The Beast (23 page)

Those who still insist on crossing in Tijuana have to pay the price. Some pay a minimum of $3,500 for false papers, hoping to walk through the port of entry and fool a border guard. If they succeed, they’ll take about ten more steps and board the trolley straight to downtown San Diego. If they fail, they can face up to two years in prison.

The rest, those who can’t afford $3,500 (the bulk of those who make the pilgrimage north), risk their skin in the desert. They head to the outskirts of Tecate, especially to La Rumorosa, crossing the new paths that were forged when Tijuana was fortified. Esmeralda Márquez, director of the Coalition for the Defense of the Migrant in Tijuana for the past ten years, explains that the search for routes farther and farther from Tijuana brings high risks: “There have been migrants killed because they crossed paths with the cartels.”

This is where confrontations reminiscent of war zones tend to take place. Two trucks packed with heavily armed men drive up to the borderline and drop off their drug mules in zones where sheer physical geography makes it nearly impossible to build a wall. The Eagle’s Nest, for example, a narrow plain between two rocky hills, has been the site of fierce gun battles between three competing cartels: the Tijuana, the Sinaloa, and the Gulf. This is where bullets start flying in every direction. And this is where a migrant sometimes gets caught in the crossfire.

As Márquez explained, these bullet-riddled migrants don’t have anything to do with the cartels or with their business. And yet they die like narcos, not like migrants. And if one of them makes it through alive, after witnessing a gun battle, they rarely file a report to explain that their dead friend abandoned in the empty desert wasn’t a drug mule or a hit man, but just an unlucky migrant trying to get back to his family. That’s because they’re scared to talk.

More than 600 people were killed in Tijuana (a city of 1.3 million) in 2008, when they happened to get caught in the midst of narco gun battles.

It’s a city of desperate crossings. You have to be crazy to cross here, migrants say. And with the wall, the Border Patrol, and the narcos all impeding a safe crossing, they might be right.

THE DOMINO EFFECT

At dawn, the photographer Eduardo Soteras and I decide to head to Tecate and look for crossing points. We pass the Tijuana suburbs, rows and rows of identical houses drifting east, compressed between the border wall and the highway for forty miles. These residential plains have been leveled by machine, the mountains carved out for the city to take over. The urban spill ties metropolitan Tijuana to the much smaller city of Tecate, which has a mere 100,000 people.

There’s little to see in downtown Tecate: stray pedestrians,
fast-food chains, plus dozens of Chinese and sushi joints, remnants of Asian migration in the nineteenth century.

This is nothing like the small border towns I’ve gotten to know in Chihuahua and Sonora where migrants crowd into the small plazas, waiting for coyotes or buying backpacks and last-minute supplies at market stands. Nor is it like the border villages where, if you’re not a migrant, the minute you set foot in town everybody knows and assumes that you’re either a narco or completely out of your mind.

We park and walk up to the wall, the same type of metallic fence constructed out of war trash that we saw in Tijuana. The top of a Border Patrol tower of floodlights and cameras pokes over the top. We can also make out two all-terrain vehicles perched on a nearby hill. Trying to cross in urban Tecate is as futile as in Tijuana, practically a voluntary surrender to the Border Patrol. It was this impregnable wall that kicked off the search for new crossing corridors, funneling migrants into more and more remote areas.

Working at a nearby taco stand we find a man who had been involved in protecting migrants in Tecate for nine years. He is the only person we find who’s willing to speak candidly about the connection between migrants and narcos. Joaquín (not his real name) has lived in Tecate for twenty-five years and has witnessed the shift of migrant and
pollero
routes from Tijuana to the outskirts of his city.

It’s the
polleros
, he explains, who find the new routes. They’re like alpinists scaling a mountain: when one route doesn’t work, they look for another one. And they even dig holes along the paths, leaving markers for those who follow behind. Since 2000, the search for safe or passable crossing points has intensified among
polleros
. Dozens of new routes have opened up, but each of them has an expiration date. The longest-lasting openings now only function for about five years.

