The Survivor Guatemalan still haunted by Allagash crash

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Part 3 of a 4-part series

Inside a spartan concrete house perched on a muddy hillside in La Democracia, Guatemala, a few miles east of the Mexican border, Edilberto Morales-Luis lies in bed, dreaming of America. These are not dreams about aspirations, though at age 24, he still has those too. No, they’re nightmares – vivid memories of the day his 14 companeros drowned in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

It’s just past 8 a.m. on Sept. 12, deep in Maine’s north woods, and a team of migrant brush-cutters – 10 from Honduras and five from a pair of impoverished Guatemalan villages in Central America’s highest mountain range, the Cuchumatanes – are inside a van that’s hurtling down a gravel logging road at more than 60 mph.

Some of the men have warned their driver, Juan Turcios-Matomoros, to slow down, but he pays them no heed. The job site is two-and-a-half hours from their Caribou apartment, and at around $10 per hour, time is money.

Morales-Luis sits in the van’s back seat, and in this recurring dream he looks forward and sees his friends smiling and laughing. “And then I wake up and think about it,” he says. “And I feel crazy.”

Since returning to Guatemala one week after the crash, Morales-Luis has had lots of time to ponder his good fortune that morning, even if he doesn’t feel so lucky now. A shoulder injury sustained in the accident prevents him from working, he says. And his seven-member family is now down to its last $300, though thousands of dollars from a Maine relief fund should arrive soon.

The small village of Bella Gloria is a 10-minute walk from a major junction on the Interamerican Highway, which links the country’s capital, about 200 miles to the east, with the Mexican border. Camoja Grande, part of the area known as La Democracia, serves as a makeshift bus station, an open-air market and, for many Central Americans with designs on reaching the United States, a staging ground.

Up the hill in Bella Gloria, the lure of America is just as strong. All of the men who drowned in the Allagash entered the country legally on temporary work visas, but some of them had previously tried and failed to enter illegally.

One of the deceased, Juan Mendez, was stopped six years ago at the Mexican border, according to his 21-year-old son Luis. Now despite his father’s death and against his mother’s wishes, Luis’ younger brother, Ismar, 17, says he eventually hopes to travel north to support the family. “I’m not afraid to go, he says, “because according to destiny, there’s a time for you to die.”

As the sole breadwinner in a house that includes his 23-year-old wife, Idalia, three children and his two grandparents, Morales-Luis has similar designs. He says he will leave in January, again as a brush-cutter for Idaho-based Evergreen Forestry Services, if he can finance the trip north.

The patio of his family’s home in Bella Gloria was the setting for a recent interview. The meeting was impromptu, but Morales-Luis was wearing a green jacket with the Evergreen logo and a tan cap that read “Maine,” giving the illusion he had dressed for the occasion. His hardened face betrayed experience beyond his years, and when he spoke, he flashed front teeth with gold etching bearing the letters “E-D-I,” which is short for his name, Edilberto.

As chickens, ducks and dogs scurried about, and women from the 160-house village lined up nearby to use a small mill to grind their corn, Morales-Luis tried to piece together his fragmentary memories of the worst traffic accident in Maine history.

The brush-cutting team’s foreman, Carlos Izaguirre of Honduras, was a more cautious driver, Morales-Luis recalls, but on the morning of Sept. 12, Turcios-Matomoros was behind the wheel. The workers warned him to slow down as he rounded a curve before the bridge. At around 8:05 a.m., the 2002 Dodge sped onto the rain-slick bridge, and its back left tire popped, the survivor recalls. Then the van fishtailed out of control.

When the van hit the water, its windshield broke, as did its left and back windows. Except for one tire, the vehicle sunk below the river’s surface, and water streamed in. There had been $1,400 cash in Morales-Luis’ pocket – about half of his savings after eight months with Evergreen- but it was washed away.

Morales-Luis does not remember how he escaped, but he estimates that he was underwater for about two minutes. Eventually his head bobbed to the surface, sank again and then resurfaced before his limited swimming skills got him to shore. He then climbed onto John’s Bridge.

In his waterlogged clothes, he spent the next 15 minutes screaming and crying for help, but no one could hear him. At around 8:20, a man in a green pickup truck drove toward the bridge, and Morales-Luis, who does not speak English, used hand signals to explain what had happened.

