The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (7 page)

We also have an antijaywalking crusade, a crusade against overtime in the Department of Sanitation, and personal political crusades: “I am on a crusade to become the state comptroller!”

The late Senator Paul Cloverdell, a Georgia Republican, and Representative Porter Goss, also a Republican from that state, came up with a bill that would have stopped anybody from doing business with any company that might somehow have some financial ties with a Mexican drug lord. No evidence was required. Just the presence of Mexicans.

“How can we be sure that the Mexican company doesn’t have drug money invested in it?” Cloverdell was asked.

“So many of these Mexican companies,” he sighed. “Well, you take these people coming across the border. How many of them do you think are carrying drugs?”

He thought the answer was just about all.

Yet for those coming from places such as San Matías, none. “Nobody uses drugs here because they don’t have the money to buy them,” Eduardo’s father, Daniel, said one day. “It is not that we are so much better.”

I
N THE BRICKYARD
in San Matías, Eduardo was shackled with shyness. He could hardly talk to Silvia when he was in the same room with her. Talking to her on the phone might be easier, he thought. At her mother’s store, he played the video machine and after it, offhandedly, he asked how Silvia was. The mother said she had not heard anything from her and that she was worried. All these stories on television about people dying trying to cross. Where was this College Station where she had gone? He had never heard of any jobs there, and that was the only way to determine where he would go. You move to the Job.

Gustavo, who lived behind him and had gone to America earlier, had called several times from Brooklyn and said he had a construction job and that the boss, Ostreicher, could use more workers. The pay was immense: Gustavo said he was making $7 an hour. Seven dollars in one hour! Eduardo carried bricks all day for the equivalent of $5 a day and talked about the money Gustavo was making in America. Hearing this, his father knew that he was about to lose a son. There was a compelling reason. Eduardo and Daniel had started to build a new two-story addition at one end of the courtyard after work, with Eduardo mixing concrete and his father and a couple of relatives digging a foundation, but the money ran out. All these things that go into putting up a building of any size—the lumber, the supports, the ironwork—cost more than they had.

Eduardo began to put money away to pay a coyote who would get him to America. It took eighteen months of saving, but by the spring of 1998 he had enough. He went first to the corner by the store to look for a coyote. Nobody was around. He went two doors from his house and spoke to a neighbor, who knew smugglers. Two days later, the neighbor came into the brickyard and told Eduardo it would cost $1,500 to get him to America. With this much money to be made, Eduardo didn’t have to look for coyotes. They found him. Just walk with the money and the smugglers will go over mountains and through water to follow you so they can lead.

Eduardo’s father had only one thought for him: that liberty is not the country you are in, but the job you have. “If you do not like the job, then you quit and go to another,” he said to Eduardo. “It is your only liberty.”

People like Silvia and Eduardo had no idea of growing or selling drugs. Crossing the border was about the Job. Because of the drugs, however, they had to face new and imaginative obstacles in order to reach minimum-wage jobs in the United States.

Those carrying drugs into the United States are in the business from the start. A fellow at the New York Botanical Garden gave a
lecture one day on the cepas of Bolivia—peasants named after cepa ants, which move as a chain. The human cepas carry packs of coca leaves strapped to their backs from one side of a Bolivian mountain to the crest and then down the hill to the lowlands, where it is cooked into a paste for shipping through Mexico to be sold in the United States, where the demand on Wall Street and in nightclubs and, in rock form, in crack cellars keeps the chain going. Cepas coming down the hill in an unbroken line, one sandal after the other, cepas coming down, cepas going back up the mountain, cepas in a chain draped on a hillside covered with brush. And far off, in Detroit and St. Louis and New York, the stockbrokers hold out cash for powder or, in poor neighborhoods, cash for crack.

Marijuana is smoked so widely in the United States that U.S. law enforcement believes that Mexicans must be wholly responsible. In New York, most pot smokers get their pot by an organized system of messengers, second in size only to the network delivering ad copy and publicity releases and large packages of letters and memos and legal briefs. The papers are carried to offices by bike messengers who are generally black. And then on the streets are these neat white young men pedaling away, carrying knapsacks full of white envelopes. The envelopes are filled with pot and are delivered to offices around Manhattan like take-out food.

