales studied the young boy.

"I think it's my friend." It was all he would say.

"When we walked out of the funeral home," Corica says, "the tears welled up in his eyes before I shut the door, and he looked at me - I'll never forget the look - and he said, `It's my little brother.' "

The drive back to Denver took four hours. Sales cried most of the way.

They called Harmon when they got back and told him the truth. Harmon contacted the boy's sister in Florida.

"They were so fearful," says Harmon, 62, who lost a son in a car crash two decades ago. "They were afraid I was going to cremate him and that his soul would go to hell."

Instead, Harmon promised he'd find some way to send the body back to Guatemala. Both bodies??, in fact.

It would have been far easier for him to bury them in Springfield, in a pauper's grave. But he was touched by what had happened. The risks Noe and Osveli Sales had taken. The mix of terror and uncertainty in their sister's voice.

"I've never had to deal with that kind of fear," he says. "They were looking for somebody to help them. Guess that was me."

Harmon and his wife Judy would spend countless hours over the next several weeks raising money to send the bodies back.

First, though, Neil Harmon went to the Salvation Army and picked out new clothes for them. Jeans and western snap-button shirts, neatly pressed.

"These are farm boys," he says. "When they go home, they'll be dressed in clothes they're accustomed to."

A destination too far

The farm worker approaches with suspicion, wary eyes peering from beneath the shadow of a New York Yankees cap.

"Es usted inmigracion?"

Here, in the migrant camps outside Naples where Osveli and Noe Sales were headed, strangers usually mean trouble. And trouble is something the vegetable pickers who work this region - many of them in the country illegally - don't need but can never escape.

Just the day before, for instance, a rumor swept this camp that the INS was planning a raid. Overnight, more than a dozen workers disappeared, quietly moving on to other places.

A migrant's life is fluid, with rhythms set by the seasonal ripening of tomatoes and other crops. Winters in Florida. Spring in Georgia and South Carolina. Summer and fall in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Then back to Florida.

In 1960, when Edward R. Murrow wanted to show the conditions under which migrants worked and lived, he brought his cameras to Florida. The documentary Harvest of Shame stunned the nation. Thirty-nine harvests later, the work is still hard, the living conditions still bad.

Some 10,000 migrants work on farms around Naples, a city that's predominantly white, wealthy and old, a city that has more golf courses per capita than any other in the nation.

The migrants remain largely out of sight and out of mind. On Friday nights, they are hauled into town in rickety school buses to shop for groceries at Publix. On Sundays, it's Kmart.

The rest of the time, six days a week, they move slowly through the rows, stooping to pluck tomatoes from the vines.

"I'd be whipped in an hour," says Elvie Engle, who manages one large farm.

It's backbreaking work that doesn't pay well: 40 to 50 cents for each 32-pound bucket - about 1 1/2 cents per pound.

At Publix, tomatoes go for $1.79 a pound.

"It's absolutely the American way," Larry Lipman says.

Lipman employs several hundred pickers on the 4,500-acre spread his grandfather established in the late 1940s. In the early '70s, the family began providing free housing for workers - an extraordinary benefit considering that broken-down trailers in most camps rent for $250 or more a week.

Lipman stepped into a pink cinder-block bunkhouse that sleeps four. "They're allowed to fix it up as nice as they want." The men who live here haven't tried.

The room is about 20 feet square and has a concrete floor. There's a table made of raw lumber. Two metal bunk beds with thin mattresses supported by plywood boards. A dented refrigerator, rust eating away its door. A portable three-burner stove, one knob missing, another cracked in half. A single bare light bulb overhead. A bathroom with a shower stall that's lost a battle with mildew.

"No, they're not fancy," Lipman says. "I'm not saying it's a great life."

But it was good enough to lure Irma Sales from Guatemala.

"She loves living here," says her friend, Mary Lou Ibarra. "Irma is a really hard worker. She runs with those buckets from sunup to sundown."

