On Patrol: Jumping border is a huge attraction

CHIHUAHUA, Mexico — All along Highway 16 on the way to Cuauhtemoc are billboards touting "Acciones de Progreso" by the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

"Third place for quality of life!" one proclaims in Spanish. "20,000 jobs created during 2005," another says.

Mile after mile on this country throughway, the government offers its high-profile promises.

"Vive la plenitud!"

But this is not the reality for 32-year-old Rosa Mendoza, who has food today but isn't sure how she will feed her two daughters tomorrow. It is not the reality for 12-year-old Cecilia Mendoza, whose throat is sore and raw one day when visitors come, but there is no money for medicine or a doctor. And it is certainly not the reality for Magdalena Calzadillas, 42, whose school-age son lives with a relative because she can't afford to care for him.

"No hay trabajo," the woman said recently from the yard of her cinder-block home. "There is no work."

There are millions more like the Mendoza/Calzadillas household among 104 million citizens of Mexico — millions with little education, few possibilities for work and with grand ideas about what possibilities lie north of the border in the United States.

Two in 10 Mexican citizens live on less than $1 a day, and nearly 37 percent of people live in poverty, according to a new report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Of those living in poverty, many will continue to eke out a living any way they can. Some will scrounge up enough money for visas and citizenship papers. But many will give up everything in an effort to get to the United States. Many will jump the border.

Were it not for Lupita, Rosa Mendoza says that's where she would be headed.

She thinks about going to the United States. She knows someone who could help smuggle them across. But her daughter Lupita is only 5, and Rosa won't take on the dangerous mission of crossing the border illegally. Not yet.

"Later, when she is older," Mendoza said through an interpreter. "It's too dangerous right now."

Sixteen years ago, Luis Diaz sidestepped snakes and scorpions in the Mexican desert on his walk across the border to California. He went a night and a day without water and food. He did it to find a job.

"Mexico," he said, "it's hard to work over there."

His first job in America was picking strawberries in the California sun.

Diaz, 33, eventually made his way to Utah, where he has worked for the same cement contractor the past nine years. His boss even put up a $6,000 insurance bond when Diaz was arrested on a warrant for unpaid traffic tickets and sent back to Mexico.