The closing of these routes by the Border Patrol coincided with the closing of other routes by the narcos. At the end of
the 1990s, the major cartels split into rival groups that started an intense turf war for the cross-border drug routes. And then, after September 11, 2001 the US government charged the Border Patrol and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, formed in 2002) to detain undocumented persons as potential terrorists. And then with the ugly upsurge in the fight against the narcos by the Mexican government, in which drug traffickers were sometimes classified as terrorists, migrants were left with little space to cross the border in safety. The funnel tightened, with narcos and migrants vying for the same spaces.

Especially on the US side, the deserts, hills, and even the cities were guarded and watched over like never before, affecting migrants more than traffickers since the latter could afford technology to evade detection, or simply buy off officials. And so the narcos took over the coyote trails, forcing the coyotes to find new ways to run their business.

“Now,” Joaquín tells me, “some of the coyotes around here, when they see that there’s no way to cross, they ask for advance payment from their migrants and then leave them in the lurch. Or sometimes they do them even worse. They ask for 500 bucks, put them in the trunk of a car, drive them south to Ensenada (a beach town about forty miles south of Tijuana), let them out and say, ‘Go, run for it, you’re in the US now.’ ”

And this is only one of the risks. Here in Tecate, migrants tend to cross in a zone known as “the mountain.” Outside of the Jardines del Río neighborhood and far from the city center, here is where the narcos run the show and the bandits like to charge their migrant tax.

And the bandits are good at tax collection.

“They carry massive weapons,” Joaquín explains. “It’s not hard to get a high-powered rifle hereabouts. Just swing up to Calexico on the US side [opposite Mexicali], and there are stores where you can buy whatever you want, anything from a pistol to an AK-47.”

Getting the gun back down into Mexico is just as easy. All you need to do is step through a gate that looks more like the passage
into a supermarket than into a country. Joaquín himself has been offered thousands of dollars to go over and buy weapons. Just two days ago, two men were arrested around “the mountain” carrying AR-15 assault rifles.

Shoot-outs are common in these parts. Yesterday, again not far from “the mountain,” a pickup truck approached a gas station where a police cruiser and a Ford Taurus were parked. Inside the cars were federal policemen César Becerra and Ulises Rodríguez. Six assassins jumped out of the truck and fired forty-five rounds into the cars. Miraculously, both men survived.

“Everybody’s corrupt here,” Joaquín explains. “Migration, the police, and the narcos are all in bed together, which makes the migrant routes really hot. They have to walk four days across the desert and they’re still in bandit territory. The narco traffic has its own routes: a straight shot nine miles up to the highway. From there it’s easy. They’ve offered me bribes to get in on the game, but I don’t accept. Most people do, though. It’s hard to turn down a stack of bills,” he says, a bitter smile on his face.

We walk a few blocks from the taco stand to the Grupo Beta office. Grupo Beta is a government-run migrant aid organization charged with providing food and protection to undocumented migrants in Mexico. At the office we explain our intentions: to get to “the mountain.”

The two young Grupo Beta agents glance incredulously at each other.

“Look,” one of them says, “just don’t go to any crossing point. Don’t go into the Jardines del Río neighborhood or the surrounding factories, and definitely don’t go to La Rumorosa. It’s swarming with bandits and narcos and they’ll spot you immediately.”

The agent goes on to explain that even they only make one trip a day through those parts, in the early morning, and they ride in their big, orange, easily identifiable pickup truck. He also mentions that they hardly ever see migrants. They’ve simply learned, he tells us, not to attempt a crossing in these areas.

~

We head out to Jardines del Río. It looks at first like any other poor neighborhood of Latin America. In these narco zones, though, you can feel the tension. You often can’t see it, not on first glance, but you can feel it. It’s the art of a narco lookout to keep watch without seeming to be keeping watch. A corrupt cop doesn’t wear a gang sign around his neck, and a
sicario
(hired assassin) doesn’t wear his gun on his hip. These narco-controlled neighborhoods are calm, and seem calm—until they’re not, and then they explode. If you don’t witness a shoot-out it’s hard to see at first glance that the neighborhood is run by the narcos.

