The Beast (31 page)

We chatted with one of the agents at the checkpoint for a few minutes, asking him if he’d seen any action. “No. We’ve got nothing today so far,” he responded. The popular idea of the border created by film, music, and popular myth looks nothing like the reality we were seeing. The area did not look like a war zone,
and we learned it would be rare to spot uniformed men haring after ragtag Latinos or narcos in pickup trucks firing machine guns. This area of the border was, more than anything, empty. Empty and silent. In the Tucson sector there are 275 miles covered by 3,100 agents who take turns patrolling the seemingly endless plains, hills, mountains, and thickets. In these hundreds of miles of border there is always movement, but it’s rarely seen. There, that day, between the towns of Amado and Arivaca, the agents were reporting a whole lot of nothing.

And Agent Marroquín took it in her stride. “That’s how this game plays,” she said.

We continued on our drive. “We’ll head towards the Nogales wall. There they sometimes ferry drugs over at night.” She drove for an hour before we finally arrived and parked in a lot filled with trailers.

Agents often spend an entire boring night inside of their SUVs, with nothing but coffee and cigarettes and the still desert out their windows to occupy them. And then sometimes an agent gets killed, as happened to Luis Aguilar on January 19, 2008, run over while laying down tire-puncturing strips. Aguilar is the last agent to have died in the line of duty.

The parking lot we reached was empty except for seven trailers and a lone agent on a bicycle who reported movement shortly after we arrived. The lot sat on top of a tall hill from which you could see thirty miles of wall dividing northern Nogales from southern Nogales, the United States from Mexico, houses on one side from houses on the other. All of it separated by the blank gray of the wall, by twenty-five-foot bars driven and locked by cement five feet into the ground, much of it constructed from leftover war material. Combat material put to a new use. In the Tucson sector there are sixty-six miles of wall and over 160 miles of vehicle barriers.

Marroquín chatted for a minute with the agent on his bike, then took his binoculars. She peered toward the Mexican side. “There they are,” she said. And there they were, two men, camouflaged
and hunkered into a bush, shaking with cold. They were watching us the same as we were watching them.

“They’re hawks for either narcos or migrants, watching for movement on this side, trying to decide when people should cross or when they should ferry the drugs.”

Marroquin’s game started becoming clearer to us. The migrants, they’re waiting to cross. And the agents, they’re waiting to catch them. And the two groups look at each other, waiting. Those on the Mexican side get to make the first move.

CALM INTERRUPTED

“It’s about to get dark. That’s when the movement begins. They know how to wait,” Marroquín explained, before suggesting we continue driving along the wall.

It was 5:40 p.m., the sun casting its last orange flashes and the radio starting to sputter directions. With the efficiency of a factory, everyone immediately responded to the orders coming in on the radio. The next thing we heard was: “We have a small car trying to cross near Sásabe.”

And then: “There’s a chase close to Abraham Canyon. It’s two different groups.”

Marroquín, glued to her radio, explained that all the action was far from Nogales. “This is a peaceful season. Other months around this time, it seems like every Mexican and every type of drug is trying to cross.” The comment seemed to have urged the radio on. The transmissions poured in.

“They’re launching drugs,” said a crackly voice, “in virtually every nearby location.”

“That one is for us,” Agent Marroquín said, stepping on the gas.

Another patrol car was parked on a street running parallel to the wall. The line of houses between the wall and the street prevented the narco hawks on the other side from spying on the Border Patrol. With the lights turned off and the radios set at the
lowest volume, two patrol cars followed two agents on bicycles sent to intercept packages thrown over from Mexico.

“The seizures by the wall are always dangerous,” Marroquín whispered. “Sometimes they shoot at us from the other side, trying to stop us from catching the pickup guy on this side.”

An agent came down the street. He was sweating. All of the patrol agents have twenty-pound belts around their waists, to which they strap their pistol, tear gas, flashlight, water, firearm magazines, and pocket knife. The agent set a package down on the ground: a backpack covered in electrical tape.

I stuck my head out the window and asked one of the bike agents what had happened to the narcos seen trying to collect the packs.

