The Devils Highway: A True Story (7 page)

How soon do we go? They wanted to know.

It takes time. But don’t worry, boys. We’ll see what we can do.

His cell phone was sitting next to his coffee. They shook hands. His belly touched the edge of the table.

He smiled.

Reymundo Barreda was a mestizo, indigenous on his mother’s side. Her last name was Maruri, and in the Mexican fashion, he bore her name as well. Barreda Maruri.

He was a mature man, a strong, hard worker with a cowboy’s aspect—he favored western wear; his favorite belt buckle, for example, was in the shape of a silver spur. He wore silver rather than gold, either from preference or due to lower cost. His watch was on a faux-silver band. He was a soda bottler by trade when he wasn’t tending his land.

He had resolved to go north to expand and reroof his small house as a gift for his wife. A summer of orange picking was all he had in mind. He had already figured out the cost of cement block and aluminum roofing and a couple of bags of cement. Florida. It was warm like Mexico, sunny, pleasant.

His pride and joy was his son, Reymundo Jr. At fifteen, Reymundo was a sturdy student in the regional school system, and he had distinguished himself as a star of the local soccer leagues. Every teen dreams of notoriety or fame, and perhaps Reymundo could develop his soccer skills and play professionally. The thought did cross his mind when he was charging down the field. Full of strength. He had the sheer faith in his father and life that could be expected from a kid whose name meant “King of the World.”

In a surprise gesture of loyalty to his father, Reymundo Jr. asked to go along on the trip. He convinced his father by explaining to him that two strong backs could earn more money in a short time than one. And if they both worked like burros all summer, they’d make double the money. They might buy his mother furniture to go in the new room. For them, the planned trip was a gesture of love.

Reymundo Sr. was worried about his son’s well-being. The boy was restless and hungry for adventure. The old man was pretty sure his boy would go off alone if he didn’t take him. And he thought of his own lonely journey ahead. When it came time to sit across from Don Moi, he was troubled. But, reluctantly, he signed himself and the boy onto the roster.

Nahum Landa was a dark young man in his twenties with a melodious voice. He had deep black, shaggy hair. Sometimes you had to lean in to hear him speak. His meeting with Moises was oddly Biblical: two men with Old Testament names haggled over details of their exodus. It seemed like a good idea. Nahum was the brother-in-law of Reymundo Sr. If the extended family went together, they could look out for each other.

Nahum was deceptive—his quiet voice, with its melodic quickness, its slightly slurred words, and his sometimes evasive gaze, hid the strong man behind the façade. Nahum was a natural leader. He had no doubt he would survive, no matter what happened to them. And his boys signed up with him, looking to him as a guardian.

There were others signing up.

Enrique Landeros García was thirty years old. His wife, Octavia, was only twenty-three. They had a son named Alexis. He had recently turned seven, and he was ready for school, but Enrique and Octavia didn’t have the kind of money school required. Although the Mexican system used uniforms to standardize all classes of students, you had to first have the uniform. Shoes. Supplies. Tuition. Enrique made his way to Don Moi’s table for little Alexis—a small illegal venture to pay for a more straightforward chance at a future.

Reyno Bartolo Hernandez was thirty-seven years old. He was one of the older men in the crew. He and his wife, Agustina, had been married for nineteen years. Theirs was a stable household; it could even be called an established home. After their years together, however, they’d decided to adopt a daughter. Reyno went to Don Moi for money to pay for her care. He didn’t have many clothes to take, though he did put aside his favorite green pants for the long walk.

Mario Castillo Fernandez was a handsome young man of twenty-five. He was in good condition, a hard worker, his only curse poverty. His wife, Irma, was fiercely dedicated to him. Their love was still strong, though they’d been together since their teens. They had two young children, and like Enrique Landeros, Mario was facing school with no prospects for greater income. And, knowing his love for Irma, there would be more children.

Perhaps he could build a better house. Add a room. Send the children to school in good pants, with new backpacks, known as
mochilas
. Maybe he could buy Irma new furniture. The rumors said he could get to Florida, where it was warm like home. Pick oranges. How bad could that be? He liked oranges. He wasn’t afraid to work. He added his name to the list.

