The Devils Highway: A True Story (10 page)

Beside the bombing range lies the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Organ Pipe has the dubious honor of being known as the most dangerous national park in America. Drug and human smugglers use it as a freeway, and officers are at risk every day of their assignments. Law is represented there by armed rangers and the federal Cactus Cops, the officers of the Forest Service, Department of the Interior, and Bureau of Land Management.

Farther to the east of Organ Pipe is the Tohono O’Odham reservation, patrolled by tribal police. South of Yuma, it’s the Cocopah Reservation. Between Yuma and Ajo, it’s 150 miles of sheriff’s territory. East of this area is the Pinal Air Park, a weird landing strip full of bloated cargo jets that shimmer in the heat waves. Local folklore suggests that Pinal is also home to a CIA airbase.

All along the line, the tireless Border Patrol drives, flies, walks. They hit the trails on small ATVs like weekend dune buggy enthusiasts. The heroic BORSTAR rescuers hunt for people in trouble. The secretive BORTAC SWAT troops (called “the hunter-killers” by one Cactus Cop) go on their covert missions. A legendary unit of Customs flits in and out of the night like ghosts, the “Shadow Wolves,” Native American trackers who hunt down drug runners. Added to the mix is the DEA, often belittled by local cops: “DEA means Don’t Expect Anything.” BLM cops. And at each border crossing are the border guards (not, the Border Patrol wants you to know, what they do)—INS agents.

There are also big angry white men in Jeeps, two separate groups of “citizen” border watchers working the western desert outside of Tucson. And the human rights groups are also wandering around, hoping to save dying walkers and placing water jugs on the trails. Then there are the prospectors, drug smugglers, journalists, scientists, FBI, park rangers, Park Service cops, BLM agents, military police, ranchers, Indians, outlaw biker gangs. Scattered here and there are small groups of militias and “patriot militias,” their trailers pulled into secure configurations, upside-down American flags and black MIA/POW flags and the occasional Jolly Roger fluttering in the wind.

With so many hunters trying to catch Jesús, it’s a wonder he managed to get lost.

Jesús and Maradona went to work.

The boys stumbled off the bus in the blighted August sun of San Luis. They made their way to the Hotel Río Colorado, flogged by the brutal heat. Here, they took cheap rooms and waited for word from Chespiro.

Maradona knew the walking route—east of San Luis, where buses stopped at a restaurant near a Mexican army outpost—but Jesús didn’t. The restaurant was probably the famous El Saguaro truck stop, traditional jumping-off point for walkers heading north to Wellton, a scene from a B movie, one of the haunted diners full of Mexican vampires and masked wrestlers, the place revealed in the last shot of the film to be an ancient Chichimeca pyramid hidden in a sewage-crusted arroyo. From the front, it’s bad walls, white paint, a gas pump, and a soda cooler.

The Border Patrol seems to have a strange affection for its tawdriness. In Wellton Station, there are several framed shots of the joint in the chief’s office. Agents take visitors in there and point to the photos of cracked, dirty walls, and say things like “There’s Mecca.”

People stop here and rest in the heat for a minute, drink a soda, buy a beer, and hike away into the wilderness. The Yuma Desert, the Lechugilla Desert, the Mohawk Mountains, the Devil’s Highway all lie ahead. Mexican Route 2 runs at their backs. Beyond it, the black Pinacate. To the north, the bombing range. If they walk for two days, they can be at I-8.

Maradona walked Jesús down the pathways. Then, Chespiro sent the first load of illegals to San Luis. They had orders to find Jesús and Maradona at the Hotel Río Colorado.

Maradona and Jesús had already worked out their contacts with the long-haul Route 2 bus drivers. Now they hustled the illegals to the depot and boarded them onto the bus headed for Sonoita. The driver sold them a “special ticket,” since they weren’t going all the way—each man could ride his bus for fifty pesos, the money slipped into the driver’s pocket. He then drove them east, and when he made his scheduled stop at El Saguaro, he pushed the lot of them off and bade farewell. Maradona and Jesús hopped off the bus too, picked up gallon jugs of water, and together the group stepped into the United States.

