On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “There’s a difference between giving water to migrants and sheltering them,” the chief said. “Harboring and smuggling is against the law.”

  A young man jumped up, saying, “Is the provision of medical care to a wounded or sick migrant regarded as harboring?”

  “That’s tricky,” the chief said.

  There were more questions related to the destruction of water bottles, to which the chief’s answer was that he would look into it.

  No More Deaths had recently released a report detailing the abuses of the Border Patrol. In the period from 2012 to 2015, the group had placed more than 31,500 gallons of water at 139 aid stations on trails used by migrants in and around Arivaca, a bleak stretch of desert east of the Tohono O’odham reservation. They estimated that about 86 percent of the water was used. That was proof that lives had been saved. At the same time, about 10 percent of the water in the aid stations, some 3,500 gallons, was destroyed. The report included two trail-camera videos that showed one agent puncturing water containers and another agent (on a cold winter day) removing a blanket from an aid station.

  The Border Patrol had been filmed systematically slashing water bottles and kicking the boxes to pieces. A report published in January 2018 by No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos gave specific figures for the Sonoran Desert in the Tucson sector: 415 jugs destroyed, on average twice a week, the damage affecting 3,586 gallons of water. And clothes, food, and blankets left in the desert by Samaritans had been seized or trashed. This was an example of pure spite.

  The Border Patrol had also arrested humanitarian workers for trespassing and littering—in this case, littering meant leaving caches of life-saving supplies in the desert. In the period reported, almost six hundred migrant corpses had been delivered to the Pima County medical examiner. Pima County is an irregular rectangle, with Tucson in the east, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in the west, the Tohono O’odham Nation in the middle, and the border forming the bottom edge.

  These abuses were not only the result of recent directives from the Trump administration. A spokeswoman for No More Deaths, Caitlin Deighan, said the policy of militarizing the border and forcing migrants into the most dangerous stretches of desert, where thousands died, dated from President Clinton’s era, and the deaths and bottle slashings had continued into the Obama presidency. “It’s been ongoing throughout every administration,” she said.

  A back-and-forth began in the church on the distinctions between harboring migrants and the humanitarian camps in which wounded or sick migrants were treated by doctors or activists. This was not resolved, though I could see that the cause of the impasse was the Border Patrol failing to see any mitigating nuance, regarding a sick or dying migrant as someone to arrest and deport, while the activists promoted the notion that such a person was deserving of help.

  This was the ethical question that Henry David Thoreau faced in Concord, harboring a runaway slave—often starving, ill, or thirsty—violating the Fugitive Slave Act and risking jail and a fine, to help save the life of a fellow human being. The Fugitive Slave Act made every American complicit in supporting slavery; the criminalizing of humanitarian acts on the border made every American complicit in persecuting migrants.

  A woman stood and raised her arms for attention, saying, “Please may we have a moment of silence for the seven thousand found dead on the US-Mexico border because of US policy?”

  After this silence—less a silence than a subdued buzz of ten seconds or so during which I could hear cars passing the church—a man spoke up: “In your opening remarks, sir, you called this a war zone. That’s pretty serious. So my question is, what is your hiring policy? It seems to me from what I’ve seen that you have a lot of very young and untested officers, a lot of wannabes and dubious people with a chip on their shoulder. What are you doing to counter that mentality?”

  “We grew very fast as an agency,” the chief said, acknowledging a lack of strict oversight and conceding that some of the newer officers had been unsuitable, aggressive, or untrained. But they were still learning, he added. “We screen our applicants better. We reject many applicants.”

  “But they’re still destroying humanitarian camps and slashing water bottles. Some of your guys are no more than teenagers.”

  “There’s a provision for eighteen-year-olds to join,” the chief conceded.

