The Beast (25 page)

DEATH OF AN OFFICER

For twenty miles, we drive next to sheets of soldered steel. As far as you can see, this rust-colored wall snakes up and down along the horizon. But then we pass Mexicali and, entering into San Luis Río Colorado, the parched scenery changes.

On the US side of the metal sheets the land starts turning green, starts looking more fertile. The border here isn’t marked by a wall. There are nothing but vehicle barriers. You can see shoots of alfalfa and wheat growing in the US fields, which are all quadrangular and easily differentiated by their colors, brown or green.

The splashes of green, however, soon give way again to the desolate open desert. We approach what seem endless sand dunes.
This is one of the new crossing areas. Many migrants are currently crossing here, funneled outside of a little town called Algodones, though I doubt this point of entry will last long because of a recent death in the area

Of all the border towns I’ve seen, Algodones is by far the most friendly looking. The single-story houses are colorfully painted and have large front windows, and despite the town’s proximity to the border, there aren’t fences closing everything in. I even spot a few kitchen gardens, and rocking chairs placed on porches for residents to while away their afternoons. American retirees like to visit and sometimes even settle here, stretching their pensions a little farther than would be possible on the US side.

Algodones is on the Baja California side of the Baja–Sonora state line, abutting Yuma, Arizona, across the border. If you have the good luck to be able to cross legally, you can reach downtown Yuma from Algodones in twenty minutes. About forty dentists, ophthalmologists, podiatrists, and other doctors have set up shop in Algodones, to reap the profits of Americans looking to get cheap medical care. One American we meet tells us that “people like me, fifty-seven years old and without insurance, we can’t afford to pay the bills back home.”

On any weekend afternoon, on any day like today, dozens of young American couples flock to Algodones to eat tortilla soup or a few tacos, which are a lot cheaper than on the Yuma side of the line. Others head to the pharmacies to buy their pills, or even to the gas stations to get the cheaper state-subsidized gas. At night, however, stomachs and shopping bags full, most Americans return to their country.

A tall twenty-mile wall cutting through the city reminds those on this side of the border that a weekend afternoon shopping spree in the United States isn’t possible. There are always at least four Border Patrol vehicles and numerous floodlights at the ready to catch any undocumented crosser.

To try to get more information about migrant crossings, I call the young priest, Father Ernesto, who runs a small church in
Algodones. I meet him in the middle of the afternoon, and I can see immediately that he’s in a hurry. He changes from his sweat-stained lay clothes into his vestments, hurriedly preparing to give the three remaining masses of the day.

“Look,” he says, “it’s rare these days that you see any migrants around town. Sometimes you see them begging for food, but usually their coyotes herd them out toward the dunes. Things are too heavy here. There are even helicopters patrolling these days. What changed everything, what cut off the migrant flow, is that about a year ago some narcos killed a Border Patrol agent. That’s when they locked down the border. Now nobody passes through.”

The deceased agent was a thirty-one-year old Mexican American named Luis Aguilar. He was killed on January 19, 2008, at around nine thirty in the morning. A suspicious brown Hummer observed crossing into the United States was being chased by Border Patrol vehicles. Luis Aguilar was laying down a tack sheet to pierce the Hummer’s tires when he was hit by the oncoming vehicle. Mexican authorities claimed that coyotes, not narcos, were driving the Hummer. The Border Patrol insisted it was loaded with marijuana, but, as the vehicle escaped back to Mexico, nobody was able to prove anything. Drug traffickers are careful to destroy any potential evidence. The Hummer was later found completely burned.

The following February the Mexican federal police detained a twenty-two-year old man, Jesús Navarro, in Ciudad Obregón. Jesús had been a coyote since he was sixteen years old. When he confessed to being the driver of the Hummer that killed Aguilar, he claimed to be carrying drugs that day, not migrants. Through his testimony agents discovered two houses where Jesús’s bosses supposedly lived. In the subsequent raid they found false visas, high-quality printers (to make the visas), ammunition, and drugs. The group was obviously working to transport both drugs and people across the border. It was further proof that the two businesses have merged. Organized crime will try to make money
however it can, smuggling whatever can be smuggled, whether drugs or people.