“They ran off,” he responded, as he started pedaling back uphill.

Sure, they’d run off, but I didn’t see anyone go after them.

“That’s how this game is,” Marroquín insisted. “We don’t endanger ourselves with a chase that involves risks. If we seize the drugs but they run and get to the other side, we let them go. We don’t know if they’re armed. We take care not to get involved in any shoot-outs and not to follow anybody who could be armed.”

The border agents came back with two more backpacks, twenty pounds between the two of them. It’s hard to understand why the guys on the other side throw any packages around this area, knowing that most of the Border Patrol’s surveillance cameras are set up around the wall, but everything has its explanation in this game. There’s a strategy to it all.

“Sometimes,” Marroquín explains in whispers, “they throw their drugs around here and in two other key places to tie our hands and distract us from other sectors where they’re crossing with vehicles. It’s the same tactic used when drug traffickers send large migrant groups for us to catch, so we’ll leave another sector empty while we take that group to the station. But what can we do? Even if we know this happens, we can’t let these packages cross. We don’t even know how to get to the empty sectors where they’re supposedly crossing bigger loads.”

It can be a gamble trying to differentiate between getting work done and walking into a trap. As Marroquín said, sometimes it seems that all of Mexico’s drug loads are being thrown over the wall and all of Mexico and Central America is trying to cross. And the SUV radios blare on.

7:12. Escaped subject now picking up packages thrown from Mexico, feet away from where his previous pack was seized.

7:21. Two migrants detained some miles from the wall. One of the screens flickers with a man seen on the Mexican side walking away from the wall with two backpacks identical to those just seized, apparently deciding to hold off on crossing until the scene cools down.

7:24. At checkpoint on Interstate Highway 19, five undocumented Mexicans discovered hiding under a truck’s false floor. Driver, upon seeing the checkpoint, flees.

8:03. Man jumps over the wall in downtown Nogales. Classic desperate attempt. He tries to hide in a crowd, but two border agents follow him.

“They’re almost never successful crossing like that,” Marroquín says. In the same area, some young men throw more drug packages.

8:31. Fifteen pounds of marijuana seized.

“And the drug mules?” I asked.

“They escaped, they walked into those woods,” an agent explained, pointing to a thicket of trees ten feet away. “They got back into Mexico.”

Rather than a deadly game, the activity here is one of routine. A routine with many interruptions. If drug smugglers escape, they escape. If they lay a trap in order to divert agents, agents have to fall for it, even when they know they’re going after bait. Marroquín said it well—in a game, the same player can’t win every time. The goal is to hinder the drugs, not to stop them.

“That’s impossible,” Marroquín said as we left the site of the backpacks. “If we build a wall ten feet high, they’ll make an
eleven-foot ladder. The Border Patrol’s mission is to gain operational control over the area. We know they’re always going to come in. You have to learn to lose. After 9/11, our mission changed. Now the priority is to detain terrorists. Migrants have been demoted to second priority.”

What is surprising, however, is that they’ve never reported the detention of a single terrorist along the US–Mexico border. That is, if by “terrorist” we understand what the United States usually defines as a terrorist: a bin Laden–appointed individual, a member of Al Qaeda, an Iraqi insurgent who works for Muqtada al-Sadr and has dedicated himself to combating the foreign soldiers in his country.

But the definition of a “terrorist” is always changing. “Of course we’ve detained terrorists. Narco-traffickers are terrorists,” Marroquín argued without taking her gaze off the highway.

“They live off breeding terror,” Marroquín continued, sounding like a Border Patrol spokesperson, while on our way to to the Tucson detention center. “And we don’t want them to do here what they’ve been doing in Mexico. That’s why we have 18,000 agents on the border and why we’ll keep raising that number.”

As an example of what “they’ve been doing in Mexico,” she used Mexico’s southern state Michoacán, where, on September 15, 2008, two grenades went off in the central plaza of its capital, Morelia, where thousands of people were gathered for the Independence Day celebrations. Eight died and scores were injured. The attack, almost certainly committed by Los Zetas, was considered revenge for the recent seizures of their drug loads.

