Death in the desert A migrant’s journey from Brazil

As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.

“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”

But one morning in early August, as the two women sat at the entrance to their Covid ward, Lenilda announced she was leaving but, she assured her friend: “I’ll be back.”

Two days later Lenilda, 49, headed off. Five weeks later and more than 6,400km north, US border patrol agents found Lenilda’s body in the desert near the town of Deming, New Mexico. She was curled up by a mesquite bush, wearing light brown tactical boots and army fatigues, and had little with her but a blue Brazilian passport tucked into a waist bag.

The incident report said she was “positioned as if she was lying down on her right side, legs slightly bent and her hands covering her face”.

Capt Michael Brown, one of the law enforcement officers on the scene, said: “I’ll be honest with you, this particular case probably hit me harder than any other case that I’ve had with the migrants out in the desert. My heart just ached for her.”

The nature of Lenilda’s demise was not the only thing that shocked the officer. “This was the first Brazilian person I’d encountered, alive or dead,” said Brown, who has worked on the US-Mexico border for 26 years. “It obviously says that the conditions where she is from are getting just as bad as they are everywhere else.”

A coronavirus-era depression is driving a new, perilous exodus from South America as middle-class families flee the financial hardship, unemployment and inflation wrought by the health crisis. “The region that took the greatest hit to total economic output in 2020 was Latin America – a 7% decline. That’s roughly what you would expect from a year of civil war,” said Michael Clemens, a migration expert at the Center for Global Development.

Other factors included the US recovery, the choking off of most lawful migration channels under Donald Trump, and the mistaken belief among migrants that Joe Biden would be less hostile than his predecessor.

Many of those abandoning South America are Haitians who fled to countries such as Brazil and Chile after their homeland was hit by a deadly earthquake in 2010. Covid has uprooted them again, with more than 90,000 Haitians marching through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle passage between Colombia and Panama, towards the US this year.

But a growing number of South Americans are also on the move. More than 46,000 Brazilians were detained at the US southern border between October 2020 and August 2021, when Lenilda began her final journey, compared with fewer than 18,000 in 2019 and 284 a decade earlier. The number of Ecuadorians has also soared, with nearly 89,000 apprehended over the same period, compared with about 13,000 in 2019.

“It’s hard to overestimate how much for some people this was a livelihooddestroying recession… Covid has set everything back,” said Andrew Selee, the president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. “This has really taken us 30 or 40 years back to a time when the economies in South America were really fragile.”

Relatives say Lenilda, who worked as a cleaner in Columbus, Ohio, from 2004 to 2007, began plotting her escape from Brazil after a gruelling stint battling Covid at the hospital for just 1,100 reais ($200) a month.

“What can you do with 1,100 reais?” asked her daughter, Genifer Oliveira dos Santos, as she sat on the veranda of her mother’s bungalow. Genifer, 28, said her mother had planned to return to Ohio, where she still had friends and family, to help fund her two daughters going to college.

In April, Lenilda flew to Mexico and surrendered to US immigration officials near the town of Mexicali, hoping they would allow her to stay while her asylum request was processed. Instead she was arrested and spent three months in a warehouse-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre in Calexico before being deported to Brazil in July.

But Lenilda was determined to return. Less than a month later, on 12 August, she left Vale do Paraíso for a second time. She boarded a plane to Mexico City and made for a different stretch of the border after agreeing to pay smugglers $25,000 to guide her through the desert from Ascensión, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, to a safe house in Deming.

“She said it would take two days and two nights, because it’s a long way – over 50km,” Genifer said.

In the early hours of Monday 6 September, Lenilda set off towards the border with three childhood friends and a smuggler. “She was really confident. She just seemed so happy,” said Genifer, who remembered being assured that by Thursday her mother would have arrived.

Things quickly went wrong, however, as the group trudged north through mountainous terrain in what Brown said would have been punishing conditions. “From July to the middle of September is monsoon season for us, so we’re dealing with summer desert temperatures – anywhere from mid90s up – and … I’m guessing probably 70% humidity or more,” he said. “So it was extraordinarily hot.”

Brown suspects Lenilda fell behind as a result of exhaustion and dehydration. “There was no water found anywhere near her … and [in the] best circumstances in this area, at that time of year and temperature, she wouldn’t have lasted any more than three days tops without water.”

By Monday afternoon, Lenilda’s family believe, she had been abandoned as her companions pressed on. Panicked, she turned on her mobile phone to ask relatives for help. “Ask them to bring me some water,” Leci remembered his sister begging in a WhatsApp voice message. “I’m dying of thirst.”

Lenilda shared her live location, and distraught relatives thousands of miles away tracked her movements across a desolate outback inhabited

‘She said it would take two days and nights, because it is a long way. She seemed so happy’

mostly by coyotes, cattle and gophers.

Then, at 3.08pm local time on Tuesday, the orange circle marking Lenilda’s position ceased to move. “That was the moment we realised she hadn’t made it,” Leci said. “She saved so many lives, only to go off to Mexico and lose her own.”

It would take police another eight days to locate Lenilda’s remains.

“Had she made it 400 yards north she probably could have been able to make contact with somebody who lives in a caravan,” said Brown.

Lenilda’s death has rattled Vale do Paraíso, a close-knit farming community itself founded by migrants when Brazil’s military dictatorship bulldozed a highway through the rainforest 50 years ago. A black ribbon was hung at the hospital’s entrance in recognition of Lenilda’s services.

“She was so loved,” said her brother Leci Pereira. “The whole town is in mourning.” He urged Brazilians to consider the dangers of joining the exodus. “My sister, poor thing, she went chasing a dream.”

But such pleas seem likely to fall on deaf ears. “I know six or seven couples who went last week, all of them with their kids, even after what happened,” said Genifer, who believes soaring food and fuel prices partly explain why so many are leaving.

At the town’s now empty Covid unit, Lucineide recalled trying to talk Lenilda out of going. The pair had dreamed of opening a wound clinic together once Lenilda, who would have turned 50 this week, returned home. “Oh, my friend,” Lucineide murmured, glancing up at the ceiling with incredulous, bloodshot eyes.