Ibarra is a good judge. She grew up in Florida in a family that followed the crops across the Southeast. She and her sisters worked the fields. At 52, those days are long behind her, replaced with a desire to help newcomers who find themselves lost.

Her husband works as a maintenance man for a farm, and they live in one of its labor camps, in a trailer with a sagging ceiling filled with garage-sale furniture and pictures of Ibarra's children. A large and gregarious woman, Ibarra collects food and clothing for those who need it, dispenses advice and lets people use her phone.

Her husband says she shouldn't do so much. Recently, their phone got turned off after they couldn't pay a $1,000 long-distance bill - mostly calls to Latin America by others.

When she first met Irma Sales four years ago, Ibarra was struck by the young woman's sincerity and innocence.

"She was like a little kid," Ibarra says.

Irma couldn't read or write. Couldn't count money. Had no idea how to put a plastic diaper on her newborn girl.

Ibarra took Irma under her wing, even arranging for a doctor to examine her right eye, the one that had turned blind and milky white after she was hit by a rock back home in Cucuna as a child. Irma was self-conscious about that eye; people in town stared. But the doctor said there was nothing he could do, and Ibarra told Irma to forget about it.

"She really doesn't need it," she says, "because she's a beautiful person inside."

But in the weeks after the crash, Ibarra noticed Irma grow more fearful. She was saddened by Osveli's death, then grateful that Noe survived.

Carmine Corica, who had found Noe dazed in the Denver Rescue Mission, drove him to Naples where he was reunited with his sister at a gas staion. At first, Irma didn't recognize him. She hadn't seen her brother in seven years, not since she left home.

"They just looked at each other for a long time," Ibarra remembers. "Then they hugged each other and cried."

Noe was torn apart by Osveli's death.

"If you gave him a plate of food, he'd fill it up with tears," Ibarra says. He rarely left the tiny bunkhouse he shared with Irma, her husband and little girl. He couldn't sleep. He talked about killing himself.

"I wish I had never come," Noe told Irma. "Why didn't I die instead?"

"You don't choose your destiny," Irma replied. "It's chosen for you."

The crash of the van outside Springfield threw dozens of lives into disarray. Seven men are still being held without bond by federal authorities, named as witnesses in the smuggling case against the van's two drivers.

"I would hope their families would know where they are, but I can't say that they do," says Ed Harris, the court-appointed attorney representing the seven. "I'm not a hundred percent sure, given the cultural and language barriers, that they fully understood that I was on their side."

They were uncertain, scared, Harris says. "I don't blame them."

In late January, an INS agent called Ibarra. He told her he'd like to talk with Noe, that he, too, was a witness in the case. Ibarra told Irma.

A few days later, without warning, they were gone, Ibarra says.

She says Irma left her a note: I don't know where we're going, but I'll call you when we get there.

She says she hadn't heard from Irma and Noe since.

She was trying to protect them.

Irma's house

The battered bunkhouse door cracks open and a barefoot girl peeks out. There are flowers and hearts on her shirt, caution in her big brown eyes.

"Is Irma Sales here?" she is asked.

She looks this way and that, saying nothing. Then she turns and runs back to the kitchen.

"Irma?" she yells.

The sound of a television, some children's show, drifts past the bedsheets covering the windows. The evening sky is a palette of pastels, pink and blue streaks. Florida colors.

Two minutes pass. The girl returns.

"She's not here."

"We're not immigration," she is told. "Tell Irma we have news about her brother who died in Colorado."

The girl runs back to the kitchen again. In a few minutes, a van carrying a dozen Hispanics and Arizona plates will pull into a gas station out on the highway. Another load arriving on the pipeline.

The girl returns.

"She's not here."

She closes the door tight. Night is coming, and there's work to be done in the morning.

Guatemala City

If Osveli Sales had lived to be 57, he would have looked just like his father. They are carbon copies, Cristobal Sales says, and in that he can take comfort. He doesn't have a picture of Osveli - a camera would be an unthinkable luxury in Cucuna - and so he will see his son's face whenever he looks in the mirror.

