The Beast (26 page)

“We used to live comfortably here,” he complains. “Only familiar cars with familiar people drove around here. Now it’s big trucks that pass by at night and nobody knows who’s driving them. Migrants used to cross in peace, without having to mess with anyone. Now that the mafia’s trying to move their drugs,
the migrants come back all beaten up. They hit them with baseball bats to make sure they don’t take over their turf or heat it up or anything, attracting migration officers. Or the mafias get hold of any bandits working against them and break their legs. The narcos have even started warning taxi and bus drivers not to bring any
pollos
this way whenever they have an important load to cross.”

Night falls in Sonoíta and we find ourselves drinking beer with two Oaxacan coyotes who are guiding a group of five migrants. They’ve decided not to take their first-choice road through Altar, which is some miles to the west.

“The mafia is charging too much: 700 pesos a head just to let you walk up to the line. It’s not like they don’t charge over here, but it’s 500 and there’s a lot more room,” explains the leader, who’s young and very small, with tight, clear skin.

Tomorrow they’ll pay what they have to pay. They’ll pass La Nariz and they’ll walk close to one of the military units and they’ll go on, so the coyote guesses, for six nights until they reach the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, where they’ll be charged another $3,000 to be piled into a van and driven an hour away to Phoenix.

“We would’ve walked less through Altar, but things are too hot over there. It’s not like there isn’t mafia here, it’s everywhere, it’s just that there’s more of it over there.”

Morning breaks and we walk toward Altar.

THE CRABWALK VILLAGE

I’ve visited Altar five times now, and each time I think that things couldn’t get worse. And each time I’ve been wrong.

The migrants don’t have much of a choice. If they’re in Altar it usually means that they’ve backtracked to Altar, that they’ve been pushed here by the narcos, that they’ve had to turn back. They’ve had to crabwalk. This used to be a village where you could get a cheap ride, where you could start your walk to the United States
in peace, on an easy road to the border. There wasn’t even a wall, and there weren’t narco taxes. The open desert was wide enough for everybody who wanted to walk. Now migrants seem to wait around in Altar for nothing more than bad news.

We talk with Paulino Medina, a taxi driver who has lived here for the past twenty years.

“It’s all gone to shit! All to shit! They just upped the price again. Now it’s 700 pesos a head to get to El Sásabe. They’re saying they need more because the peso fell, or maybe the dollar rose.”

When I was last here, six months ago, the price was only 500 pesos a head and Paulino was busy hunting for migrants to take to the border town, El Sásabe. Now he doesn’t bother. He only does service between Altar and Caborca, which is a small migrant launching town about a half an hour west.

After strolling around for a few minutes I run into Eliázar, who I know from my first visit here in 2007. Back then Eliázar worked as something like a coyote agent, receiving $200 for each migrant he could convince to join up with the coyote he was working for. But now he too is having to adjust to the new laws of the town. He recently went back to his home state of Sinaloa to ask for official permission to work the main square. In Sinaloa he had to convince his boss to pay off Minerva,
¹
the municipal policeman in charge of collecting bribes from the coyotes. Minerva then grants permission for the agents and coyotes to work. He also provides security to make sure nobody who hasn’t paid is herding migrants. Minerva charges $150 dollars a week for each coyote-agent to work. There are fourteen of them. This works out to $260 dollars a month in bribes for the eight municipal policemen, and that’s on top of their official salaries.

Eliázar receives a call as he explains the new setup. When he gets off the phone he says everything’s in order. The plaza is, for the next few hours, his to work.

“I gotta run,” he says. “I don’t get twenty-four hours to work like before. Now we have to take shifts. Six in the morning to six at night. Then the night shift takes over.”

The plaza is the best place to swindle migrants. One classic stunt is to sell a migrant’s information to the people who work in the “call centers.” Coyote agents, who are typically pretty chatty guys, like to squeeze names, numbers, destinations in the United States, and any other info they can out of migrants. They listen in, build up trust, redial phone numbers, whatever it takes. The call centers pay 1,000 pesos for a family member’s phone number. They call migrants’ families and tell them their loved one has been kidnapped, and is going to be beaten or killed unless they wire 5,000 pesos through Western Union.