  That reminded me of the many big, swaggering high school kids I’d seen on Arizona sidewalks, laughing much too loudly and shoving each other, or honking their horns at teenage girls at the Sonic drive-in. Not one of the activists was anywhere near that age. It was easy to imagine a boy or girl in their late teens, armed with a Glock and a stun gun, in a green Border Patrol uniform and a Stetson hat—such an armed teenager representing the federal government—facing a defiant activist or a cowering migrant. The ensuing confrontation would not be a meeting of minds.

  The tribal elders voiced the same concern: aggressive policing, Border Patrol vehicles violating tribal law by driving across the reservation. One of the legal and cultural complexities of this sector was that the Tohono O’odham Nation of twenty-five thousand people straddled the border, most of them living in the United States, the rest in the Sonoran Desert.

  “The greatest casualty is the trust in the US government and the Border Patrol,” one of the elders said. He was a slender man in a red shirt, a braid of his lustrous jet-black hair hanging against his back. “In the Nation there’s an overwhelming fear of the Border Patrol. Tribal members see the cars driving on our roads—and these cars have no right to be there.”

  “I’ll have someone look into this,” the chief said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m here to listen.”

  “This land is our sacred land,” the man said in a protesting voice. “What are you going to do to reestablish trust?”

  “I am here to develop that trust,” the chief said.

  But the man remained standing, leaning forward. He raised his hand and waited for silence before saying, with stern authority, “We are not the enemy!”

  “Let me say this,” the chief said in a subdued voice. “You need to understand that we don’t make the rules and laws. It’s our job to enforce them.”

  This elicited a shriek from a young man in a back pew, who stood and said loudly, “You say you don’t make the rules and laws, but successive Border Patrol chiefs have changed the rules and made new rules! These have been arbitrary and abusive, like destroying the water bottles and arresting us for giving medicine to migrants!”

  “I will be following established protocols,” the chief said. “I will not be making new rules.”

  An older man in a jacket and tie rose to say that he was a teacher in a Tucson school who often supervised students on field trips in the sector, and the students in the vans and buses always had to endure an extensive interrogation at Border Patrol checkpoints.

  “These are my students—they are not lawbreakers, and yet they are singled out and subjected to intimidation,” the man said. “I want to know what you are doing to eliminate racial profiling. It is having an enormous negative impact on my students.”

  As the chief said he would look into this, too, adding that he was bringing the meeting to a close, a petite middle-aged woman got up and said, “Before this session ends, I want to remind you that your union endorsed Donald Trump for president, and the Border Patrol Foundation gave an award to Steve Bannon.”

  This assertion had a dark and tangled history. Bannon, an adviser to the Trump presidential campaign, had received the Courage in Journalism Award from the Brian Terry Foundation at a dinner in Tucson in 2017. The foundation was named for a Border Patrol officer who had been murdered in 2010 in the Tucson sector. The rifle used to kill him had been identified as one of the weapons in the “Fast and Furious” program.

  Fast and Furious was a gun-walking plan that allowed more than two thousand high-caliber weapons—assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns—to flow from the US to Mexico so that in
a sting operation the weapons could be traced to criminal figures, who would then be arrested. Under Fast and Furious, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed—indeed encouraged (no proper IDs were necessary)—Mexican criminals to buy firearms from gun stores near the border (the Lone Wolf Trading Company, in a Glendale, Arizona, strip mall, was one) and smuggle them into Mexico.

  The twisted thinking behind this idea was that the weapons, traced by the ATF to cartel leaders and drug lords, would identify and undo the villains in the gangs. The program, initiated during the Obama administration, was a failure: the bureau lost track of hundreds of the illegal weapons, and no drug lords were prosecuted. A Fast and Furious .50-caliber rifle was recovered from El Chapo’s drug gang, though thirty-four of these big guns (powerful enough to shoot down a helicopter) went untraced. And it was later proven that a Fast and Furious assault rifle, an AK-47, was used to kill Officer Brian Terry. This came to light when a whistle-blower, an ATF agent named John Dodson, made the connection between Terry’s death and that particular rifle, sold by the Lone Wolf Trading Company to a Mexican criminal, with the approval of the ATF.

