Guayaquil, ECUADOR — Rogelio Bolufé stared out the porthole of the white Boeing 767 as the landing gear hummed to life. He eyed endless green fields, a sparkling expanse of water, and a sprawling city along a river. The 44-year-old Cuban, who’d lost months of his life inside the vast network of U.S. immigration jails, was staring at his new purgatory: southern Ecuador.
His mind wasn’t on the reality of being stranded in this strange place; that despair would swallow him later. Instead, his thoughts were fixed on the piles of documents that had been taken by prison guards and vanished.
And now, he thought, I disappear too.