Later on I spoke with the Border Patrol press officer of the sector, Esmeralda Marroquín, who is of Mexican descent. After Aguilar’s death, she said, they applied to Washington for reinforcements. Before that, this sector was one of the least patrolled of the border. “We had to respond vigorously,” she explained, “to show that we were going to be tough on these kinds of crimes. It’s one thing to smuggle drugs across the border. It’s quite another to kill a US agent.”

And so they were sent two new helicopters, ten off-road vehicles, plus some thirty extra officers. Coyotes soon learned to avoid the area. If that Hummer had missed Aguilar, Algodones would have been a very different place today.

An agent dies, and the FBI comes screaming in. It’s quite another thing when a migrant dies. On April 28, just outside of Mexicali, two migrants died and eighteen were injured as Border Patrol agents chased them. The nineteen-year-old coyote, Héctor Maldonado, trying to outdrive three BP vehicles, flipped his Chevrolet Suburban. Despite the crash and his injured passengers, Maldonado tried frantically to escape, stealing a Border Patrol vehicle while the driver was attending the victims, and speeding back into Mexico. He was eventually caught by the Mexicali police. When he was presented to the press, his face was completely swollen from the blows they’d dealt him.

But then there was almost no follow-up. The two dead were undocumented. They became an anecdote, nothing more. Nobody called Washington. Nobody called the FBI. Nobody raided any house for more information, and no reinforcements came.

So what’s left for the migrants—bottlenecked into the desert—are the dunes. Crossing within city limits is like walking straight into Border Patrol custody. Nobody bothers to try anymore. Instead of the quick jog into Yuma, migrants now have to walk as much as three days across the desert. And the desert doesn’t just mean
risking heatstroke and dehydration. It also means crossing paths with the narcos.

This is what’s come of the funneling: those carrying a change of clothes and the hope to find work now have to walk the same paths as those smuggling guns and drugs.

THE GREAT FUNNEL

When we leave Algodones, the metal wall reappears. Metal plate against metal plate. We’ll see it go on like this for the next fifteen miles, until the man-made line gains distance from the highway, as we drive into the open vastness of the Great Altar Desert.

These 714,556 hectares without horizon are considered one of the most inhospitable and arid areas of the world. A desert of brown rock and hard limestone pocked with jutting silhouettes of cacti, loose sand dunes, and a large volcanic reservoir, El Pinacate. It’s a wonder that once upon a time someone with a native eye was able to qualify and differentiate these seemingly faceless natural landmarks, naming one hill El Alacrán (The Scorpion), another Cactus Blanco (White Cactus).

We reach Sonoíta, the western entry point into Sonora, a state that in the last few years has become a major crossing zone for migrants. Because of its small collection of suburb-like towns sparsely spread out along the border, the area is now also a smuggling corridor for narcos. Nogales is the only big city nearby. This rural scene is the perfect environment for the narcos, who don’t have to negotiate with high-level authorities and can instead focus on buying rural sheriffs and municipal police. There aren’t many big cities or police squads on the US side of Sonora either. Lukeville, for example, is a tiny border town with a population of one hundred (seventy of whom are of Latin American descent), and with nothing in its downtown but a gas station.

Authorities of the Mexican justice system are known to call the stretch of border between Sonora and Arizona “The Golden Gate.” Between the desert and the so-called Golden Triangle—an
area of high drug production, just southeast of Sonora—lies the money-laden paradise of drug smuggling. Most of the narco-tunnels that have been uncovered along the US–Mexico border have been in the seventy-two municipalities of this area.

Little by little, however, military barracks have been put up beside these towns. A couple of weeks ago a military unit took three days to burn two tons of marijuana seized at a ranch. The air of Sonoíta reeked.