Don Moi drove from town to town, patient, happy. He called Chespiro, his shadowy boss in Hidalgo.

Yes, yes, it’s going well,
jefe
.

I have them lined up.

Several already. Seven, eight.

Don’t worry, I’ll get more.

3

The Coyote and the Chicken

T
here are things, unlikely as it seems, that unite the Mexican consular corps and the Border Patrol. In consulates, names of certain Border Patrol officers are spoken with respect, even affection—Ryan Scudder of Tucson is called a gentleman; Mike McGlasson of Yuma is looked on with respect; Ken Smith, at Wellton, is mentioned as a kind of patriarch of the wasteland. The Wellton boys like the Calexico consul and the Yuma consul, and they have a pretty good feeling about the Mexican Beta Group cops, who are the elite agents investigating narco and Coyote crimes on the Mexican side. Aside from that, they seem to see lots of the other Mexicans as communists and thieves.

But the two things that most unify the two sides are each one’s deep distrust of its own government, and each side’s simmering hatred for the human smugglers, the gangsters who call themselves Coyotes.

The sign is printed in black and blue and red on a white banner.

It faces south.

They have spent good money on it.

For the Coyotes Your Needs

Are Only A Business And

They Don’t Care About Your Safety

Or the Safety of Your Family.

DON’T PAY THEM OFF WITH YOUR LIVES!!!

The sign has been posted by the Mexican government at Sasabe, Sonora. It is as absurd a placard as might have been posted by the U.S. government. Policy wonks in Washington, D.C., are as ineffectual as policy wonks in México, D.F.

There is no real border here, just a tattered barbed wire fence, a dusty plain, and some rattling bushes. Walkers face the Brawley Wash and the Sierrita Mountains coming up from Mexico.

Don Moi never bothered with Sasabe. He wasn’t a walker. For Don Moi, the conspiracy was a thing of buses: the Tres Estrellas and Transportes Norte del Pacífico bus lines. Then a quick night tossing and turning in a Sonoita or San Luis or Douglas motel. A wad of colorful Mexican pesos and a nice lunch, and back home on the bus. It was all
Playboy
s and American cigarettes, a tequila and maybe some girls. And so long, boys! I’m going home!

The border was the problem of others.

The Sasabe sign, which many of the walkers can’t read, is the only thing Mexico is doing to try to stop them from crossing. The Mexican army patrols the borderlands, sort of, though nobody can find them, probably because the Coyotes pay the soldiers off. Coyote gangs have more money than the Mexico City sign painters. What do Mexican soldiers care if
alambristas
(wire-crossers) walk into Arizona? Any one of the soldiers might very well head north himself at some point.

For a while, the Mexican government offered the walkers survival kits with water and snacks, but the uproar from the United States put a stop to that. Americans saw these attempts at life-saving as a combination invitation to invade and complimentary picnic basket. They were further astonished to learn that Mexico City officials put condoms into the boxes. Of course, Mexico City claimed this was a gesture of deep consideration for the health of all involved. Gringos were deeply alarmed that the illegals were not just coming over to work, but to get laid. They’re coming for our daughters! They’re coming to make welfare babies! They’re coming to party, party, party!

Fifteen hundred walkers a day depart from under the Sasabe sign. The writer Charles Bowden, on a visit to Sasabe in 2003, counted five thousand walkers in one afternoon.

Although our Wellton 26 did not cross at the sign, their trail leads to the region surrounding it. The Lukeville/Organ Pipe border was too busy for them, so they scooted off to the side and tried to backtrack to the Lukeville paths once they were in the United States.

No matter where they entered, they had only to step over a drooping bit of wire fence, or across an invisible line in the dust. Near the legendary crossing at El Saguaro, there is often no fence at all. Along the Devil’s Highway near Tinajas Altas, there is nothing but a dry creek bed and a small sign telling walkers:
Y’all better stay out or else we’ll be, like, really really bummed!

Tucson’s newspapers described their entry as having been “somewhere between Yuma and Nogales.” This is a safe bet—a cursory glance at a map will reveal that most of the state lies between Yuma and Nogales. Several accounts say they crossed at a tiny burg called Los Vidrios, not to be confused with the Vidrios Drag.

