Deathtrap for Wetbacks

Barely audible cries and the muffled thudding of fists came from a rented truck parked beneath a pitiless sun in San Antonio, Texas. Summoned to in vestigate, police smashed the truck's locked back door, peered inside and recoiled. Crammed into the airless, oven-hot space were 47 Mexican laborers. One was dead, two dying. Fifteen others had to be hospitalized for heat prostration. The truck driver had fled. For the hapless Mexicans, it was the end of a dream of jobs in Chicago as illegal wetback immigrants. Each had paid 1,250 pesos ($100) to be brought into the U.S. by smugglers who operate like latter-day slave traders.

After being rescued from the abandoned truck -- and then arrested -- Otilio Pantoja, 31, a ranch hand with five children, told of painstakingly saving enough pesos to pay off a smuggler. With others, he journeyed to Piedras Negras opposite Eagle Pass, Texas. "Night came," he recounted later. "We took all our clothes, rolled them in a bundle so they wouldn't get wet, then waded across the river naked, holding our clothes over our heads." The wetbacks met "The Man" in a thicket. He took their money, then locked them in the truck. After 15 minutes on the road, the cramped Mexicans discovered that there was no ventilation. "The air was gone," Pantoja said. "We couldn't breathe. I fainted." Others managed to pierce two small holes in the roof, but there was still not nearly enough air for 47 men. Leonel Zavila, 18, told of banging vainly on the window behind the driver's seat during the ride. "How can people be so inhuman?"

Green Cards. Wetbacks from Mexico have been entering the U.S. in a rising flood. Last month border patrolmen of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service seized more than 14,000--1,000 more than the monthly average. Thousands more filter past roadblocks and airplane spotters or wade the shallow Rio Grande in search of jobs as "stoop" laborers on farms. Most wetback workers make it across the border on their own. Illegal labor contractors smuggle others across.

The traffic keeps border patrols busy from Brownsville, Texas, to Chula Vista, Calif. Last week patrols near San Antonio intercepted two camper trucks, one containing 15 wetbacks, the other 17. All but a handful of the illegal immigrants are simply sent back across the border, but many return. They have become a special curse to the A.F.L.C.I.O. United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, which is waging an uphill struggle to organize migrant laborers. Illegal workers, the union charges, have been hired by union-hating farmers to break strikes. About 2,200 wetbacks have been arrested in the past six months in California's Kern County, the scene of a bitter strike against growers of table grapes organized by Cesar Chavez, leader of the farm workers. Other strikebreakers, the union alleges, have been recruited illegally from among "green-card" workers--aliens who hold U.S. residence permits but commute from Mexico. The going price for a forged green card, the union says, is a mere $150.

Adios, Braceros. The added influx of wetbacks coincides with moves by the U.S. to restrict legal entry of migrant workers. Only two weeks ago, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz bid adios to the braceros, who once crossed the border as contract laborers at the rate of 400,000 a year. The braceros, Wirtz announced, were no longer needed. Union organizers welcomed the move. Their only complaint is that the braceros have become dispensable primarily because the U.S. Government, bowing to the growers' wishes, is so lax in its vigilance of the 2,013-mile border that thousands of Mexican laborers cross into the U.S. illegally.

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