Through a special visa program, freelance truckers called transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import-export fees. These truckers, many of whom have Central American roots, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s unwanted items into valuable goods abroad. One transmigrante, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job in 2014 from his Colorado employer to drive a truck full of furniture to his homeland. It would be a routine trip like he’d done many times before. But this job went horribly wrong.
For 5280, Chris Walker recounts León’s kidnapping and its aftermath, and how this terrifying experience has affected León and his family. And it’s through León’s story that Walker is able to expose a very dark side of the transmigrante industry.
Even now—years later—Orlando still hears rumors about what may have been concealed in the truck’s cargo, including guns or even up to $2 million in cash hidden inside pieces of furniture. If that much money had gone missing, though, Orlando doesn’t think he’d be alive—or that he’d have been able to negotiate his release for such a comparatively small sum. While his kidnappers originally asked for $15,000, Orlando says he negotiated it down to $7,000 by telling his captors they could keep the school bus he’d driven down to sell in Guatemala. Only in retrospect does it appear that some outside factor—perhaps his family’s calls to local Guatemalan police—saved him from a shallow, unmarked grave.
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