“Where have you been all week?” one asked, having noticed the boys slouched over their drinks. She insinuated herself between them and the others gathered. “We all had so much fun on Christmas, I thought for sure you’d come back.”
“Well,” said El Indio, looking pleased, “now it looks like we’re going to ring in the New Year together.” The guys invited the ladies out to dinner, but the women said no, they wanted to take out the boys. Tips had been good. They all agreed on a Chinese restaurant called El Dragon in the Cinco y Diez. The group spun out of La Estrella and flagged a taxi. In New York they might have been young artists and actors reveling in the big city far from family. They burned with the same passions, these smugglers and strippers—optimistic young people looking to make a mark and hungry for something better. After dinner, the party careened on to the ladies’ late-night shift at Adelita. The group celebrated the arrival of 2006, which floated down upon them in a shower of confetti, colored lights, and dance music. El Indio raised a bottle of Bucanas—Buchanan’s scotch, a calling card among polleros. In the village it would have cost a week’s wages. “Happy New Year, Juanito!” he cheered his friend.
Juan, however, wasn’t going to let the spirited moment slip by. As the bleating horns and embraces subsided, Juan put a steady hand on his shoulder. “Amigo, how are we going to start working in 2006? It’s time we became coyotes, hombre.”
“I found a way,” Indio said—bleary, content, and unusually open.
“All right!” said Juan. “You ever take anybody to the inside?”
“Me? No, never,” Indio said. Juan had only assumed. Now his friend seemed somehow younger. Had Juan misread his quiet character for experience, confidence even? Indio put the neck of his bottle against his camarada’s chest. “But this is the year, amigo.”
“And how?” Juan asked with a flick of his chin.
“You want to find out, mi Juanito? Meet me at the cathedral tomorrow at 8:00 PM.”
Still a bit hung over at seven thirty the next evening—the phrase Juan would have used was Estoy crudo, I’m raw—he prowled around the open square underneath the spires of the downtown cathedral. The Catholic edifice stood kitty-corner to several popular markets and shops. It was the last night they’d be lit and decorated for the holidays. People milled about, enjoying the early winter evening. Indio arrived exactly at eight. He looked fit and healthy. The boys bought a couple of tacos at a nearby cart and then caught the bus, in this instance a minivan colectivo, and headed west. Stepping off near the Comercial Mexicana in Playas de Tijuana, they crossed to the other side of the International Road where empty lots of desert scrub rolled up to the iron border fence. Before them to the north, the deep dark of the Tijuana River Valley lay like a vast pool—wind-rippled and quiet, it spilled onto a distant shore where lamps illuminated the city streets of Imperial Beach. They made their way along the base of Bunker Hill. Indio led Juan toward a shallow depression not worthy of the name canyon. A portion of it had eroded under the fence, leaving a hole big enough for a man to slide through. This was where Indio had stashed his bicycle. The men found the spot, crouched, and listened.
“Okay, so what’s the plan?”
“This is where we’re going to enter with the people,” El Indio said.
“Through the hole? And then what? That’s a long way to the road.” Juan made an obvious show of looking west toward a tower that the Border Patrol had erected opposite the lighthouse. Then he turned east and nodded at a kilo truck parked on Bunker Hill. The silhouette of an agent was visible inside.
“We’re going to ride in on bicycles,” Indio said.
“What? Taking time off had some effect on you!”
“No, mi Juanito, the time helped me to see it,” Indio said. “This is the way—riding across on bicycles.”
“Seriously? Explain.”
“Better to show you.”
“Okay, and when will this happen?”
“Right now.”
“You’re joking. Come on. La migra right in front of you, cameras over there, sensors in the ground all over the inside.”
“I know all of that already. If you don’t want in, no problem. I’ll do it myself.”
“Don’t be crazy.”
El Indio pushed his mountain bike through the crevice and squeezed in after it. Juan saw the bike lifted out and then Indio’s legs climbing out of the pit. Then Juan could not see his friend at all. The solid steel wall blocked any view. He ran up Bunker Hill a ways to get a vantage. And there he caught the silhouette of a man astride a bicycle—a phantom navigating a deep blue slope down to the Border Patrol’s very own road. He watched the dark figure fleeting through shadow and light, the tires raising just a quiet puff of dust.
Juan turned to view the Border Patrol agent waiting in the truck. Local smugglers believed that a blue light mounted above the Border Patrol’s Imperial Beach station, within view of the valley, flashed when ground sensors detected a disturbance. Juan waited for it. He wondered if the distance created a lag time before the sensors set off the light. But the light did not blink. And by then El Indio had already vanished into the night.
8
On satellite images of the globe at night, the Baja peninsula is one of the last regions of the world—in a league with the Amazon, Central Africa, and Siberia—that recedes into a blackness as deep and thick as the oceans. The two main exceptions on this thousand-mile strip of mountains and deserts are the light clusters of the Tijuana-to-Ensenada corridor on the north end, and the state capital La Paz and resort towns of Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip. In contrast to the Age of Discovery, however, nowadays the lightless, roadless places of the map are not the lands where monsters lurk.