The messengers are from offices that take the orders by phone. A woman answers usually, and the caller gives his code: “RF for number 7.” As he says this, he can hear the woman typing the number into a computer to verify that the caller is a legitimate customer and not a cop. You get on the list by having a friend call and then the woman gets your name and number and calls you back to make sure you’re not the police. After that, you are on the customer list.

Now, ordering pot by phone, you tell the woman what you want. One envelope. They deliver from 2
P.M
. to 9
P.M
. You have to call before five to get it delivered by nine. They do not deliver heroin or cocaine. That is another and smaller business.

The bicycle messenger is white because cops don’t stop whites. He wears a helmet and backpack and carries a driver’s license. He brings the envelope up to the reception room of a business, the customer comes out and hands him an envelope with the standard $60, and the messenger gives him the envelope of pot. The guy goes back to his work and the messenger goes out to his bike and wheels his way through heavy Manhattan traffic on his way to the next customer.

Marijuana is so widespread that its status seems to be close to that of booze during Prohibition. You can’t actually tell because pot smokers don’t talk much. Drinkers boast, “I had a thousand beers last night.” Pot smokers are home alone. But the reception rooms have people waiting, and the messengers are in the elevators, and somewhere they are bringing it in across the Mexican border.

O
UT OF THE ATTEMPTED
sealing of the Mexican border comes a most imaginative and effective drug and illegal immigrant enforcement, and it makes no difference. They find a tunnel of one hundred yards in length between Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Arizona, that has been in use by drug smugglers for twenty years. It was three feet wide and four feet high, and they found about $1.5 million in cash and 2,668 kilos of cocaine. By the time they were through counting the money there was another tunnel.

Stopping illegal immigrants and stopping drug peddlers are two separate and fairly hopeless occupations. In the 280 miles of desert leading to Tucson, authorities intercepted 387,406 people in 1998. The next year, there were 470,449 officially returned Mexicans from this area. The population of Tucson is 460,000. And some people feel a million Mexicans got through, but just enough did not, with 500 dead in the desert, to become an international scandal. Simultaneously, 25 percent of the nation’s crime caseload comes from the Mexican border. Federal public defender Sandra Pules sat at her desk one afternoon in early 2000 with case number 3,500. The
courtrooms are filled with so many Mexicans, the overwhelming number having to do with illegal crossing. As only one or two guards are available to a courtroom, the Mexicans are always shackled like dangerous animals. All day long, courtrooms are filled with the chiming of chains.

At border crossings like Tijuana and Laredo there are signs up saying that there have been four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand—who knows how many—pounds of pot seized at this location. It is something to be satisfied about, like bridge painting. Upon finishing, you turn and start back, chipping and stroking. With drug arrests and seizures, you catch Mexicans and their drugs; meanwhile the majority of drugs come into the country from Puerto Rico. Drug users are supposedly impoverished and despondent and helplessly addicted, and will steal the nearest silverware. Drug rehabilitation can’t possibly be effective with these derelicts. The only thing to do is put a million in prison.

And far away from studies and statistics are the people who use drugs because they are fun. Do I use cocaine? You bet. Am I addicted? Don’t be silly. Then why do you use it? I told you. Because it’s fun.

The community of Sells, Arizona, sits alone in the border desert on the three-million-acre Tohono O’odham reservation, with its Customs Service patrol. The name Tohono O’odham means “people of the desert.” They have been at this place since the sand began. Their ancestors were the Hohokam, who can be traced back to 300 B.C. Agents in this unit must be at least one-quarter Native American.

Here are the two agents from this headquarters pulling up to the three strands of barbed wire that make up the border fortifications. They are Doug Bothof, of the local tribe, and Kevin Carlos, a Sioux from South Dakota. They are here on account of drug smuggling, not illegal aliens. The three strands of wire are the fence that is supposed to be keeping all of Mexico’s immigrants and marijuana out. It isn’t even government wire. It has been put up by ranchers
on the reservation. The top strand has been cut and the end hooked once around the post to hold it up, as if it had not been touched. The second and third strands were the same. Unhook all three and this part of the wire fence becomes a gate.

