The Beast (30 page)

“There, at least,” he says, referring again to Chihuahua, “I could get right up to the wall and see if I had a chance to cross.
Here I can’t even get out of Altar. Without 600 pesos for the ride and the narco tax, I can’t even get close to the wall. My plan was to walk with the will of God instead of with a
pollero
, but how am I even going to try if I can’t at least get to El Sásabe?”

There’s little that Mario can do here. Altar is still the principal crossing point in the state, but it’s also been turned into a toll road with strict rules. It’s not like it used to be. Now there’s nothing but migrants with money, those who can afford to pay, no exceptions made. Because along this border, as Mr. X said, as Father Peraza explained, as Paulino grumbled, as Javier confirmed, and as Mario came to realize, there are always taxes. And if you dodge them you’re playing with your life. The taxes in these parts are sacred.

So for a migrant without money there seems to be no one left who can answer Mario’s question: “Where can I at least give it a shot?”

1
We saw the situation in Algodones months later (around April 2009) as described in the previous chapter.

11
Cat and Mouse with the Border Patrol: Arizona

I remember what the photographer Edu Ponces told me at the end of this trip: “The story about the Border Patrol is more myth than reality.” It turned out that the bad guys of this story aren’t so bad, and that the border, with its wall, its radar, and the constant patrolling, is still porous, though in reality it makes way for drug traffickers far more than it does for migrants. Undocumented migrants aren’t high on the Border Patrol priority list, and so the chasing of some counts enough for the ones who get away. And getting caught, what migrants call failure, is looked at by some Border Patrol agents as winning the game. A game that is played again and again, every hour of every day
.

One of the twenty-three revolving radar systems located on these 220 miles of desert border flashes a signal. Four dots appear on one of the screens at the Control Center Headquarters. The radar system, located near the town of Arivaca, hovering over one quadrant, has stopped revolving. It has detected movement and has focused on one of those small red circles projected on the monitor.

The game has begun.

At least three patrol SUVs have received the signal on their screens. The four dots are moving. The SUVs make their way to a surveillance zone. They park on top of a mound overlooking the plain. The same message blares from sixty Border Patrol radio transmitters: “We have movement.”

Twenty minutes pass after the radar first flashes its signal. The agents fail to come to a consensus. They don’t know who to go
after. From the radio of the patrol car we’re riding in, we can hear the confusion swelling when those four red dots meet up with another four that have just appeared on screen. It’s three in the morning and down below, in the middle of the desert, there are eight people walking through the deadly December night.

The uncertainty on the radio goes on: is it two groups of migrants? Two guides mixing their groups together? Are they drug mules meeting up with the guides who will lead them to a drug stash?

Esmeralda Marroquín, the border agent we’re with, decides to get closer. She steps on the accelerator of her SUV, crosses Arivaca, passes ranches, and turns off at a road that goes to the town of Amado. We stop before a hilltop. We see the agent who was most talkative on the radio, glued to his infrared-vision binoculars. He observes the mound from the roof of his truck and signals the three patrol agents who have gotten out of their cars to go look for the migrants or traffickers—the eight red dotted silhouettes on the viewer: “One eleven, one nine, from your position heading northeast.”

Three agents leave on foot with a screen that lets them see in real time what the agent on the car roof is seeing through his binoculars. The silhouettes disappear and reappear. “Look for a kite stuck in one of the broken parts of the wall.”

The task isn’t easy. Whoever those walkers are, making their way across the Tucson desert, they have changed direction three times in half an hour. They come in and out of tiny of pockets of lower ground that provide shelter from surveillance. They probably don’t know that an entire technological system is focusing in on them. They probably don’t know that some fifteen agents are following them.

Agent Marroquín warns: “On this job, patience is key.”

Meanwhile, the five patrol agents standing at the foot of the car with the mounted agent and his binoculars are chatting over coffee and cigarettes. They talk about coworkers, kids, the weather. “How’s Michael?”