It’s a cutthroat money game here. There are no sales and no special offers. It’s like the whole town and all the crossing zones are being taken over by parasites, by anybody who can leech off the system. The whole package to cross costs $2,400 and includes a grueling seven-night walk across the desert. If the migrant is a Central American, the coyotes charge an extra $600, just because they can: because in Mexico most Central Americans have nowhere to go but north. On top of this each migrant has to pay the seventy-dollar narco tax once they get over the line. There’s usually another tariff as well—one hundred dollars for the marijuana farmer or cattle rancher who lets the groups cross through their land.

In the morning we have a meeting set up with Grupo Beta. It’s in El Sásabe, which, as Paulino tells us, might be a problem. Our car has plates from Tijuana, and El Sásabe is run by the Sinaloa Cartel whose lookouts (hawks, as they’re called) don’t like to see unfamiliar faces coming from Tijuana, faces that could mean the Tijuana Cartel is making inroads.

We make a call to a friend, Father Prisciliano Peraza, to see if he can clear the way for us, if he can tell the right people that we’re journalists interested in migrants and not narcos, and that we
don’t want to make moves on anybody’s territory. He responds to our plea: “Okay, okay. Let me see what I can do.”

Everybody has the number of the head boss here. You have to call him to let him know you’re coming to town, or a new group of migrants is passing through, or something unusual is happening. Even the priest has the number, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s in the game. It just means that he follows the rules of Altar. In other words, everybody follows the rules of Altar.

Driving by the gas station on the road leading to El Sásabe, we realize we’ll be fine when the young attendant steps out and signals us to stop. “You guys are the reporters, right?” he says, before we’ve opened our mouths. “Going to El Sásabe to write about the migrants? Just make sure to take the turnoff at Sáric, it’s smoother than the dirt road.”

He is the first of many lookouts. We’re being watched, we know, and we’re also being covered. The narcos know who we are and are giving us instructions, telling us to play by their rules. “Take the road to Sáric,” they tell us. “Twenty-nine miles on the pavement and thirteen on the dirt.”

Our hope is to find out from the Grupo Beta how effectively they practice “the protection of migrants” in a zone completely run by narcos. Once we arrive, it doesn’t takes us long to learn the answer.

The normal turnover rate for Grupo Beta officers here is one month. That’s because nobody wants to bring his or her family to this place, and nobody wants to stay. When the commander (who prefers to remain anonymous) ends his shift at six in the evening, he explains how they work here.

“We seal ourselves in. We don’t even leave the office to go out to the store. It’s super dangerous. The smartest thing is just to keep a low profile.”

We try to negotiate with the commander to get a quick tour of the crossing zones, but he says no and won’t budge. The best he’ll offer is to show us La Pista, an out-of-the-way crossing point hardly used these days, or so he tells us. We want, however, to
get a look inside the funnel, to see the intermixing of drugs and migrants, to get to La Sierrita, El Chango, or La Ladrillera, but his response is firm.

“They don’t let us work around there.”

“Who doesn’t let you work?” I ask.

“You know very well who. Pretty much everyone’s in the business here.”

The commander says that the narcos don’t let them work in El Tortugo anymore either. It was there they used to stop trucks, count migrants, and warn them of the dangers of the desert: the climate and the animals. It was the Good Samaritan work of Grupo Beta. But then they were run off. Or so the commander’s story goes.

I hear a different story. A trusted source tells me that Grupo Beta simply got a better offer. They explain that Grupo Beta officers used to charge 200 pesos a head on the migrants who were passing through El Tortugo. But when the narcos got wind that the government was using some of their own strategies, they got jealous. So they offered the agents a monthly salary to lay off the crossing tax. The officers accepted. I hear the identical story from a driver as well.

Before we leave El Sásabe, the folks at Grupo Beta want to offer us something. It’s the least they can do, they say. They take us to another semi-active crossing point, far from El Tortugo. There, unexpectedly, we catch a peek inside the funnel and come away with a good idea of why the high-rolling narcos like getting involved with poor migrants.