At sunset, they shoved off, and the walk went well. It was about thirty miles to Wellton or Tacna. Maradona, the old pro, showed Jesús how to navigate by the mountains. They skirted the Copper Mountains, watched for Sheep Mountain, and followed Coyote Wash part of the way. They walked till dawn the first night, and they settled in to rest during the morning of the second day. It was hotter than anyone expected, and they were drinking too much, but Maradona didn’t worry—they’d be in sight of lights by nightfall. And they were. They saw the lights after dark, and they orienteered by the glow of the Mohawk radio towers and the vapor lamps of the Mohawk rest areas. They came up over the railroad tracks and hurried to the spigots of the bathrooms, the cool drinking fountains, the flush toilets. Those few with American coins could buy cold Cokes and Snickers bars at the vending machines. Mohawk rest area was already some kind of county fair for that first group. If they’d been Boy Scouts, Maradona and Jesús would have gotten merit badges.

They made it their practice to home in on “houses and towers” in the Wellton area. As they trudged toward the freeway, they passed over the irrigation canal carrying Colorado water into the desert. There they might have drunk their fill of fertilizer-polluted green water.

Most walkers die a relatively short distance from salvation. Some walkers fall in the canals and drown. It seems to be one of the cruel tricks of the Desolation spirits, but it makes brutal sense. Most walkers are fresh and strong at the start of the journey. After a day of baking in the sun, they start to get disoriented. They drink too much water. They’re dizzy and weak. By the second or third days, when they need their wits and strength about them, they are near death. And they drop, often reported with sad irony in the press, a few miles, or yards, or feet, from water, a home, a road, or a Border Patrol outpost.

This first trip, however, went perfectly. The vans appeared, and the walkers were whisked off to Phoenix.

But the Border Patrol was catching on to the Cercas gang’s routes. After two months, they were getting busted more often, their walks disrupted by the sudden appearances of trucks and spotlights. Those Migra guys made Jesús crazy. The Mexican Migra agents were the worst. Turncoats. Traitors. They hunted down their own people, and they were meaner to the illegals than the gringo Migras were. He did everything he could to avoid their attention. He walked down the loneliest valleys, cut across the darkest washes, and regularly relied on the brush-out.

He dressed like the pollos, of course, in case he was arrested. If he was, he’d be processed and put on a bus and sent back. He learned quickly to keep his head down and stay quiet. The Tucson Migra had this evil trick they’d pull. They wouldn’t chase you if you ran, they’d run along beside you, and they’d grab a hunk of your shirt. And you’d be trotting along, wondering,
What is this?
And the pinche Migra would be grinning a little. Then, bam! He’d shove you to one side as you ran, and you’d smash face-first into a saguaro. Any tree or tall boulder would do, but the saguaro trick, that really hurt. Yuma was supposed to be a little different, but he didn’t intend to find out. Oh, hell no—Jesús never ran. He shuffled along, acted stupid, which they pretty much believed of him anyway. He accepted water and nodded and grinned and said “Sí, señor” when addressed, as if he respected the Migra.

Of course his name started appearing in Border Patrol reports. But of the thousands of illegals intercepted by the Yuma sector, how many must have come back over and over? Jesús was nothing special. Still, he was becoming visible and El Negro needed an invisible man.

So Jesús and Maradona were sent to Sonoita. Hey, what the hell. It didn’t make no nevermind to them: they’d been in San Luis a long time, and they’d used it up. Sonoita was just about as flyblown and Podunk as San Luis, but it was something almost new. And there was plenty of work coming out of Altar. The boys had been doing two loads a week in San Luis. But in Sonoita and Sasabe they could probably up that by another three loads a month. Plus the Migra didn’t know them out there—they might get away with it for a year before anybody noticed. Yeah, man,
orale vato, no mames buey,
they were ready. And besides, what were they going to do, tell Chespiro and El Negro no? All they could do was get pumped and pack, head east to the dead heart. Plug in the headphones and listen to Marilyn Manson as the saguaros and volcanoes drifted by.

They only had one real concern. They were going to new desert, to the center of the Devil’s Highway. But El Negro had a couple of locals ready to show them the ropes. Nothing to worry about.

