Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (33 page)

The night grew older, and we did not eat dinner, nor did anyone mention it: a sure sign that the real traveling had begun. The chatting continued, the little conversations about so-and-so back home, such-and-such in Idaho, replays of the Owls’ last soccer game of the season—they had finished third in the state this year. They would have placed second, apparently, except for Tiberio’s miss of an easy goal. He looked exasperated as somebody brought it up again—an incident he would never hear the end of. Suddenly those nearer the
coyote
began rising to their feet, and my heart leaped ... our turn. After three or four hours of waiting, it all seemed very sudden. Within fifteen seconds we were off again, single file.

The land quickly turned to scrub desert as we left the tiny stream. The earth was white and powdery, the shrubs thin branched and small leaved, in scattered clumps that made the path circuitous. All was black and white under the quarter moon. I put on my jacket as we walked—the wind had begun to blow. We walked for ten minutes, stopping at a depression in the desert floor. “
Here we wait again,”
said our guide.

We sat down, lay down, waited. My ears were pricked for any sound: for some reason I expected some kind of setup, an ambush. Tales of betrayal and robbery were legion along the border. But nothing happened until much later, when we heard the soft purring of a motor arriving in wafts of the wind. Everyone stood up, even our guide uncertain of which direction he ought to look. Then there was the more definite click of a door opening, and we hurried toward the sound.

An old pickup truck had backed into a clearing one hundred feet from our little crater. The driver lowered the gate as we appeared, and, without a word, we all climbed in. Genaro and Plácido conferred with the driver and the guide, and then Genaro climbed into the cab with the two
coyotes.
Plácido came around to the back of the truck, now weighted far past capacity, slammed the gate, and struggled to cram himself in amongst the fifteen of us already there.
“They say they’ll collect at the other end—at La Nariz,”
he answered Jesús.

The driver shifted into gear and then, ever so slowly, began to roll forward. The headlights were off, and he leaned way out the window to negotiate his route around the shrubs. For fifteen minutes we rolled softly through the desert, the hum of the motor a comfort after so many hours of silence. Nobody said a word. We went a little faster when a vague dirt road materialized, braked to cross the ledge of pavement at the edge of a highway, and finally accelerated as the driver steered into the eastbound lane. After ten minutes of driving, the headlights came on. I breathed a small sigh of relief as we hit 45 MPH or so, the effect of the cold wind diminished by the sardine closeness of all the others. None of us could move, at risk of pushing someone over the edge of the truck bed.

Something behind the truck caught Plácido’s attention. I, facing forward, watched his face until light reflected off his eyes and the cab window told me there was somebody following us.

Plácido nudged Jesús. Several of us turned around to stare in the direction of the approaching vehicle.

That it was gaining on us did not concern me at first; we weren’t going that fast. But then I noticed that it was coming up on us extremely fast, and that everyone was watching. The driver must have been worried too—you could hear the engine strain as he tried to accelerate. But the old truck was moving as fast as it could, and within seconds the headlights in the distance were following us by only twenty feet. Then a row of high-intensity lights exploded from the roof of the pursuing vehicle, making it impossible to see at all. It sped up alongside us—a pickup truck, but small and souped up, with the cab crowded and two men in back. The passenger window was cranked down, and a man with a long arm held out a revolver.
“Pull over!"
he yelled at the driver. The driver kept going. The two men in back held up rifles.
“Pull over!”
they shouted. The driver drifted to a stop.

In a matter of seconds the four men had hopped from their truck and surrounded ours. I half expected some movement from my companions, a rapid scattering out into the desert, but no one stirred. The tall man with the pistol opened the driver’s door, hauled him out by the shirt, and whacked him on the side of the head with the gun. He fell to the road.

The men with the rifles trained them on us.
“Stay right where you are!”
shouted one.
“We will shoot if you move.”

Genaro and the guide were ordered from the other side of the cab and around the front of the truck by a short, round-faced man with a submachine gun. The tall
pistolero
questioned all three of them.
“Where were you going?”

“
Home,”
said the driver. I noticed, for the first time, that he was also a teenager. The tall man punched him in the stomach, and he doubled over.

“
Where?”
he demanded of the guide, who held his hands over his head.
“To our farm,”
said the guide. The tall man’s elbow landed near his ear, and he fell onto the pavement.

“
Don’t lie to me! Were you taking them for money? Are you drug smugglers? Answer!”

None of them did, and they were struck this time with fists. The tall
pistolero
placed the barrel of his revolver against the driver’s temple and ordered him back into the old pickup.
“Follow them,”
he directed, sliding onto the seat next to him and pointing to the other gunmen. Genaro and the guide were loaded into the back of the fast pickup. We did a U-turn and followed the truck in the direction we had come. Through the back of our cab we could see the silhouette of the tall man and the driver, pistol against his head. He drove slowly.

Plácido was close to me.
“Who are they?”
I asked.

“
I think they’re judiciales,”
he said—the Federal Judicial Police.

“
They are?”
That was astonishing to me—I thought they were some sort of bandits.
“But why? What did we do?”

Plácido shrugged.
“Maybe the coyotes didn’t pay them first.”

“
The coyotes have to pay them?”
Often you did, he explained, even though you violated no law; it was an expense of doing business. Maybe that's how these
coyotes
had offered us the budget rate.

“
But how did they know we were there? Where are they taking us?”

Plácido shrugged again. I remembered the old man we had suspected of being an informer.