Two pickup trucks pull up. One has fifteen migrants. The other has twenty-three. In fifteen minutes the narcos collect more than $2,500 in tax. And that’s without trafficking a single bud of marijuana. It’s roughly the monthly salary of a hired hit man. The coyotes are carrying a veritable gold mine in those trucks. And if they succeed in getting all of their clients across, they’ll earn at least another $84,000—more if any of the migrants are Central American. We hang out for a few hours, passing the afternoon
and the early evening, and in those few hours we witness more than ten trucks pass through.

CLOSE TO JUÁREZ, FAR FROM JUÁREZ

A forty-minute drive from Altar, still deep in desert terrain, lies another town with a name often mentioned on the border: Naco, a town with a population of less than 5,000. It’s another one of the flashpoints that cropped up in the 1990s, and to this day it’s a town that doesn’t cultivate or manufacture a single thing. People here work as bandits or coyotes, or they have a small hostel for migrants or restaurants specializing in cheap food. Naco serves as a pit stop for those who are crossing as well as those who have just been deported. It’s one of the slots through which disoriented Mexicans are shoved back, deported to a country many of them hardly know.

The problem is that in the past couple of years the twenty-mile radius surrounding Naco has become a tight bottleneck, and the narcos, as they have everywhere on the border, have since laid out their rules: the hill known as Gadiruca, where it would only take two nights to reach the US town of Sierra Vista, can only be used to cross drugs. So now Naco shares another route with Altar, but migrants there have to pay an even higher price to be packaged into trucks and taken north.

Benjamín is a well-known coyote agent in Naco. He spends his time loitering in the small plot of concrete where the deported get dropped off, waiting for clients who can’t imagine a life in their native country and so decide to go back to the United States. When I walk up to him he seems willing to talk. A coyote agent isn’t regarded in these parts as a delinquent, but rather as a necessary laborer in a widely accepted commercial framework.

“They say crossing gets ugly around here,” I say.

“Fucking hell.”

“Because everything’s under surveillance on the other side?”

“No, it’s not that. They do keep guard, but only here in the city. We have an easy time over there, out in the hills where we cross. The thing is that the bosses don’t let us work it over there because there’s so many loads the bandits have, and they’re in charge. So we have to go look in Altar.”

“And that raises the prices, I imagine.”

“What can we do? We’re asking for 3,000 now.”

Some agents can’t count on a steady stream of migrants willing to pay to be taken to El Sásabe, and so they’ve had to start relying on the infamous kidnapper express. They tell migrants they’ll cross them over, but instead they lock them inside a house and get their information to call their families back in the States, and demand $500 to $1,000 in fast deposits.

This is an example of how the border keeps mutating due to the funnel effect: one tightening route drives migrants to new routes already saturated with narco-traffickers and coyotes, and the whole border, little by little, becomes tighter and tighter.

Our journey continues. After two hours of highway driving we arrive in Nogales, the only Sonoran city split down the middle by the border, with half on the US side and half on the Mexican side, both halves with the same name. We’ve only come here to quickly check out the terrain, thinking we won’t find anything new. The story of migrants getting pushed to the outskirts of a city has been the same at every point throughout our journey on the northern border.

Nogales seems to grow assailants. The Buenos Aires neighborhood that hugs the urban shell around the border wall is the most dangerous part of the city. Every night it’s crawling with dealers and drug mules ferrying their cargo of marijuana to the other side. The idea is to attract the Border Patrol there, leaving the hills free for bigger loads to pass unnoticed. This neighborhood is dominated by the Los Pelones gang, who are in an open war with Los Pobres. They are mostly underage boys, willing to kill in order to show they’re worthy of being recruited by a bigger cartel.

We’re received by Commander Henríquez, the head of Grupo Beta. Henríquez, known for his order and discipline, was part of the military and a judicial police officer in this area until his body became proof of what happens on this divisive line. Fourteen years ago he was shot three times while walking the migrant routes: once in the chest, once in the abdomen, and once in his right tibia, which is now metal. He says it was narcos who aimed at his chest, and a larger group of bandits was responsible for the other wounds. He survived and now works for the migrant aid organization.