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By JENALIA MORENO
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

Fed up with the extreme poverty in Honduras, Oscar Trochez, 31, left with his wife, three children, sister, niece and nephew and headed to Houston.

The 31-year-old father led his family on a grueling six-week exodus across Central America and Mexico because the Honduran economy has worsened since the last time he made the journey alone, back in 1998.

With the help of a coyote, or smuggler, the Trochez family crossed the Rio Grande near Matamoros and went directly to U.S. immigration offices, where members received temporary visas because they are from a region devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. They'll find out in December if they can remain.

Trochez has found a job painting cars and earns about $200 a week, a huge increase from the $15 to $30 a week he earned as a taxi driver in Honduras.

This family is among the thousands of people from Central America who emigrated to the United States because long-standing woes in their homelands were worsened by natural disasters, like Hurricane Mitch, and by depressed prices for crops such as coffee.

Honduran immigrants are fleeing a country where more than half the population lives in poverty and a 28 percent jobless rate is encouraging lawlessness.

"As long as you have depressed economies and as long as the United States needs the work force, you will have this trend," said Jorge Pinto, director of the Center for Global Finance at Pace University's Lubin School of Business in New York. "There's a very close link between economic development and immigration."

This week, trade experts will try to further Central American Free Trade Agreement negotiations, and if it lives up to their expectations, the deal could improve the region's economies and decrease the need for people to leave.

"I don't think CAFTA can be looked at as a panacea for Central America," said Regina Vargo, assistant U.S. trade representative for the Americas and the lead CAFTA negotiator. "But it gives them a very important tool for economic development."

The agreement will give the region a "Good Housekeeping seal of approval" which will encourage more investment, she said.

Negotiators from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua will meet this week in Houston with U.S. representatives in the eighth of nine scheduled meetings, to try to reach an agreement that could change the economic future of Central America.

While there are many opponents of the deal, almost everyone agrees on one point -- nearly every Central American economy needs help.

"We're looking at some of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere," said Maria Crummett, director for the University of South Florida's Center for International Business in Tampa.

Things got worse in Latin America in the 1980s when civil wars and political strife plagued the region.

But the picture isn't altogether bleak. These five countries are all now fledgling democracies, and the wars are past. Freer trade with the United States could well provide a boost. A past U.S. effort to open trade in the region -- the 1985 Caribbean Basin Initiative -- did help attract some jobs and diversify economies, said Ed Gresser, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Progressive Policy Institute's trade and global markets project.

In recent years, economic growth has been hindered by events out of the control of political and economic leaders.

The region has suffered over the last two years as the economy of its major trading partner, the United States, slumped.

There also have been natural disasters. First, there was Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which hammered Honduras and Nicaragua, and then two earthquakes in 2001 in El Salvador. Those disasters killed thousands and wiped out entire crops. Banana and coffee plantations can take years to plant and yield fruit, so the catastrophes created long-term problems.

In reaction to the disasters, the U.S. government granted temporary visas to immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua who already were living in the United States. The number of immigrants increased dramatically in the wake of the disasters.

Today, about 40,000 people from Honduras, 2,000 from Nicaragua and 100,000 from El Salvador live in Houston.

Even farmers in countries like Guatemala, whose crops were largely spared by natural disasters, earn little from their harvests because prices are depressed.

Coffee is one of the main crops in all five of these Central American countries, and the coffee crisis has driven more Central Americans into extreme poverty. In all of these countries, at least one-fifth and as much as three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line.

One benefit of the increase in migration to the United States is the money sent back. In El Salvador, $2.2 billion in remittances prop up the economy, and the U.S. dollar is now the country's currency.

Costa Rica is the only country that does not rely heavily on remittances because few people immigrate to the United States. It's one of the most stable economies in the region because of its successful tourism sector.

But because remittances provide some support for the region, Teodoro Aguiluz, director of the Central American Resource Center in Houston, said Central American negotiators should demand that the trade agreement allow more legal immigration into the United States.

That would help people like Trochez, who said he's given up on raising his children in Honduras because "we want a better future for the kids."