The two agents watch a van parked just on the other side of the wire, in Mexico. A woman is selling water to the immigrants about to sneak across and whisky to members of the Tohono O’odham tribe who cross over because tribal laws do not allow whisky on their lands.

The agents drive along the wire at five miles an hour, hanging out the windows and training on the ground below the most complex, miraculous technology: eyes that have been trained by their blood since time began to look at the ground and see great pictures and precise diagrams in the empty dirt.

They stop and get out. Bothof looks down at the tire marks of a vehicle that has come right through the wire.

“They’re old. You can see people walked across them the next day.” The outline of a foot is over that of the tire treads. Then he mutters, “Look at these people. See?” In one spot, a second set of treads suddenly runs over the first set. “They crossed here in two vehicles. Vans, I guess.”

“Drugs?” Indicating the footprints.

“Immigrants. The footprints over the treads are too shallow for somebody carrying a heavy pack.”

The agents are stocky, with equipment bringing Bothof to about 200 pounds and Carlos up to 260. They carry Steyrs, Austrian rifles with a thirty-round clip, plus another clip on their belts, a radio, receiver, a big Magnum handgun, and a flashlight.

Border areas like this one are speckled with buried sensors that pick up people walking, sometimes even their speech. Any activity lights up on terminals back at the base. But so often the metallic technology isn’t worth the air its signals soar through. Whoever passes over the sensor can be gone before anybody gets out to the
spot. So the agents track. The depth of the footprints indicates the weight being carried. A person with a backpack of marijuana rubbing, cutting into the shoulders has his feet sinking deeper into the ground than some little illegal carrying only his hopes, who skims across the dust, leaving the imprint of a grasshopper. To desert trackers, the term
backpacker
means a drug carrier, not some Ohio State student on summer break.

Sensors are often made futile by all these centuries of hunting and tracking that run in these border agents. Carlos points out that whether a track is fresh or old can be seen immediately. If the prints of a desert rat are on top of the footprint, it means the footprint is not fresh.

The ones the agents want come across with drugs strapped to their backs. It is usually marijuana, weighing from fifty to seventy-five pounds. The backpackers are usually wrecks who come slogging along until they hit this long stretch of scrub, under a remorseless sky that has them gulping water every few yards. At the start of their trek—back where it was slightly cooler and the paths softer—they can do two miles without stopping. Soon they are down to a mile. Now, outside Sells, they do only a half mile before dropping their packs and collapsing.

They pray to Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of drug peddling: “Let my legs be strong. Let the border guards lose their eyes. Help others know that we carry the good. Nothing that is harmful. Our marijuana causes songs. The Border Patrol kills.”

And behind them are the natives with badges, tracking them.

Carlos looks at the bits of branch that have been knocked off bushes by a backpacker lumbering through. He feels the leaves. If they are moist, then somebody just went through. If they’re dry, it was a while ago.

The coyotes traveling with the backpackers usually try to cover the track by taking branches and sweeping over the trail, as if they
were scrubbing a saloon floor. Always, the sweep marks are a better trail to follow than the footprints.

The coyotes tried tying pieces of carpet to everybody’s shoes, causing a smoothness where there was supposed to be footprints. Noticing this, the trackers began to sift the dirt. They found colored fabric strands from the carpet. They followed them. Next, the drug packers used mop rope, with strands the color of sand, but it still showed fresh and bright in the agents’ eyes.

The drug haulers left signs where they sat to rest. One time, there were traces leading up to the start of mountains, and then on the rocks they found a small boulder dislodged, another overturned when somebody slipped and kicked it. Soon the agents were on four backpackers sitting with five huge packs of marijuana. Bothof was waiting for them to say they didn’t know anything about the extra pack. Instead, one of them said it belonged to a group that was just over the next small slope. Which they were. On that day, there were thirteen arrests, and hundreds of pounds of marijuana were confiscated.