A woman named Ofelia, or Orelia (depends on who you ask), Alvarado runs a small truck stop at Los Vidrios. Many walkers stop at her store before they cross over. Near Mrs. Alvarado’s store are signs that warn walkers “USA Prohibido!” Walkers see them, scratch their heads, and continue. At best, the signs imply, in bad Spanish:

TO USE IS PROHIBITED!

To use what? The trail? The sign? The desert? Spanish? Nobody, it seems, told the Yanquis who put the signs up that in Mexico, “USA” is spelled “EEUU.”

Mrs. Alvarado never saw the Wellton 26. She told reporters that a young man had gone a few days before they did, and he’d returned, burned black and vomiting blood, after they’d left. He told her God was coming to get him.

So Los Vidrios, as generally reported, was not their crossing point.

Most of the survivors say they crossed at El Papalote. That would be a tiny scatter of wrecks and huts whose name translates as “the kite.” The trail probably led them into the Quitobaquito Hills. These confusions and guesses should suggest why it’s so difficult to enforce immigration law on the border. Of the men confirmed to have survived from the group, none can agree on where, exactly, they entered the United States. Perhaps only one person knew where they were trying to go once they were here, and that was their Coyote.

From El Papalote, it seems like the myth of the big bad border is just a fairy tale. One step, and presto! You’re in the EEUU. Los Estados Unidos. The Yunaites Estaites. There’s nothing there. No helicopters, no trucks, no soldiers. There’s a tarantula, a creosote bush, a couple of beat saguaros dying of dry rot, some scattered bits of trash, old human and coyote turds in the bushes now mummified into little coal nuggets. Nothing.

The smugglers tell the walkers it’s just a day’s walk to their pickup point. If they are crossing into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, it’s literally a walk in the park. A couple of hours, heading north for Ajo, Arizona. Cold soda pop and a ride to work.

How bad can it be? A day of thirst, some physical struggle—they’ve lived like that all their lives. The place may be alien to them, but the situation feels like home. After all, they tell themselves, America’s a country with a state called Nuevo México. Other states are called Red, Snowy, Mountain, and Flowery; several of them were going to Flowery, and some of the others were going to Northern Caroline to see about making cigarettes. The state of Nuevo México even has a capital city called Holy Faith: Catholicism, New Mexico.

And then there’s the hilarious Chi-Cago. (“Piss.” And, “I Shit.”) It’s funny until they feel the cold of winter.

Illegal entry is the sole reason for Sasabe’s or El Papalote’s or Vidrios’s existence. The vans lined up under the spindly cottonwoods have driven from Altar, Sonora, full of walkers. Don Moi was quite familiar with Altar. The bus stopped there, and he often hit the cell phone to check with his bosses: should the walkers hop off in Altar and grab a guide for the Sasabe line, or should they go on to Sonoita, to take part in a more complex conspiracy? Several of our Wellton 26 stopped over in Altar, and it was the merest whim of the head Coyote that put the Yuma 14/Wellton 26 on the bus to Sonoita instead of in a wasted Ford van heading for Organ Pipe. Maybe the Big Man was watching MTV; maybe he was heading for the toilet, or looking for a smoke. He had his phone in one hand, he spoke one word, and on they went to their ordeal.

By the time they were finally rescued, they could have been in Miami.

The ne’er-do-well fence jumpers that galloped into El Paso and San Diego on a quest for chocolate shakes and Michael Jackson cassettes are no more. The New-Jack Coyote is largely the inadvertent product of the Border Patrol’s extremely effective interdiction and prevention policies. Good old Operation Gatekeeper is the mother of invention. San Diego’s Border Patrol beefed up the border fence, then placed massive flood-lights along it, illuminating the no-man’s land between the United States and Mexico. Then, in a burst of creative thinking, it ceased the endless patrolling of the hills and river valleys of the region. Instead, the Border Patrol parked trucks at half-mile checkpoints all along the fence. Each agent is in sight of the next, and all of them are in constant contact as they observe the line. Helicopters still hover, and their versions of the Oscar sensors blip, and night-vision electric eyes scan. The fence in the west extends into the ocean. In the east, it terminates in the wasteland of deserts and mountains.

