The Beast (24 page)

We wait a few days at the shelter with Pablo and some old men and women who are either abandoned or without a family. The rooms seem filled with sadness. The old people sit on the couches, staring blankly, apparently doing nothing but awaiting their coming deaths.

Finally we head out with Pablo, his brother, wife, and sister-in-law to the crossing points outside of La Rumorosa. Pablo says it’s unwise to travel in a truck full of only men: the women will make us look less threatening. We enter into the desolate hills,
approaching the border. A rattlesnake lifts its head as we pass. Next we spot a coyote, the animal, not the guide.

We arrive in Chula Vista, nothing but dirt and rock all the way to the border. The wall here is the same material and the same height as the wall in Tijuana. We’re close enough to the big border city that the US government realized pretty quickly, after constructing the Tijuana segments, that migrants started crossing here. They sent their reinforcements: Border Patrol agents and construction crews.

The land, though, besides the wall, is completely empty. It’s like a ghost town. When we approach the wall we see a few holes where someone tried to get through. Though if you even pop your head into the United States on this stretch the cameras spot you, and in about five minutes you hear the roar of Border Patrol’s off-road vehicles.

Pablo’s brother tells us a little about his own experience along this border: “I used to be a distributor for the little shops around here, but then the place filled up with bandits. They took over the stores, the streets, everything. I don’t think we’ll be seeing many more migrants passing through here.”

We drive on toward another little settlement, Jacumé, amounting to a few houses clustered around a crossroads, but the feeling is that everybody has escaped. We don’t see a single person in the streets. It’s four in the afternoon and not even one child is playing outside, nor is a single store open.

We continue on toward this part of the wall and we see a Mexican military Humvee approach as if coming straight from the Iraq war. The vehicle is armored, topped with a submachine gun, and driven by a man wearing a balaclava and a helmet. The Humvee stops and six soldiers, all with bulletproof vests, jump out yelling: “Out! Out of the truck! This is a checkpoint!”

Eduardo Soteras and I step out of the truck with our hands in the air. The soldiers look nervous (and I wonder if the safeties of their machine guns are flipped off). The soldiers move all four of us men away from the truck before giving us a chance to take out
our papers, which are in the truck, so they push us back to fetch them. They check them through and listen to what sounds like an unlikely explanation, that we’re journalists and that Pablo is in charge of a senior citizen shelter where his brother occasionally helps him out.

“And what are you doing here?”

“We’re going to see the wall at Jacumé,” I answer.

“You’re going to the wall at Jacumé?”

“Yeah, that’s it. We just want to see where migrants are crossing.”

“You’re nuts. Migrants don’t cross here. Even we don’t go to the wall at Jacumé, not unless we want to get shot. It’s narco territory. You can’t even set foot there. I’m going to have to ask you to leave, for your own safety.”

We’re only 200 yards from the wall. Yet we can’t go forward. It’s incredible to see firsthand this explicit understanding between the narcos and the army. You can patrol here, the narcos say, but if you venture a foot over this line you’re going to have a problem.

“That’s fine,” Pablo’s brother says to us, “Let’s go to Microondas. It’s where more migrants are passing now, anyway. And there’s less narcos there.”

We finally come to a crossing point that’s not swarming with bandits and narcos. Here in Microondas is the first area since leaving Tijuana where the biggest risk to a migrant is the weather, not other humans. From the road we’re on we can even make out the faraway line of Interstate 8, the highway that runs along the border in Southern California. Most of the migrants are headed there, to meet up with their coyote-coordinated rides.

But after a while the road we’re on veers away from the wall. We bump along, climb a hill, and then the road is impassable. We have a view, however, of the rocks and radio towers of La Rumorosa.

“Let’s continue on foot,” Pablo’s brother says.

We get out and start scrambling up, rock by rock, climbing the steep pass.

“We’ve actually had to come here a few times to rescue migrants,” Pablo’s brother tells us. “They’ve had broken bones or gotten sick. It takes us at least six hours to get here.”

