John Lantigua
Staff Writer
The Palm Beach Post

Citation
John Lantigua showed his readers, step by perilous step, what desperate migrants go through to cross the border into the United States. In a series of stories that sometimes echoed John Steinbeck, Lantigua wrote of a journey that has become so commonplace and yet so mysterious to most of us. To get up close and supply the sights and sounds of illegal immigration circa 2003, Lantigua endured many of the same dangers as the subjects of his stories. The result: A fearless report on people -- our neighbors -- who are willing to break the law and even risk death in the desert for the chance to find a better way for themselves and their impoverished families. His stories, part of a three-day series called “Modern-Day Slavery,” have prompted a Justice Department investigation into the treatment of undocumented Mexican farm workers.

Excerpt
This Is Where So Many Die
December 8, 2003
SASABE, Mexico _ The nine migrants trudged across the border into the blazing Arizona desert just before sunset.
Eight men and one woman who wanted work in the U.S., they had traveled by bus some 1,500 miles from southern Mexico. But the next 50 miles they had to walk, and it would be, by far, the most difficult and dangerous leg of their journey.
It was late July. Temperatures reached 104 in the shade of Tucson, and several notches higher in the desert sun. Already in 2003, the Sonora Desert had claimed at least 99 victims who had dared the crossing, almost all of them dead from dehydration. According to Border Patrol agents, that many bodies had been found. They figured many more lay baking in thousands of square miles of wilderness….
After hiking 75 minutes over hills from the fly-ridden town of Sasabe, and just before crossing the unmarked border, Cesar asked the group to kneel. They closed their eyes, and he prayed for 15 minutes, invoking Old Testament figures such as Isaac, Jacob, Ezekiel and, of course, Moses.
“My Lord, you have led your people through the desert before,” intoned Cesar. “Please, do it for us. Help us find our daily bread. I know it will not be me who gets us there. It will be you.”
…The migrants then stood up and entered the United States, the first steps toward finding jobs to support themselves and their loved ones, jobs that do not exist in Mexico.

Biography
A native of the Bronx, N.Y., John Lantigua, 57, worked at The Hartford Courant, UPI, and The Miami Herald before joining The Palm Beach Post in 2002. Lantigua shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting while at The Miami Herald and also shared the Overseas Press Award and the National Magazine Award, both in 2002, for his work with Newsweek in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A graduate of Jacksonville University in Florida, Lantigua has extensive reporting experience in Central America. He once ran his own camping business in the Sierra Madre of southern Mexico.