It wasn’t too long before the SUV radio transmitter blurted out a more concrete example of what the Border Patrol avoids on this side of the wall. A message from one of the sector’s coordinators requested border agents to temporarily abandon the area surrounding Nogales, in order to let a group with firearms pass. US informants on the Mexican side—probably anti-narcotics agents—had communicated that there had been threats by narcos to execute Nogales police officers. Sometimes, as in this instance,
hit men try to flee into the United States, and the Border Patrol counters by calling off standard patrol agents and mobilizing special units to handle the situation.

It’s impossible to know how much the Border Patrol’s new prioritization has affected the traffic. It’s impossible to know, while more narcos have been ferrying drugs, whether fewer migrants have been crossing. What we do know is that the statistical data confirms Marroquín’s take on things.

Between 2005 and 2008, this border area registered a decline in migrant apprehensions. The 439,079 detained in 2005 became 281,207 in 2008.
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But the 221 tons of marijuana seized in 2005 rose to 236 tons in 2008. It’s understood that whatever is seized is at least proportional to what is successfully crossing. This follows a simple logic: if more drugs are seized than are successfully crossed, business wouldn’t be viable for the narcos. If more migrants are seized than those who cross unnoticed, then that business wouldn’t be viable for the coyotes.

At night the desert turns into a mysterious territory, an immense darkness where a twig’s movement can look like an oncoming person. The light of the moon is deceptive. We drove through that landscape, down Interstate 19, with the radio transmitter blurting: “Another vehicle entered. Ten miles from Nogales. Receded when it saw the patrol car. It’s still making rounds, trying to come in.”

“We go on like this,” Agent Marroquín said with a faint smile, “chasing them all the time.” And she started telling stories that made her laugh, though they involved drug traffickers, desert bandits, and coyotes. She told them like she was remembering the mischief she used to make as a kid.

“They’re very creative,” she said. “We’ve found three false
border patrol agents among us, trying to smuggle drugs. Of course, when we radio them, ask who’s there and don’t get any response, we know they’re a lie. Oh, I remember,” she smiled, shaking her head, “one eighty-five-year-old woman who was taking sixteen migrants in a van that said: Church of Love.” But Marroquíns face became grave when she recalled that a month ago one agent bumped into three smugglers. “One had an AK-47.”

“And sometimes,” she went on, resuming her friendly tone, “they’re more ingenious. Especially the narcos. One time, we detected a van but only because they hadn’t covered it completely. On the screen at the control base we only saw a tiny red dot that couldn’t have been a person or an animal or a vehicle. It looked as if it were floating through the desert. When we got closer, the agents realized it was a vehicle full of drugs covered in a metal invisible to infrared light.”

This is the stuff of movies that we were expecting. The traffickers had obtained a type of fiberglass or metalloid, germanium or the like, and covered almost the entire car. “They accidentally left just that one spot uncovered that gave them away.” Marroquín hit the nail on the head as we drove into Tucson: “Everything you could imagine, they’ve done. They’ve done it and more.”

Back at headquarters, some agents were taking fingerprints, others were easing the cuffs off a recently detained migrant. Four agents stood as they always do, day and night, watching the thirty-eight monitors that show images of the desert and the wall. Two big computer screens showed tiny red dots. People were moving through the mountains.

In one of the detention rooms I saw seven undocumented migrants wrapped in military blankets, lying down on a gray slab of cement.

“Those are the ones that have criminal charges,” Marroquín explained. They’ve entered more than once without papers, or they raped someone, robbed someone, or drove drunk. Whatever it is, all of them will testify before a judge who will
decide whether they’ll be deported or incarcerated. “Those over there,” Marroquín pointed, “are the undocumented without any charges.” I saw three disillusioned men in another room, hunched quietly on the bench or lying up against the wall.

“This is sometimes full, but usually not until morning. Most people try to cross at night,” Marroquín said, as if trying to justify the nearly empty rooms. “Sometimes one wins,” she repeated her refrain, “sometimes one loses.” Whoever was here was a tally on what she considered the winning side.