On a side street in Jardines del Río, there’s a migrant shelter that has been run by five nuns for the past twelve years. The sisters, understandably, don’t want to comment on narcos, bandits, or the dangers that migrants face. Once in the shelter I see Vicente and Verónica, both Salvadoran, as well as Mainor, a Guatemalan. I first met them in the migrant shelter in Ixtepec. It seems miraculous to see them again on the complete other side of the country.

These three were fleeing the uncertainties of the road, hoping to find in Tecate, as they had been told, a safe spot to cross. Or at least a safe spot to lie low, while staying within driving distance from their families in Los Angeles. They’d recently picked up on a rumor, one of the many pieces of unreliable advice that passes from mouth to mouth on the tops of the migrant train. Old hopes or securities that change or fizzle as quickly as they are passed on. What they didn’t know was that the same dangers and uncertainties of the road that they were fleeing still lay ahead of them.

“They told us it was easy to cross there,” Verónica says, referring to the zone between Tijuana and Tecate. “But after only a day we started to see signs of narcos and bandits. So we asked around again and heard that there was at least one spot left that’s safe, a hill called El Centinela.” And that, a few days previously, is where they had gone.

From El Centinela [the Sentinel], with a compass pointing to Los Angeles, they started walking northwest, looking for the
fabled hole in the border. They crossed La Rumorosa, but its bald rocks gave no hint of whether the route was free of narcos or not. Then the cold started working into their bones. At dawn they reached a small village that was covered in snow. None of them had anything warmer than a light spring sweater. There wasn’t anything they could do. They knew they’d die if they set off into the desert. And so they turned around and came back to the shelter in Tecate.

“What about you?” Verónica asks us. “What do you know about crossing around here?”

We have nothing but bad news to deliver. For the third time, after traveling twenty-five days on the top of a train to this border, she realizes that she can’t get across. And yet she tells us she’ll keep looking for a way to get to Los Angeles. First she’ll head back to Tijuana, to see if some relatives can help her there.

Tecate seems to offer little more than a dead end for migrants. There’s not even a hole in the fence anymore. Crossing here is a kamikaze mission.

Despite all advice to the contrary, we decide to follow the route Véronica, Vicente, and Mainor had taken a few days earlier, to La Rumorosa.

THE HAMLETS THAT SCARE EVEN SOLDIERS

The highway snakes through the rocky hills in this vast, open desert. Only the Gran Desierto of Sonora and Arizona is as large. The hills here reach as high as 6,500 feet above sea level. And the huge cold rocks that cover them resemble Olmec heads, as though fallen in some long-past Biblical rain. These hills form into chains that stretch beyond the horizon. In the middle of this desolate landscape lies the small truck-stop town, La Rumorosa. It’s a town of little more than gas stations, twenty four-hour restaurants, small cafés, and vacant lots where long-haul truckers like to pull off the road and doze.

La Rumorosa has a population of about 2,000, not
counting plenty of snakes, scorpions, and coyotes. This is where the Tijuana wall has been pushing migrants and human coyotes since 1997.

Here there’s only one person who can talk about migration, the narcos, the holes in the border, even the bandits. It’s Brother Pablo, a lay member of the Franciscan Aid Workers, in charge of a senior citizen shelter that recently started housing migrants. He is forty-some years old, but has the look of a man who’s lived a long time in the desert.

A dirt road cuts through the rocky desert to the shelter. We introduce ourselves and explain our project to Pablo.

“It would be best if you waited for me. It’s not a good idea to travel alone through these hills. There’s the Jacumé ranch that’s full of narcos. La Rosita and Chula Vista, if you make it there, make sure not to stop. That is, if anyone even looks at you, you better get moving. Microondas [Microwave], another town, don’t even think about it. But if I go with you, and we go in the truck that has the shelter’s logo, it’d be a lot safer.”

Nobody seems to have anything good to say about La Rumorosa. We hear about a car chase the previous day in which the federal police arrested two men: José Gómez, a fat twenty-year-old with a shaved head, and Jimmy Bracamontes, a thirty-year-old with a goatee. They were both accused of being
asaltamigrantes
[migrant-muggers]. The police found a forty-caliber pistol and nine transistor radios with their chargers. Bandits in these parts seem to be well-equipped.