Jesús and Maradona boarded the same Mexican Route 2 bus they smuggled walkers on. Perhaps one of their bribed drivers was at the wheel. They paid full fare. No doubt the driver’s eyebrows rose.
Orale,
they said. No drop-off today. They got off at El Saguaro for a Coke and a piss, a smoke and some flirting. Then they climbed back on, only starting on their big adventure.

6

In Sonoita

A
nd here they were, getting off a bus again, whiplashed out of air-conditioned comfort into another brutal desert sun storm.

Jesús and Maradona trudged across Sonoita and took rooms in the Hotel San Antonio. Chespiro had paid for them in advance. He kept a whole section of the hotel rented out for his recent arrivals, the Coyote’s chicken coop. They settled in and waited for the call, which came soon enough.

A Mexican budget border hotel is not to be confused with a Super 8 or a Ho-Jo’s. The rooms are tatty, and the carpets, if they exist, are worn. The beds are cheap and occasionally feature little black periods and semicolons that reveal themselves to be hungry bedbugs. No cable. No room service. The bathroom at the end of the hall is all tiles, and the toilet is often in the corner of the shower, and the whole thing can be swamped out with a dirty mop. Oaxacas and Marias clean the floors. The toilets won’t swallow toilet paper, so the bathrooms feature aromatic white-washed tin buckets full of tainted rosettes. The locks are busted. Home sweet home.

El Negro came for the boys and set them on the path with their teachers, a little fat man known as Santos, and a badtoothed scrapper known as Lauro. These were not their real names. Later, Jesús claimed he didn’t ever know anyone’s real names.

The new smuggling route was as treacherous as the old. Yuma sector Border Patrol agents will tell you they patrol the deadliest landscape on earth; Tucson sector Border Patrol agents will tell you they do. It’s a peculiarity of Arizona—the worse it is, the prouder they get. Kings of Nowhere, they each want to claim the crown. To El Negro’s boys, it was just more damn desert.

Where before, they were expected to maneuver north from San Luis to Wellton, or Tacna, or even Dateland (home of the World-Famous Date Milkshake), this new walk was at least thirty-five, and even sixty-five miles long, depending on whether they were headed for Highway 85 or the big freeway beyond. If they walked straight along the cut trail laid down for them by El Negro’s scouts, they could get there in two days, three at the outside. The detours possible to them extended for several million acres.

The few place names they knew were eerie to them. They were in a strange Indian language Jesús didn’t recognize. Gu Vo, Schuchali, Hickiwan. It was the Dark Continent.

The land was also rougher here, crumpled and spiked with peaks and mounts. Great wads of landscape reared up all around the path. The Growler Mountains, Mount Ajo, the Bates Mountains, the Granite Mountains, the Puerto Blanco Mountains, Díaz Spire, Twin Peaks, the Sonoyta Mountains, the Cipriano Hills, Growler Canyon, Scarface Mountain, the John the Baptist Mountains, the aptly named Diablo Mountains.

It’s a naturalist’s dreamscape. For the illegals, it’s a litany of doom. The poems on the map read like a dirge. A haunted cowboy ballad:

Chico Shunie Wash,

Tepee Butte,

Locomotive Rock,

Gunsight Wash,

Pozo Redondo,

Copper Canyon,

Black Mountain,

Pinnacle Peak,

Camelback.

That’s a busy piece of real estate. If God could take an iron to it and flatten out all the creases, there would be a plain the size of west Texas. And in all that land, there were only a couple of
tinajas,
or natural water tanks, and a very few hidden wells.

Pinacate Lava Flow,

Tordillo Mountain,

Pinta Playa,

Cholla Pass,

Saguaro Gap,

Alamo Wash,

Gunsight Hills,

Burro Gap,

Gu Vo Hills,

Montezuma’s Head.

If they cut east and climbed the Diablos, then went up Estes Canyon, they might have found Bull Pasture Spring. Water tanks hide on the south side of the Puerto Blancos, and on the north slope they might have found Red Tanks Well. Going northwest up Growler Canyon, they might have found Daniells Well, or north of that, over old Scarface and below the Lime Hill mine, they might have found Bandeja Well. It’s a hard slog, even if you’re a veteran signcutter, and you know where the water is. You need a U.S. Geological Survey topographical map. The Coyotes, when they had them, drew maps on notebook paper with Bic pens. Their routes were inferred from freeway maps and road atlases. And none of the Coyotes knew where to find a drink.