Father David receives us in his parish. We need to ask him for help in getting to La Nariz, which is an hour away from this city, with a population of 10,000. “Sure,” he says. “It’s better to go with someone you know, because narco hawks are always there, watching from the hills. And as soon as you get to La Nariz, right at the entrance of the town, go to the little store and ask for Doña Baubelia. Tell her you’re there on my behalf, and that you need to be put in contact with Pancho Fajardo. He has all my trust and is an honest man. Just make sure not to miss your turn, and go directly to La Nariz. If you miss the right turn and still try to walk into town, you’ll be in for it.”

But directions like
straight ahead, right
, or
left
are of no use on this dirt road. It’s pure desert, and choosing a route means trying your luck. We end up taking a wrong turn and find ourselves in the calm emptiness of the narco desert. There are just a couple of signs in sight, pointing to some ranches lost in the nothing of the desert scrub. Not one living thing. Nothing but silence and desolation. The complete emptiness is how we realize that we’ve picked the wrong path. We turn around.

Doña Baubelia eyes us suspiciously when she receives us. Her sons are known coyotes, and she doesn’t like journalists. But soon Pancho Fajardo shows up. He’d been working on his tractor. Hearty, sixty-one years old, and with a leathery complexion, Pancho is the stereotype of a rancher. He’s lived over half his life in this suburb of thirty houses, built in 1979 thanks to a growing market for wheat and alfalfa. But those were other times. Now
most residents live off migrants. Most, as they say here—a sort of nod to the obvious—live off “who knows what,” or “best not to ask.” And a minority, like Pancho, live off their cows.

“I’ll show you guys the area. Everyone knows me here, and they know I don’t mess with anyone, that’s why the
mafiosos
don’t touch me. I just hope no one sees you guys alone and gets to thinking you’re deep into something else.”

That “something else” can lead to a particular and horrifying situation. Four months ago, the body of Pancho’s nephew-in-law was found a few yards from his ranch. The body had five nine-millimeter impacts. One of them right between the eyes. He was “deep into something else.”

We pass by a suburb called División del Norte, where five military personnel play football in a store and a group of migrants sit waiting for nightfall, when they’ll make for the border line.

We walk into the desert.

“I’m going to take you to the military’s hiding spot,” Pancho explains. “It’s close to one of the military offices right next to the line.” He knows the place like the palm of his hand because of the rounds he makes on his pickup, keeping an eye on his thirty-five cows as they graze on desert shrub.

We pass two slumping, battered homes in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing. There’s no grass, no water, no roads.

“Those two houses were dismantled by the military a couple of months ago,” Pancho says. “Used as a hiding spot for
clavos
[drugs] before the loads were smuggled across. One of them was the home of a relative of mine, until a man who wasn’t from here came and bought it. Not much later they found the house filled with drugs.”

Such houses are deliberately scouted out by criminals because they are in the middle of nowhere, far from any military. Migrants, at least those who know, walk as close as they can to a military unit, so as to avoid invading the mafia’s turf.

Pancho turns out to be an excellent guide. Some 300 yards from the military office, without saying anything, he climbs down from his pickup and walks into the scrub. In a couple of moments we hear his hoarse voice: “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

Hidden among the thorny bushes, huddled in a bunker of dried branches, there’s a group of four Mexican men and one Guatemalan woman. They’ve been there two days, they say, waiting for their moment.

A forty-year-old man, making his second attempt, explains: “One group left early today. The groups make sure to leave one by one. We’re giving them their space before we head out.”

The greatest obstacle here is not the border wall, which is only good for stopping vehicles, but the narcos and bandits hidden on the American side, near Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

This desert, it seems, is too big to be corralled. There are about 370 miles of border that still have unmonitored breaks, allowing narcos and migrants through. Areas that by the same token—not a person or a town in sight—imply a treacherous walk for the migrants. At a good pace, one has to walk seven nights to get to Tucson. That’s what the wall has left us.

One of the sheriff patrol squads is in charge of keeping an eye on the US side of the border. On that side we see a coyote (the animal, not the person) terrorizing a herd of donkeys only a few yards from the spot where the migrants are bunkered down.

Pancho later invites us to a meal of beans and coffee at his house. A rancher from División del Norte stops by for a visit and gets started on the current situation. Pancho had been reserved, but his friend speaks with resounding anger.