Unimaginable developments followed. In the region of San Ysidro, the last small town before you get to the Mexican border, at the last U.S. exit off I-5, a big sparkling suburb has sprung up. In this area formerly notorious as a human hunting ground, a dangerous waste of crime and panic, junkies and gunfights, there are now soccer fields and two-story houses that look like they could be in a subdivision of Denver. At the end of all the cul-desacs in the development, there is a high wall, and football-stadium floodlights pointing south. Some of the new Latino middle class once crossed that very land in a mad scuttle; now, teens in the neighborhood climb up on their backyard sheds to watch the action in the Tijuana River floodplain.

The hundreds of walkers who once ran this gauntlet are now forced to move east. They rarely try to swim around the western barrier, and if they do, they land in a state park where “fishermen” casting into the surf are often armed feds. The only way to go is out there, back of beyond, away from civilization. And if you go far enough, the fence devolves into a two-foot-high road barrier you can step over. Farther still, and you’re in territory much like Sasabe. There are approximately two thousand miles of this kind of terrain to enter.

This new paradigm—walkers crossing Desolation in place of jumping urban fences—has made Altar the largest center of illegal immigration on the entire border. The central park plaza in town is full of Coyotes and walkers. A five-minute visit to the park will garner several offers to cross. Coyotes hawk destinations like crack dealers in the Bronx sell drugs: voices murmur options from a memorized menu, “Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida.”

The backs of the Altar vans have plastic milk jugs of water for sale. On the front of each van is a sign made of masking tape, and it says “Sasabe,” or “Frontera.”

“Carolina Norte. Carolina Sur. Nueva York.”

The main grocery store in Sasabe, hardly a supermarket, is winkingly called “Super El Coyote.”

The Mexican government’s border sign near Sasabe doesn’t actually say “Coyotes.” It uses the hipper slang of the border. It says, “Los Polleros.”

A
pollero
would be a chicken-wrangler. The level of esteem the smugglers hold for their charges is stated plainly. They’re simply chickens.

Of course, if you know Spanish, you know that the word for “chicken” is
gallina
.
“Pollo”
is usually reserved for something else. A
pollo,
as in
arroz con pollo,
has been cooked.

Now, more than ever, walkers need a Coyote.

In the new organized crime hierarchies of human smuggling, the actual Coyotes are middle-management thugs. The old Coyote, the scruffy punk leading a ragtag group of Guatemalans into San Diego via the bogs and industrial parks of Chula Vista, is rapidly becoming extinct. You will still encounter a dope fiend who will walk you into the infrared night-vision RoboCop scrub for fifty bucks, or the homeboy in the Impala who blusters you through the line by being a “Chicano” heading home to the barrio after “hitting the bars,” but he’s being replaced by the new breed. And woe to that crackhead if the Young Turks get hold of him. He’ll be found with his hands tied behind his back and a .9 mm slug in his brainpan.

Even asking questions about these criminals is considered dangerous. Queries into the Coyote operation behind the Yuma 14 catastrophe, for example, elicit three different warnings about being “shot in the head.” One gets the feeling that the entire world of Coyotes is waiting, waiting to merge with the
narcotraficante
underworld immortalized by Norteño music and movies such as
Traffic
, waiting to hook more deeply into the white slavery and sex slavery and child-labor rings of the world, waiting for a human-smuggling visionary to unify them.

Gangs are so in control now that walkers who want to go alone, without a pollero to guide them, must pay a fee just to enter the desert.

Criminals are at the gate of Disneyland: they’re scalping tickets, and they’re scalping each other.

The criminal operation that lured the Yuma 14 and their companions into the desert and abandoned them was not the biggest, by far. But it was well established, and it operated out of Phoenix, Arizona, and the Mexican state of Hidalgo. It was a family operation. The main man, the Tony Soprano figure, lived in the United States. Or maybe he lived in Hidalgo. He liked to wear cowboy boots, and he kept his figure slim. Or he was never seen by the troops. A voice on the phone.

In Phoenix, it was Luis Cercas.

Luis Cercas, at the time of the Yuma 14 deaths, had contacts in Florida, Illinois, and California. He had a Florida associate, Don Francisco Vásquez, and another roving associate was placed in Mexico. He was the brother of Luis, Daniel Cercas, and he lived in Hidalgo.