  President Obama stonewalled the investigation, defended his Justice Department, refused to release any documents relating to the affair, and stoutly defended his attorney general, Eric Holder, who denied knowing anything about it. But because of intense pressure, crucial documents were unsealed that showed that many subordinates of Holder in the Department of Justice had known of the scheme, and that Holder (combative under Senate scrutiny) had attempted to thwart the investigation. The result of the gun-walking operation was that thousands of US weapons ended up in Mexico and were used extensively in crimes on the border.

  Since Bannon was head of Breitbart News, which exposed the whole business—though Breitbart inaccurately portrayed Holder as having prior knowledge of it—he was given the journalism award.

  “I have nothing further to say on this,” the Border Patrol chief said, and called the meeting to a close.

  But the mention of this scandal showed how complicated border issues could be, and how the desperate measure of concocting a sting operation, allowing guns to be smuggled, ended in mayhem, misery, cover-ups, and death.

  Listening, making notes, I rehearsed a little speech, which I would begin by saying, “Criminalizing humanitarian effort in the United States is nothing new . . .”

  In fact, it amounted almost to a national tradition. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—the Bloodhound Law—penalized abolitionists in, for example, my hometown of Medford, Massachusetts, as well as those who kept the safe houses throughout the North that constituted the Underground Railroad. Taking risks, and often arrested for helping people fleeing slavery and persecution in the South, the idealists—Henry David Thoreau was one of many—defied the government and sheltered runaway slaves, hiding them from the authorities and helping them to freedom. Anyone caught harboring or aiding an escaped slave was fined $1,000—a punitive sum at the time ($30,000 in today’s money). But in their humanism, and squarely in the American tradition of justified dissent, opposing the craven political philosophy of “the government knows best,” the abolitionists were precursors of the activists in No More Deaths, and of sanctuary cities and churches that sheltered migrants.

  But I said nothing.

  The Psychotropic Bus

  Instead of flying back to Mexico City to pick up my car and resume my road trip, I decided to ride the bus there by a roundabout route, via the coastal cities of Culiacán, Mazatlán, and Puerto Vallarta, places I was curious to see. And in taking the bus I thought I might also experience a different sort of border crossing—in the company of hard-up Mexicans who could not afford to fly.

  The inexpensive cross-border bus from Phoenix (“Tufesa Internacional—la experiencia más confortable de viajar”) turned out to be mood-altering, psychotropic in a general way, and in a narrow sense, too. The trip reminded me that most headlong hallucinatory brain-bending drug episodes (at least in my life) begin with the mildest, most prosaic tinkering and hoo-ha. First you find a couch or a hammock (“This’ll do”), get comfortable on it, swallow the poison, and for thumb-twiddling minutes or longer, wait for the nerves to jangle and the eyeballs to boil.

  At first there is only mild discomfort, a pukesome catch in the throat, and then, in an eruption of phosphenes, blinding light in the lantern of your head, as the body surrenders to a narrowing liquefaction, and finally a transformation, as one is borne along a river of lava, or it might be marmalade, with a chorus of warping chirrups, perhaps of demented sparrows or speeding schools of translucent reef fish—only the synapses know. At the start is the decapitation, and you melt, you vanish, and in a welcome dawn you are reborn as plasma, until reincarnated as damp flesh, blinking and wondering, What just happened?

  The bus was like that, but it took a while. Travel can mimic such an episode, which is why they are both called trips. From a hot Phoenician noon, the bus moved through the Arizona desert to the glare of Tucson and the sting of sand at Tubac, where some saguaro cacti were giving me the finger, others were like spiky candelabra, and the more symmetrical were monumental menorahs. After twenty miles, the bus slowed over rumble strips at the edge of the USA, for its insertion through a gateway in the tall rusted fence, crossing from small, sedate Nogales, Arizona, to sprawling and rackety Nogales in Sonora, where I had been several times.