The view from the summit is shocking. We see rocky peak after rocky peak trailing into the distance. We can even see, beyond more outcrops, the shadow of I-8 again. This is the only land that the narcos and bandits have left for migrants to cross in peace. This is where Tijuana spits out its unwelcomed travelers.

Rock after rock. Hill after hill these men and women have to cross. And then they have to navigate the dangers of getting caught along the distant highway. This is the first clear crossing point we’ve come upon, and we realize that it’s just as dangerous for migrants as crossing through a narco zone. It’s not a human hand here that kills the migrants, but the system that pushes them to walk this far.

Yes, there are other crossing points, other options equally as dangerous. Pablo points to the distant desert of Mexicali, the hill outside of El Centinela, or the white, salty expanse of stony desert known as La Salada.

9
The Funnel Effect: Baja California and Sonora

In this second phase of our trek across the northern border we leave behind the big cities, Tijuana and Juárez, that monopolize newspaper headlines. We travel through little-known towns like La Nariz, Sonoíta, Algodones, and Sásabe. Everyone in these towns—bandits, narcos, and migrants—struggles to carve a niche for themselves. A lot of them, we find, spend their time either assaulting or trying to escape being assaulted. Some give orders and others give in, and the migrants, as is almost always the case, carry the heaviest burden
.

The military checkpoint is on the outskirts of La Rumorosa, in front of the hill known as El Centinela. In thick red letters a sign reminds the thirty soldiers who run the checkpoint: “Caution, mistrust, reaction.” We ask the officer surveying our car to explain how the words are put into practice. “Be alert,” he says, “even when you’re asleep. Never trust anything that moves. And the thing about reaction, you get it, right …” Then he makes as if picking up a gun, finishing his sentence with: “
Raca-taca-taca-taca-taca
!”

This checkpoint is the door that leads out of the easternmost tip of Tijuana and into the coyotes’ backyard. This route, popularized at the end of the 1990s when the wall went up, is now the one most heavily trafficked by migrants. It’s also the most heavily trafficked by narcos. That’s why being alert, suspicious, and quick to react are smart commandments to live by for anyone walking this 400-mile-long stretch of border. Because it’s not uncommon to hear that
Raca-taca-taca
. This is the “small-town border,”
away from Tijuana’s wall and the checkpoints, the border of drug smuggling and bandits, the border that took the place of the “old border.”

It’s six thirty in the evening when we leave the checkpoint behind, turn left off the main highway, and duck onto a back road that leads straight to the border. The wind has turned from a whispering rumor to abrasive gusts of sand and dry leaves that feel powerful enough to blast our car into the sky. We’re parked at the bottom of El Centinela, waiting for someone to walk by. Migrants, coyotes, narcos. Anyone.

To get here we had to drive forty minutes, leave the sprawling city of Mexicali and head north on a two-lane road that dies at the so-called “Normandy Wall” which stands only ten yards from us. The wall is made up of a series of three metal bars that look something like giant asterisks half buried in the sand. The vehicle barriers block cars from crossing, but can’t stop a pedestrian willing to jump.

No one is around.

Back in Mexicali, Jorge Verdugo, manager of the traveler’s hostel, Betania, explained the funnel effect to us. “This is the only crossing area left around here, the only one that’s used anymore. The problem is that narcos also use it to cross their stuff.” At this juncture in our travels, his line sounds trite. Over and over, the formula repeats itself: a crossing point on the outskirts of a city that will be heavily used by narcos, coyotes, bandits, and migrants alike.

Eduardo Soteras, one of the photographers in my team, takes a few pictures at the wall. When he comes back we walk over to the only three people in sight, three private guards standing outside a power station.

“Good evening, agents.”

“Evening,” the eldest responds. He looks apprehensive. He comes toward us as the other two stand back, eyeing our car.

“We’re journalists and we’re wondering …”

“Come on over here,” the agent says and turns to his coworkers, “I told you they weren’t coyotes.”

“No, we were just checking out the area. We were told this is one of those crossing points.”

“That’s right. They hurl themselves over here.”

“Drugs too.”

“That’s right.”