Sonoita was easier to trailblaze than the Devil’s Highway. It was a small city, splayed in a northwesterly oblong beside Mexican Route 2 and the Sonoyta Arroyo watercourse. The cemeteries were to the east of town. There was a good paved road to the Lukeville border crossing, and a region between Sonoita and Lukeville was called Hombres Blancos (White Men), which gave newcomers a chuckle. Gringos cut south through town on Route 8, heading to the Gulf of California and Puerto Peñasco, or Rocky Point—Ski-Doo and ocean-fishing wonderland.

For a small place, Sonoita had plenty of cantinas. It had several discos. And it had the requisite border nudie bars.

There were other places of worship, too. Sonoita had been targeted for revival by the great Protestant Evangelical movement battling Catholics to a draw all over the north of Mexico. The war was not merely between Catholics and “Los Hallelujahs.” In the Catholic church itself there was a schism between traditional Roman observance and the new Charismatic Catholicism, which borrowed from the Pentecostal traditions and featured shouting and clapping, folk songs and uproar, prophecy and talking in tongues. Alternatives abounded. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, “Los Testigos de Jehová,” (known by local wags as “Los Testículos de Jehová”) worked the barrios. Karate and kung-fu dojos represented Eastern thought. Northern Mexico has a busy Chinese immigrant community, and it was fully represented by its many faiths, including loyal Taoists. The AA sober club in town introduced a “God as we understood God” twelve-step spirituality. A healthy occult subculture simmered away in the neighborhoods—from traditional and indigenous Curanderas to trance mediums, known as “materias.” Black magic cults worked in the deserts, and Santería cells worked their mojo. Koranic missionaries were the latest wave to penetrate Mexico. The Imams were making their way north, on their way from teaching the Indian kids in Chiapas and Veracruz how to speak and read Arabic. The Baptist missionaries in their little barrio Bible studies knew what they were speaking about when they preached that “Powers and Principalities” battled in the air over every sinner’s head.

Like many border towns, Sonoita offered people better pay than what they could scrape together in the interior; not all locals had plans to cross the border illegally. The San Antonio Hotel was only one of the inns that set aside rooms for “Oaxacas.” The rooms were often crammed with ten or twelve nervous people and the bill was paid whether there was toilet paper or not. Sheets? Who was going to complain about sheets? The tenants were sometimes in the rooms for only a few hours, then they were gone. At most, they’d be there a day and a night; rarely did they last more than two. The hoteliers could have simply kept plain rooms, empty except for a slop bucket in a corner, and they could have gotten full price. Some of them did.

Jesús and Maradona, camped out in their rooms between training runs, smoked and watched TV and read comic books. They went out at night and drank. During the brutal daylight hours, they squatted and sweated out their hangovers in front of fans. In this middle period, Jesús met his beloved, Celia Mendez. Nobody knows if she worked at the hotel, or was visiting for some reason. Later reports list her as “Mrs. Mendez.” Maybe she was escaping a failed marriage.

In love, Jesús left his hotel digs and moved into Celia’s house on Altar. Maradona followed soon after, renting a room down at the dirt end of the street. The runs must have already begun since Maradona could afford rent. And Jesús, now adopting his beloved’s last name as an alias, became Mendez. Mendez and Maradona—it had a nice ring to it.

El Negro had the whole thing worked out, a science. The walkers came in by bus, pulling up the long Route 2 from deep in the interior. Mendez, Maradona, Santos, or Lauro met them at their hotels. They either stayed at the San Antonio, or the appropriately named El Sol del Desierto—the Desert Sun.

A night or so before the run, they were whisked across the street from the San Antonio to a ramshackle rooming house known as La Casa de los Huespedes. It was supposed to be a two-story building, but the owners had never gotten around to finishing the top floor, which had become an open tarpaper space handy for hanging laundry. It also lent itself to service as a lookout post. This safe house was the province of El Negro. Although he reserved it for them, his clients paid for the privilege of sleeping there. The manager, Nelly Muñoz, charged them each fifty pesos per day. The groups were always between fifteen and twenty people in size. These loads came through three times in a good week —easy money for Nelly.