The others are still tuned in. “We haven’t spotted them,” the patrollers report.

“They were going northeast,” the one with the binoculars says, “but then changed direction and I lost them. Locate the kite and I’ll direct you from there.”

“We’re there, but we don’t see anything.”

It’s been over an hour since the ground surveillance radar flashed, since the agent at the control room in Tucson communicated the signal to the patrols, since these officials alerted the rest of the patrols by radio, since the agent glued to his binoculars jumped up to the roof of his SUV, feeling the bite of the cold despite his gloves, hat, and heavy jacket stamped with the name US Department of Homeland Security–Customs and Border Protection.

It’d be impossible to see anything from this mound without infrared technology. The only thing that can be spotted, in spite of the huge, full moon, is a dark lopsided plain, some desert bushes, and the shadowy scrub. The only thing that can be heard is the whistle of the wind whipping against our skin. My lips are chapped, and when I open my mouth to stretch my jaw I feel as if my skin might break like an old rubber band.

The agent with the binoculars and those deployed over the ground check in to tell each other the same thing: “No contact.” “Nothing here either.”

Simple logic tells us at least one thing: the operation is complicated. Maybe one of the thirteen OH-6 helicopters will appear behind Diablito Mountain and flood the plain with light, letting the three agents on foot move more easily and take off their infrared goggles to spot those eight red dots that would turn into either eight scared people hiding in a thicket, or eight narcos dropping their load and running back toward Mexico.

But here routine is routine, and the rules of the job are applied the same every night. The agent gets down from his SUV. The three trucks are started and Marroquín tells us we’re leaving.

Edu Ponces and I look at each other, surprised. These fifteen
agents have been following those red dots with all their technology for over an hour.

“Where are we going?” we ask.

“To see what else there is,” Marroquín answers.

But she realizes that neither Edu nor I understand what’s going on, that we’ve forgotten what she said earlier: “We have to get used to losing at this game. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. It’s like that every day and every night.”

She warned us of this some twelve hours ago, when we met at the Tucson headquarters. They’re not going to let fifteen agents hunt the same target for two hours. This desert fills with too many targets every night. That’s part of the game.

TRACKING

“Ready to play?” she said. It was the first thing Esmeralda Marroquín, a dark, short, and partly indigenous-looking Mexican-French-American said to us when she came through the station doors at the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, Arizona.

We didn’t respond.

She insisted. “Ready to play cat and mouse?”

Esmeralda Marroquín and the other 18,000 agents who guard the US borders are, of course, the cats. Those who carry thousands and thousands of pounds of marijuana and cocaine, as well as the estimated 3,000 undocumented migrants trying to cross the border every day, are the mice.

We arrive by three in the afternoon, twelve hours before we would start the chase between Diablo Peak and Diablito Mountain.

The planning for this ride-along took a long time: two months of telephone calls and emails, negotiating back and forth. The Border Patrol offers ride-alongs every month, during which reporters visit a few migrant crossing corridors, interview a few patrol agents, and then call it a day. “Tours,” the press agents call them. We, however, asked for an atypical tour. We wanted to see the full routine, how agents work on a daily basis. Only after
consulting the Border Patrol center in Washington DC did the Tucson sector give us the go-ahead for a full shift tour.

We first started calling the Border Patrol after we’d already gotten to know some of the busy crossing points on the Mexican side, which included Ciudad Juárez, the most violent city on the continent, where one in every four of the 5,600 narco murders occurred in 2008. We had also spent time in Nuevo Laredo (on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande from Laredo) where drug traffickers, mostly Los Zetas, control the migration routes and direct the kidnappings that take place in the southern part of the country. Then, besides Tijuana, we also got to know Altar and Nogales (the closest Mexican cities to Tucson), where since the 1920s Mexican marijuana has found easy entry into the United States. And where, since 2005, more undocumented migrants have been crossing than at any other point along the border.