That is, when he passes a mirror in town. Cristobal Sales doesn't own a mirror either.

His 5-foot-5 frame is bent at a permanent angle from a lifetime of hauling 100-pound sacks of corn up and down mountain trails. His arms are long and sinewy. His hands are rough as sandpaper. His eyes, deep in thought, reveal nothing.

He stands in the hallway of Funerales E. Galindo in Guatemala City's old quarter, a noisy jumble of traffic-choked streets and crumbling colonial buildings where beggars share the sidewalks with shotgun-toting guards protecting storefronts. Sales and a son-in-law left Cucuna about midnight and took the 2 a.m. bus to Guatemala City, a nine-hour ride, to pick up Osveli's body.

"I was very concerned when they left," Sales says of Osveli and Noe. "I would have told them they shouldn't leave. There may be money to be made in the United States, but it's too risky.

"It's sad that I wasn't there to tell them."

Instead, Sales was here in the capital, visiting a daughter, when his sons took off. He didn't hear the news for weeks, and even then, Sales figured they had just gone to Mexico to pick coffee beans. Thousands of Guatemalan men who live in villages along the border make the trip, a river of labor flowing across the frontier in search of work.

In Cucuna, work is life. It begins early and never ends.

Children as young as 6 tend goats and sheep. By 8 or 10, they take to the fields, raising corn, beans, wheat and potatoes during the summer rainy season, picking coffee during the dry winters.

By the time they turn 14 - Osveli's age - childhood is a distant memory.

"At 14, you're a man," Sales says. And so a 14-year-old comes and goes as he pleases and doesn't necessarily tell his father that he is going to the United States.

Osveli Sales and Raquel Jimenez didn't know each other, yet both found themselves on the same van.

Ten days ago, both their families found themselves in the same funeral home.

"It's the young that usually go," says Luis Domingos Vasquez, noting that his nephew Raquel didn't tell him he was going to the United States either. "We, the adults, know that it's very dangerous, very treacherous to go to the United States. That you can be killed. That's why they don't tell us."

Edgar Galindo has seen them go and come back like this time and again.

"I get about 10 a year," the funeral home's owner says, meaning bodies of young Guatemalans killed in the United States. "But keep in mind, there's other funeral homes in Guatemala City."

Sometimes, families spend their life savings to bring a body back, and the fact is that if it hadn't been for the fund-raising efforts of Neil and Judy Harmon - who paid part of the cost out of their own pockets - Osveli Sales and Raquel Jimenez wouldn't have made it home.

"We didn't have any other choice," Judy Harmon says. "We made a commitment."

On Feb. 3, the Harmons traveled from Springfield to Guatemala City with the bodies to see an end to the story.

But for Cristobal Sales, the arrival of his son's body at the airport is just the beginning of an odyssey that will drag on into the night and the next day and day after that.

At the airport, Sales signs some papers and is told to wait. So he does. For four hours he stands quietly outside a chain-link fence, his eyes avoiding the white cardboard box sitting in the hot sun on a cargo dock.

Roberto Mendez is losing his patience.

"In this country, when the authorities tell them to wait, they wait," says Mendez, who runs the Guatemala Cultural House, a Denver-based support group for immigrants. He has flown down to help the families with the funeral arrangements.

Finally, Mendez has had enough. He persuades security guards to let Cristobal Sales onto the dock.

"Can I see my son?" Sales asks him.

"Yes," Mendez answers. "That is your right."

The packing straps are cut and the cardboard box lifted. Underneath lies a slate-metal casket.

Mendez opens it, unleashing an overpowering odor. Then he unzips the black body bag.

Sales steps forward and peers at the face. He isn't sure. He reaches in the bag, thrusting his arm down deep, groping for something unseen.

A crooked right index finger, the result of a soccer injury.

"It's him," Sales says and bursts into tears.

They bring Osveli's casket back to the funeral home and place it in the chapel, a long, windowless room decorated with a crucifix and candles, Naugahyde sofas and plastic hanging plants.

