PRADO, Aland

Aland Christian Felix Prado: Honoring a fallen son Douglas Dispatch (AZ) - Wednesday, September 5, 2001 Deceased Name: Aland Christian Felix Prado: Honoring a fallen son XAVIER ZARAGOZA/The Daily Dispatch Jainor Felix clutched a wooden cross and a shovel to his chest as he walked through a stretch of rocky desert and mesquites. Only moments before, he and a cousin, Gustavo Chirinos, had jumped a barbed-wire fence, a fence not unlike the one Felix's 22-year-old son, Aland Christian Felix Prado, had jumped in order to come illegally into the United States from his native, Lima, Peru. Felix suddenly stopped in what seemed in the middle of nowhere and he set the cross aside. Silently, he and Gustavo took their shovels and began to break the hard, stubborn ground next to a mesquite bush. Several days earlier, in the late afternoon, two Border Patrol agents found Aland's badly decomposed body under that same mesquite bush. "I don't understand how my son died," Felix said, as he set the cross upright into the hole. "But I do know he died at the hands of very greedy people." Aland was apparently not feeling well and when he finally collapsed, the smuggler simply left him in the desert to die eight miles north o Douglas. On the one hand Felix blames the Peruvian government for not providing enough incentives for its younger people to remain in the country. On the other hand, Felix blames himself. "I should have been stern about his not leaving," he said. But Felix did not know about Aland's leaving until Aland was gone. Aland called his father from Honduras, asking for money. "By then it was too late. All I could do was support his efforts," he said. The trip was difficult and expensive and it was only going to get worse, his father said. Aland was headed to New York, where a wife and two-month old baby waited him. He made the decision to cross the border illegally when his visa was denied renewal, Felix said. "But he paid the ultimate price for what many Latinos think is the American Dream," he said. Felix finally covered the hole with dirt and rocks, making sure the cross was firmly planted into the ground. He then kneeled and bid his some farewell, a stranger dying in a strange land. But never once did he feel like a stranger in Douglas, he said. "The people here open their doors and hearts to us," he said. "It reaffirms to me that there is kindness in this world despite the ugliness like the ones who left my son to die."