The question we wanted to see answered, on the US side, after witnessing all of these Mexican sites controlled by narcos, was if the wall, the helicopters, the cameras, the underground sensors, the horses, and the off-road vehicles were sufficient to control a border that had thousands of people wanting to cross it every day. We wanted to know if the message from the US government was for real.

Is your wall really unpassable? Is your wall (in all of its forms) sufficient to stop the waves of people and drugs?

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security during the Bush administration, often emphasized that the border situation was “an enormous challenge that couldn’t be solved in thirty minutes.” Yet he also repeated numerous times that the government efforts to secure the border would herald a “final victory,” the “definitive blocking” of the flow of drugs and undocumented migrants.

We wanted to know if the declarations made by the suits in Washington were making any actual difference on the desert dirt.

~

The agent we were paired up with was a ten-year veteran currently working on the busiest sector of the entire border, the Tucson sector. Esmeralda Marroquín, thirty-seven years old, daughter of a French father and a Mexican mother, was born in Arizona. Her mother came to the country legally, she told us, with papers. When I asked her why she had wanted to work for the Border Patrol, she responded emphatically: “For the love of my country. To give back to something that has given me so much.”

For the love of her country she spent six months in training, as well as taking Spanish classes and doing physical conditioning. For the love of her country, she affirms, she also spent two years on Operation Disruption—a team working to break down the coyote networks responsible for locking up migrants in safe houses for ransom. Though Marroquín doesn’t speak very highly of coyotes, “those traffickers that trick a migrant and leave them stranded in the middle of the desert just to make a buck,” she has a better view of undocumented migrants, considering them simply “people looking for a better life.” Yet the constraints of the job remain at the forefront of her mind. “I can’t let them pass,” she says. Then she adds, leaning back toward her natural sympathies, “I know how poor a lot of these people are. My grandma was indigenous. I know how they live.”

Marroquín switched on the radio transmitter and our night began. “We’re going to look for some action,” she said. “We’ll scout for migrants first, what we call tracking. But as soon as we hear anything on the radio we’ll jump on whatever it is. Sometimes we get a lot of drugs and no migrants. Sometimes a lot of migrants and no drugs.”

She drove with her head jutting forward, her gaze fixed on the passing asphalt. Half an hour in, and the radio hadn’t made a sound. Marroquín resorted to telling anecdotes.

“I remember the only time I had to draw my weapon. It was in my first year with the agency. I came across seven drug mules. When I approached, one of them picked up a big stick. I flipped
off my safety and thought, here we go. But thankfully the guy dropped the stick and booked it. We’re only allowed to open fire if someone has the intention and possibility to cause harm or death. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rock, a blade, or a firearm. If I think my life is at risk, I can open fire.”

We drove in her SUV for miles and miles, cutting through the desert. The sun beat down and the cold wind whipped in through the open windows and against our skin. Nothing seemed to be moving.

Agent Marroquín, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and tied off with a bow, kept giving us warm smiles, trying to diffuse the silence around us. “It’s often like this,” she said. “Sometimes there’s a lot to do and sometimes you don’t hear a thing in the whole desert. But don’t worry, any minute and we could see some action.”

“There,” she pointed as we arrived at the checkpoint between the small towns of Amado and Arivaca, “is a pickup spot for
polleros
. We’ve detained a lot of migrants waiting to catch a ride along the side of the road here.”

The only difference I noticed between that and other desert spots was that three Border Patrol agents (two of them of Latin American descent) had marked it off with fluorescent cones. These hotspots aren’t recognizable except to the eye of experts.
They
know that six miles straight into the desert from this road there is a trail that is out of reach of Border Patrol cameras, where migrants can walk at ease without even having to climb any hills.

But despite agents’ sensitive noses, which can help them pick up on migrant trails, it’s still mostly a question of luck. “There’s simply not a pattern to this,” Marroquín explained. “You can’t say where they’re crossing. Every day we find new routes.”