That evening, Raquel Jimenez's casket joins Osveli's. On one side of the room sit the Saleses, on the other the Jimenezes. Six people with no place else to stay.

A woman who has been paid $5 to take care of the families wheels in a cart. Coffee and ham sandwiches wrapped in napkins. Sales takes one and puts it in his backpack.

They are tired, and a few lie down on the couches to try to get some sleep. The light from the candles around the caskets dances across the walls. Five hours from now, at 3:30 a.m., they will leave for the mountains.

It is going to be a short night. And a very long one.

The homecoming

Two pickup trucks sit in front of the funeral home, the purr of their motors breaking the silence of the deserted street. They really aren't big enough for the job, but they will have to do.

The two boxes containing the caskets are carried out by the men. Cristobal Sales helps Vidal Jimenez with his son. Jimenez returns the favor.

They lash the boxes down with cords and take off, the caskets sticking out the back of each truck.

Robbers armed with automatic weapons left over from the civil war prowl Guatemala's highways at night, so the families will drive together until the sun comes up. Safety in numbers, or at least the illusion of it.

They climb out of the city on the Pan-American Highway, a two-lane snake of a road that winds through terrain so rugged that Colorado looks flat by comparison.

The drive is a nonstop game of chicken with careering cars, overloaded trucks and busted-up buses jockeying for position, swerving into on-coming traffic and narrowly missing each other while passing on blind curves.

Four hours west of Guatemala City, the pickups split. Vidal Jimenez and his son head north; Cristobal Sales and his son continue west toward Cucuna.

The highway climbs and dips and climbs some more. Eventually, Sales' pickup makes a right, leaving the asphalt behind.

What comes next is bone-crushing, three hours on a washboard road that rises higher and higher over the arid mountains of the southern Sierra Madre and over a 10,000-foot pass.

The truck rattles past fields on 45-degree slopes where men with machetes chop at corn growing in stingy soil. Past children caked in dust with their goats and sheep. Past entire families - mom, dad, the kids - chipping rocks from hillsides with hammers to sell as construction material.

Higher and higher the pickup goes, into the town of Tacana and through it, plunging down an even worse minefield, all huge boulders and bomb-sized craters.

Finally, the truck bottoms out, and Sales and the others get out to lighten the load.

He hasn't slept in nearly 40 hours, yet he runs after the truck, stumbling on rocks as he goes, trying to keep up but slowly losing ground.

More than a mile later, they arrive at the end of the road, to a crowd of people who have come from the village.

Cucuna is four miles away - and 3,000 feet up.

Shouldn't we eat first to build our strength? some of the men ask.

No, no, others argue, let's get on with it.

And so they do.

Several men hoist the box, jerk it onto their shoulders and begin to run up the trail.

As they go, more and more people join the procession. At last, a hundred people are marching up the steep slope following the box, old tennis shoes and tattered loafers kicking up dust in their wake.

"Next group!" someone yells, and fresh men grab the box.

It weighs 335 pounds, and the men struggle with the load as they scramble up switchbacks, those on the left using one hand to claw and push at the side of the mountain.

"Cambio! A change!" comes a call, and a new crew takes over.

Up they go, two of Osveli's sisters sobbing all the way.

"Mi hermanito. My little brother," they wail, their cries sounding like music.

Later that evening, Cristobal Sales will finish making the concrete blocks that will be used tomorrow to build Osveli's nicho, an above-ground crypt. He wishes he could talk to Noe, the son who survived.

"Tell him I'm sad," he says. "Tell him to take care of himself."

From on top of a donkey he watches the men take turns hauling the box. They are in good humor, some even laughing at having taken on this bizarre challenge and besting it.

"Take a break!" someone shouts.

"No," comes the answer. "Andale! Keep going!"

Higher and higher. People praying. Others weeping. A woman breast-feeding her baby.

Then, two hours in, the trail crests a ridge.

Cucuna.