We arrived again in Sonoita, its streets empty and dark. The two trucks parked next to a building which I immediately recognized as the Federal Judicial Police headquarters. I was a little relieved to see they were official, and not common criminals—naively relieved, as I would learn. Under gunpoint, we were ordered to leave our gear in the back of the truck and climb stairs up the back of the building. The tall gunman, waiting on a landing at the top, told us to stand against the walls of a large, empty room. It was dimly lit by a single bulb. My heart was pounding. The faces of the men were stony, those of the young guys and Evangélica terrified.

I didn’t know how I looked; all I was sure of was that the police had not yet realized there was a
gringo
present. The lighting was part of the reason: neither moonlight nor their forty-watt bulb really illuminated my pale skin and blue eyes. I also credited my dress: a baseball cap, with a hooded sweatshirt pulled over, hid my hair and cast a shadow across my face. But my best disguise was simply the company I kept—I had been around the group so long that they treated me like one of the gang. And who would dream that a
gringo
would be crossing the desert into his own country?

Apparently thinking all three to be
coyotes,
the police kept the driver, guide, and Genaro across the room from the rest of us. Then, one at a time, the driver first, they directed them into an adjoining office. The fourth, the tall cop, stayed in the big room, his revolver trained on us. Through the thin partition we could hear nearly everything.

“
Who do you work for?”
a voice demanded.

“
Nobody,”
came the reply, through the wall.

"Don’t lie!”
There was a sudden exhalation, the gasping of a blow to the stomach.
“It will be worse if you lie.”

The “questioning” of the three lasted nearly an hour. We winced as we witnessed with our ears the beating of the driver and his friend. But fists were clenched and eyes glared as Genaro’s turn came up and he was pushed into the office. The interrogation was curt and desultory. First we heard accusations, then Genaro’s denials, punctuated by louder accusations. Finally, after a long silence, the words
“¡Ay, Dios mío, Dios mío!”
came through the wall—oh, my God, my God. His relatives from Quirambal, dressed in black, trembled as the torture continued.
“¡No! ¡Por favor!”
They stared hard at the floor, tense, and we listened. There were thumps and bangs from within the room.
“Señores, ¡por favor!”
The tall cop watched us. There was a sputtering, coughing, and gasping—evidently Genaro was having a hard time breathing. I prayed the Quirambal guys could keep themselves under control, for their own sake.

After what seemed hours, Genaro hobbled out the door, hands cuffed behind his back, hat missing, face and shirt wet, clearly shaken. It was more than sweat—his shirt was soaked, and stuck to his chest.
“Tehuacanazo,”
said Jesús, standing next to me. He was grim.
Agua Tehuacán,
I knew, was Mexico’s popular carbonated mineral water.
Tehuacanazo,
I would later learn, was the slang term for a torture, popular among the judicial police, which involved holding the seated victim’s head back, covering his mouth, and then pouring the fizzy water up his nose, through which it entered his sinuses. The torture was so common that almost everyone in Mexico knew what
tehuacanazo
meant. From his age and imposing presence, they had probably figured Genaro to be the leader.

Three others from Quirambal went in next, one at a time. I swallowed hard when I realized I was next in line. They were going around the room. The tall cop came up to me. I continued to look down.

“
You! What's your name?”

“
Teodoro.”

“
Where are you from?”

“
Colorado.”

“
What?”

I paused. There was no way out.
“Colorado. Over there. On the other side”

The cop brusquely lifted the bill of my cap. He stared at my face.
“Identificación.”

I took out my driver’s license. Fortunately, I had also had a business card printed in Spanish the week before, identifying me as a journalist and naming the press syndicate to which I had been sending articles on Mexico.
“I’m a journalist,”
I said.

The tall cop abruptly called to the others, and they came out of the office. They asked me questions—I was crossing the border to write a magazine article, I lied—and then conferred among themselves. I was directed into the fluorescent-lit office, and then into a chair. The tall one came in and closed the door behind him. I braced myself. One of them picked up the phone on the desk, waited a long time for someone to answer, and then apologized to them. They were calling the
comandante,
who had been asleep. The
comandante
had to come down. Apparently this was serious. They decided to do nothing further without him, and so, for half an hour, I sat.

I took in my surroundings. On the floor were the black hats of Genaro and his young cousins, dusty, upside down. On one wall was a long gun rack. It held at least ten different kinds of rifles and automatic weapons. I recognized M-16 and AK-47 machine guns, and an Uzi submachine gun—they could not have been standard Mexican government issue. The others I could not identify. It was a small arsenal. The cops had me empty my pockets onto the desk. They flipped through my notebook. It was full of slang you could not find in a dictionary—words I was trying to learn, many with sexual connotations. They thought these were funny, and asked why I had written them down. It was a relief to see them laughing, though I did not trust their sense of humor; they derived too much pleasure from suffering. The notes, I explained, were simply to help me communicate with people in their own language. While we waited, they taught me a couple of new words.

The
comandante
arrived, a clean-cut, surprisingly young man with puffy eyes and a mug of coffee in his hand. The
judiciales
were not local kids—they were trained at a national academy, recruited from across the country. He took off his coat, sat down at the desk, and looked at the contents of my wallet.

“
You say you are a journalist?”

“
Sí, señor. Of the InterAmerican Press Association. ”

“
And what were you doing with these men?”

“
Writing an article on what it is like to cross the border. ”

He paused.
“Who besides us knows you are here?”

There was something menacing about the question. I decided it would be best if everyone knew I was there. The more people that knew, the harder it would be for them to dump me in the desert.