The short hotel stay was apparently the last hoop the walkers had to jump through. It was a favorite nightmare of the Coyotes that the Migra’s black-clad BORTAC monsters would come out of the sky on ropes, infrared goggles glowing horribly in the night. Sometimes El Negro, in an absurd bit of spy-game paranoia, would appear suddenly and quietly order the walkers to rush to Nelly’s and hide, there to await further orders. Then he would hurry off in his pickup, casting glances all around lest he be found out. As if anybody in Sonoita cared.

The Saturday before the fatal walk began, Mendez and Maradona had taken a group across the Devil’s Highway. It was a long, arduous walk, but it was uneventful. They crossed the Quitobaquito Hills, heading north, then they cut west and approached Ajo. They stuck to high ground, baffling the Migra’s drag system. By walking high, they could only be spotted by cutters scanning with optics, or by Migra overflights. The planes were easy enough to evade. This ground was so rough and crooked that all you had to do was squat under a paloverde or a mesquite, or hug a creosote. Mexican skin, from the air, is hard to tell apart from the ground. Knowing this, pilots often just fly in circles looking for telltale points of white. Bones. The bones come right out of hiding, as if the dead feel there is nothing left to lose.

The walkers made it over Bluebird Pass, and they could see Ajo as a small cluster of lights in the unmitigated dark velvet of 1:00
A.M.
It always seemed like madness to the clients that the guides were pressing past Ajo—they could see roads and gas stations and stoplights, they could practically smell the hot dogs and beer. But the guias knew better. Ajo was just a sign they were cutting.

They got past town, and hours later they arrived at a water tank beside a paved roadway. This nameless outpost was the El Negro gang’s chosen rendezvous. There, the group rested and drank as they waited for the pickup. But instead of their own driver appearing, a Border Patrol truck found them. Maradona managed to escape with one pollo, running into the scrub. The two men went on to Phoenix. Mendez and his group of twelve were apprehended.

One of the Border Patrol guys saw that Mendez had a rabbit tattoo on his arm.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“What?”

“The rabbit.”

“The tattoo?”

“Yes, the tattoo. What does the rabbit tattoo signify?”

“Nothing.”

“Gang sign?”

“No.”

“Is it some kind of Coyote code?”

“It’s a rabbit. I like rabbits.”

If the Migra had realized who they had in the holding pen, the Yuma 14 might be alive today. But somehow, Mendez wasn’t recognized. They were looking for Jesús Lopez Ramos from San Luis, not some Rabbit Mendez of Sonoita.

Another disturbing element of this bust was the water tank itself. Once it had been discovered by the Border Patrol, it was compromised. Forever after, the lifesaving water stop would represent a game of roulette.

Among these arrested walkers were three brothers from the state of Guerrero. Mario González Manzano, Efraín González Manzano and Isidro González Manzano were from a small village near Chilpancingo called Villagrande. Their family home did not have telephone service. They had gone to the Coyote’s men in Guerrero, south of Mexico City, and sought passage to the north. There wasn’t enough money in the family to take care of one brother, much less all three, and the elders, and the young ones.

The Coyotes put them on a bus for Tijuana, where they were going to cross into San Diego. They were repeatedly foiled by Operation Gatekeeper. Pinche Migra! An associate had called Chespiro Cercas on the cell phone and made a case for them. They were good boys, hard workers. They deserved another shot at the border. Just to prove they were good boys, they’d all taken menial jobs in Baja California. They weren’t wasting a minute without earning something.

Brothers were good, a working unit that the Cercas gang could control. Each brother could be threatened or hurt if need be. But if they worked well together, they’d be earning big. If they got into a yearly trip, they’d owe Chespiro money forever.

Chespiro ordered that they be shipped to San Luis, and then—after that didn’t work out—they mounted the famous bus to Sonoita and tried again.

Bus after bus after bus: they must have thought el Norte was nothing but bus lines.

The brothers had been living in crap motel rooms for weeks, and now they’d been caught. They were angry. Enough was enough—they demanded yet another shot at it, and soon. El Negro, in an uncharacteristic spasm of humanitarianism, offered them the next walk—May 19—for their trouble.