  So far, a simple bus ride in the afternoon heat and no formalities at the border, except five squat, helmeted soldiers in black, shouldering past us on the broken pavement and entering the bus carrying assault rifles, prying open sections of upholstery and poking flashlights into crevices. Mexican authority figures are meaner, darker, better fed, and more muscled than the average Mexican, heavily armed and unsmiling.

  “Looking for drugs?” I asked my new friend Bonifacio.

  “No. The drugs go the other way. They are looking for guns and money.”

  A dozen of us on the bus, and I was the conspicuous gringo, all the others fully documented but poor and anxious returnees, burdened with the Mexican dilemma, extended family on both sides of the border, compounded in Bonifacio’s case: “Wife there, with some kids. She don’t like Arizona. Other kids here, grandkids too.” And his lungs were bad, from the fumes of his work, spray-painting cars in Phoenix. Old Señora Cruz and her daughter were visiting relatives. Miguel had not been to his hometown of Guadalajara in years (it was twenty-seven hours away on this bus); he, like the others, were intending to come back, yet quietly watchful—as Mexicans always seemed to me, a reflex that was both social and cultural—in the presence of a detachment of police, as you would be in the presence of shouting drunks or a clutch of madmen. And even the middle-aged man with the boy-gangster face, who was to get off at Los Mochis, was subdued.

  In Nogales, Sonora, street food was being served—you could smell the hot fat and its smart of chiles in Arizona through the vertical interstices in the thirty-foot iron fence: a woman with a bundle of tamales, a man with a tray of drinks, an ice cream seller, children hawking candy. Only fifty yards from the United States and the economy was suddenly improvisational, intensified by the heightened awareness of people hungry and poor. Newspaper vendors, too, the headlines all mentioning Trump.

  “Café?” I asked.

  “I’ll get you one!”

  The well-dressed—tie, jacket, golf cap—street vendor hurried into moving traffic with my money, emerging minutes later, a Styrofoam cup in one hand, deftly sorting my change with the other, keeping a handful and reminding me that propina is the word for tip.

  The bus sped south to Hermosillo, out of the old heart of Nogales, through the precincts of the industrial area (more than a hundred factories, making computers, clothing, appliances, electronics, and plastic and rubber goods to be trucked through the fence), and finally low, grassy, and wooded hills. If you ignored the ordinary miseries, the tenements and tumbled huts of the almost forty thousand workers, the landscape was indisti
nguishable from that in Arizona, even to the emblematic sight of a crow pecking at the red hash in the crushed plating of a roadkill armadillo.

  But that frontier is misleading for giving the impression of poor people jammed against the fence, their shonky houses in the rabbit warrens of dense colonias. They are the unfortunates, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, making plastic buckets and automobile wiring for the gringo market, hustling tamales for bus passengers, and as in many other Mexican border towns, offering discount dentistry.

  You’d never know, contemplating the chaos and squalor and the hope that is palpable by the fence, what natural beauty lies beyond it, that twenty minutes south of the fence is open country: the grandeur of the Sonoran hinterland, the villages of Bambuto and Santa Ana, the mesquite trees dotting the hills, the green-tufted ravines and iron-dark mountains in the distance, the ridge of the sierra to the east, the dry riverbeds in the twilight, their shadows mimicking water flow.

  In the gathering darkness, the approach to Hermosillo, the passengers, sunk in their ancestral desert, became calmer and more confident, softened in a way by being back in Mexico, polite to each other, though garrulous and digressive when contending with my questions.

  “Trump is crazy—very crazy,” Miguel said. “He hates Mexicans, he hates immigrants, he says bad things about the Chinese—and the Chinese are intelligent! All he cares about is money.”

  This was at the sandwich stall at Hermosillo bus station on the Plaza Girasol. And that was when I saw Señora Cruz’s large medallion, the size of a silver dollar, and the way she moved her thumb over its face in a caress, as though venerating San Cristóbal, patron saint of travelers. But this was the narco saint Malverde I’d seen at the Santa Muerte chapel in Mexico City.