They carry the box to the Sales house, a one-room mud and straw structure with a metal roof and a dirt floor. Smoke billowing from a fire under a huge pot of tamales blends with hundreds of swarming flies.

The cardboard is removed, exposing the casket, and, suddenly, the crowd surges toward it.

"Osveli! Osveli!" they chant.

They lift the casket once more, carrying it inside the house. Mourners pour in after it, dozens and dozens of people packing into the small, stale room.

The adults continue their deafening chant. The children stand stunned and silent.

Osveli's mother is at the head of the casket. Eulalia Vasquez Perez took ill when she heard of her son's death. Six weeks later, she is wailing.

"Mi principito! My little prince!" she screams. "My little spoiled one."

She spits the words out again and again and again - raw, anguished, a mother's cry for her child.

"My little prince! My little spoiled one!"

Her voice carries from the house and down the trail, the one that leads to Mexico, the one her son traveled to find a better life in America.

The journey took two months. Now, Osveli Sales has come home.

Osveli Sales was one of an estimated 275,000 people who entered the United States illegally last year. Federal officials put the number of illegal immigrants in this country at about 5 million, 45,000 of them in Colorado. But those estimates, they acknowledge, are probably low.

Most jobs for undocumented workers used to be in California, Texas and Florida. But more and more workers today can be found on North Carolina's tobacco farms. In Gerogia's onion fields. In Iowa's meatpacking plants. In Chaicago's factories. In Vermont's orchards. In Denver's fast-food restaurants.

Congress has approved hefty budget increases for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The agency will open five new offices around Colorado this year. Almost 7,400 agents now patrol the U.S. - Mexican border, and the number is growing monthly.

But desperate people from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and hurricane-stricken Nicaragua and Honduras are undeterred. Like Osveli, they are ready to risk their lives to reach the promised land.

The route

Dec. 5 1998: Cucuna, Guatemala - Osveli Sales, 14, and his brother Noe, 19, cross into Mexico near their village of Cucuna.

Dec. 12 (approx): Mexico City - After 600 miles on foot and hitchhiking, the brothers reach Mexico City, where they board a bus toward the U.S. border.

Dec. 18 (approx): Altar, Mexico - The brothers reach Altar, a staging area for illegal immigrants.

Dec 20.: Nogales - A smuggler takes the brothers to the U.S. border near Nogales, Ariz. They are shuttled to a safe house probably near Phoenix.

Dec. 22: Phoenix - Wedged intothe back of a van, the Sales brothers and 11 other illegal immigrants head northeast through Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado.

Dec. 23: Southeastern Colorado - Van crashes on U.S. 160 west of Springfield. Osveli Sales and Raquel Jimenez die. Noe Sales is airlifted to Denver Health Medical Center.

Dec. 30 (approx): Denver - Noe Sales is befriended at the Denver Rescue Mission by Carmine Corica and his family. Corica later drives Sales to Naples, Fla., where Sales is reunited with his sister Irma.

Feb. 3 1999: Going home - Caskets carrying bodies of Jimenez and Osveli Sales are flown from Denver to Guatemala via Miami.

Staff Writer Hector Gutierrez contributed to the reporting of this story.

Featured

• DNC in Denver

  

  Complete coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

• The Crevasse

  

  A five-part series that examines one tragic day on Mount Rainier.

• Deadly denial

  

  Sick nuclear workers applied for government compensation but most haven't seen a dime.

• Final Salute

  

  The Rocky followed Maj. Steve Beck as he took on the most difficult duty of his career.

• 'Colorado's burning'

  

  Coverage of the state's worst wildfires.

• Columbine shootings

  

  Coverage of the April 20, 1999, shootings at Littleton's Columbine High School.

• The Crossing

  

  Colorado's deadliest traffic accident killed 20 children on Dec. 14, 1961.

• Osveli's journey

  

  Osveli Sales left Guatemala for a better life. Two months later, he came home in a box.

• Wake for an Indian warrior

  

  Oglala Sioux bestow a tribute to the first tribal fatality in Iraq.