The driver used his radio to alert the Maine State Police. Another 15 minutes passed, and then authorities were on the scene, Morales-Luis recalls. The truck driver took him home and offered him food as well as a dry shirt, pants and shoes.

Morales-Luis was later taken to the hospital, where x-rays were taken and he was discharged. “They told me it was nothing, just a bruise, and they didn’t give me any medicine,” he says.

One week after the accident, its only survivor says, the wife of an Evergreen employee took him to the Bangor International Airport. He was given $1,400 cash to replace the money lost in the Allagash, he says. Then he boarded an Atlanta-bound flight and arrived in Guatemala City later the same day.

When Morales-Luis returned to Bella Gloria, he found a situation as bleak as the one he had left eight months earlier. Traditionally the men in the village – and throughout the Cuchumatanes – have worked in the coffee fields. But this year the world market price for coffee, which was over $1 per pound four years ago, has remained very low. It has recently recovered somewhat to around 70 cents per pound this week – but according to Luis Mendez, the per-pound sales price is now about one cent higher than the cost of production.

For the village’s farmers, the low prices make their abundant coffee bushes’ red berries, the seeds of which can be roasted and re-sold at high prices abroad, virtually worthless.

But that is only the first problem for Morales-Luis. Even if profitable work were plentiful, he says, the injury to his left shoulder makes it difficult to perform any labor more strenuous than house painting. Standing on his patio, he lifts the arm to show that significant torque either upward and backward causes pain. And he says he can’t afford to have the injury re-evaluated by a Guatemalan doctor.

That raises the family’s financial situation. Morales-Luis was able to save and send home about $1,500 while he worked in the southern United States last spring, and later in Maine’s north woods. There was also the $1,400 he received after the accident and a $600 paycheck he was sent after returning to Bella Gloria. But virtually all of that money went to pay debts in Guatemala, including the cost of his plane ticket to the United States last January.

Such debt is hardly unusual in Guatemalan villages, where many men owe money for failed attempts to travel to the United States. The illegal, overland journey is more expensive than the legal route because it is extremely dangerous, and the guides, known as “coyotes,” command fees that are enormous by Guatemalan standards. One of the deceased, Alberto Sales Domingo, who hailed from the nearby village of El Naranjo, was trying to pay off debts of more than $5,000 from two prior, failed trips when he went north in January, his 19-year-old daughter Consuelo said.

But for the families of the 14 men who died in the Allagash, financial relief is on the way. Under the terms of their life insurance policies, each of the families will receive about $250 to $300 per week for about 91/2 years, plus extra for dependents. The amount for the dependents will continue to be paid until the youngest child turns 18.

The Mendez family last week received its first payment from a life insurance policy that will yield about $150,000 over the next six years.

That is a fortune by Guatemalan standards, and some of the other families will receive much more.

A smaller package of financial assistance also should arrive soon for Morales-Luis. Some $6,850 of the money donated to a relief fund following the crash has been earmarked for the lone survivor. But that was not clear to Morales-Luis during last Wednesday’s interview. Only recently was phone service installed in this area, and contact with the outside world remains extremely difficult. Several days after newspaper readers in Maine knew that Morales-Luis would receive the cash, he and his family still were unaware.

Morales-Luis says he wants to resume working for Evergreen in January, and the company is willing to take him if he is able to cover transportation costs, but he still has grievances. He says Evergreen told him they would send worker’s compensation for his shoulder injury, but that money has never come. He also wants counseling for the trauma he has endured since the crash.

Evergreen’s insurer, Liberty Mutual, is contesting the payment of worker’s compensation to Morales-Luis.

The company wants proof that he was physically or emotionally disabled by the accident. A hearing before the state’s Worker’s Compensation Board is scheduled for next week.

During the interview, which lasted several hours, Morales-Luis obligingly recounted the traumatic details of the crash and the hardships of its aftermath. Then he agreed to pay a visit to the nearby cemetery where the van crash’s four Guatemalan victims – Mendez, Domingo, and brothers Cecilio and Sebastian Morales – are buried.

He repeated his desire to return to the United States in 2003 if he has enough money. At the cemetery, he stared solemnly at the grave of Juan Mendez, which carries the epitaph: “The American Dream took you away from us.”

NEWS reporter Deborah Turcotte contributed to this story.

Kevin Wack is a former Associated Press reporter.