“But we haven’t seen anyone since we got here.”

“Well, you never know. All of a sudden people start coming and keep streaming across till morning. Sometimes trucks too. They park where you two were and five, ten people come out each truck. Then off they go.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Sometimes, like last week, if it’s drugs, they send people to watch over the area beforehand, just like you guys. That’s what we thought you guys were up to. They watch out to make sure no one is loitering around here, no migrants, no officials. And they check out the other side, too, with binoculars, to see if they can spot Migration. That’s what we thought your buddy was up to when he went up to the wall.”

After a while the other two guards come up to the car and join the conversation. We ask them about the third factor—bandits. We want to know if it’s the same here, if everyone works on the same tiny piece of dirt, the mouth of the funnel. Some trying to cross, others robbing the crossers, and yet others telling the crossers when they have to clear out so that things won’t look so conspicuous when they have drug loads to sneak over.

“They used to gather here, just over there,” the youngest-looking guard says, pointing out a small grassy plot of land on this side of the wall. “Coyotes, their migrants, and bandits, all of them used to mix here. The bandits would be listening in, trying to find out where the coyotes were heading so they could follow them.”

Behind us, about forty minutes by car, is Mexicali, its million inhabitants and its more than 200 Chinese restaurants. The
Chinese population in town is a consequence of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was upheld by the US Supreme Court until 1904, and barred Chinese immigrants from entering the United States until its repeal in 1943. Behind us are cotton fields, worked by thousands of Mexicans who come from the southern regions of the country. But that’s behind us. Here in this crossing zone, as happens in so many places far from Tijuana, there is only the dried-up desert funnel where everyone who can’t legally get into the United States tries to cross. Here at El Centinela, it can be as hot as 122 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and as cold as minus five degrees in the winter. We’re also relatively close to Los Angeles, where so many migrants are going. And all those factors have driven up the price of a coyote for a two-day walk to more than $2,000 for each attempted crossing, and that’s with no guarantees.

“Many times it’s the coyotes themselves who assault the migrants just a few feet across the line, or sometimes they’re the ones who lead them to the narcos, who then force them into drug smuggling,” is what Jorge Verdugo of the migrant shelter told us hours before. That’s how it’s been since the mid 1990s, when metal walls took the place of barbed wire.

This is where the bra tree myth was born. It’s a desert tree literally draped with the bras and panties of migrant women who are raped by bandits along this border. Their underwear is kept as trophies. I refer to it as a myth not because it doesn’t exist, but because it’s not one tree but many. The rape of migrant women is a border-wide practice, from Tecate, passing La Rumorosa and El Centinela, to the neighboring state of Sonora. On this stretch of walled-off frontier, bra trees grow everywhere.

A volunteer at the migrant shelter in Tijuana gave testimony, the only personal account I’ve listened to so far, of a twenty-four-year-old Mexican woman’s experience getting raped and having her underwear stolen in the desert. This is part of Sandra’s story:

“I got to Sonora in August 2006 and started crossing the border to California. I rode in a truck with five other women, one who was thirteen years old, plus six men. We rode for hours, both by
highway and unpaved roads. Then we walked for a long time until we got to a place where we saw a barbed-wire gate with a sign that read: ‘No Entry.’ From there we kept walking. I noticed a pair of black panties hanging from the gate on the Mexican side. As we went on we heard a whistle come from a group of men in the distance, squatting in some shrubs, then some others from another spot answered back with more whistles. It was daytime. Our coyote said: ‘You know what, gals? There are bandits here.’

“He warned us not to resist, that if they asked for money we should give it up and that to save our lives we, as women, should cooperate in whatever they asked. We were in some shrubs and a group of armed men came up with their faces uncovered, they told us to give them money. They told us to take off our clothes. They sexually abused us. It’s a sad thing. One woman was brutally raped. We couldn’t help. They finished and we put on our clothes, but our underwear was thrown away, one woman’s underwear was thrown over a bush. I don’t know why, maybe it means something to them. All this happened on the Mexican side, and after that tragedy we just kept on walking.”