By 2007, the monsters lurked in the cities.
In the 1990s, when Colombia’s great Cali and Medellin cartels began to crumble as the main distributors of illegal drugs to the United States, a cadre of Mexican trafficking organizations took control and vertically integrated the business. They were no longer the middlemen. Over the next decade the wealth and influence of the Mexican cartels grew to such an extent that many believed their power threatened the sovereign authority of the Mexican republic itself. Disputes among cartel affiliates concerning the right to traffic through certain corridors increasingly led to public firefights and executions. The showy and gruesome displays revealed a disregard for official authority that put the nation on edge.
In December of 2006, the newly elected president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, ordered 6,500 troops into the state of Michoacán to tamp violence between two of these organized groups, and to assert federal control. The result, however, was a flash point that broke into an open war between the government and the cartels that would last the remainder of Calderón’s term and cost as many as forty thousand lives. Each time government troops arrested or killed leadership in any one organization, the power balance among the mafias fell out of whack, territory came up for grabs, and the assassinations and murders increased. The war revealed veins of corruption within branches of the government itself. And of the many fronts to this conflict, the most disruptive was the one that opened between corrupt local police forces and government troops. Shooting between police and soldiers occurred in public. But as police departments were forced to purge their ranks of tainted officers, many of the newly unemployed took positions within the cartels. The margin between the tactics of civil authority and those of armed gangs only blurred. By 2010, Calderón was accusing Mexico’s network of traffickers of attempting to “replace the government” and “impose their own laws.” In the United States, pundits began to use the term failed state in reference to the nation’s closest neighbor and second-largest trading partner.
As two cities on either side of a dry river, San Diego and Tijuana suffered a dramatic split. The younger of the two was quickly becoming too chaotic and violent for the other to comprehend. San Diegans, and most Californians, averted their gaze, simply choosing not to see. Then the housing bubbl
e burst, and in the ensuing economic crisis even those tourists who had been brave enough to visit Tijuana ceased to go. The city built on good times lost its founding industry, seemingly overnight.
During the economic peak that preceded the recession, a magazine editor sent me to cover a heated Baja land grab. Development schemes had been hatched along the coast from Cabo to Tijuana. Gringo speculators were fencing off sections of desert with no access to roads or anything else. Equity-rich Americans, looking to catch the next boom, bought unfinished $300,000 apartments overlooking the gray and polluted beaches of northern Baja. Just a matter of months after I wrote that piece, I was tasked with covering the collapse of those inexpensive retirement dreams—and all of the half-built, ramshackle developments left to Mexico in its wake.
But also, due to the addiction-like drive of the surf bug, I continued to comb the black stretches of the Baja map—tidal flats, basins, headlands, and dusty little fishing hamlets that looked like sets for slasher films. I became more familiar with Baja’s windblown coasts and cactus fields than I was with the city closest to my own. During those years, Tijuana sat like a lion at the gates of Baja’s wilds. The feat of driving through Tijuana while avoiding Tijuana was something tourists like myself put a lot of thought into.
One of the first events that brought the incipient drug war into my consciousness occurred in September of 2007 on the International Road, a route to the coast I frequently used. A group of American surfers traveling in two trucks looked into their rearview mirrors to catch flashing blue lights—Tijuana’s municipal police were behind them. The tourists pulled over to discover that there was not one police car behind them but a short convoy. Once the vehicles had stopped at the side of the road, heavily armed men exited them in combat fashion. The waiting tourists quickly realized this was not normal procedure—they were yanked from their trucks and instructed to get on their knees at the road’s dusty shoulder. Guns were trained on their heads. Their pockets were emptied of wallets and keys; then associates of the gunmen stepped into the surfers’ vehicles and sped away. In this instance, the robbers let them all live. Back in the States, the victims feared reprisals to the extent that they wouldn’t give their names to the media. Mexican authorities said they would recover the two trucks only when the vehicles turned up at another crime scene, which, with the way things were headed, would be very soon.
This incident, and a few others like it, suggested something broader afoot. As had happened in the past, pressure put on the traffickers’ traditional sources of income and smuggling routes had provoked them to diversify into robbery, extortion, and kidnapping. The use of police and military tactics and equipment in these events, however, suggested a blurring of the lines between criminal and governmental authority—a signal that the situation was soon to be totally out of control.
Each border reporter could pinpoint the moment when he or she sensed trouble coming. While, as a surfer and a traveler, I might have related more closely to the surfer robbery than to others, it was probably the mellowest of tremors in an incrementally intensifying series that went on to rattle the entire region. Regular citizens were robbed and raped. Police officers disappeared. Human remains were found melted in barrels of lye, or piled in empty lots. Decapitations became routine. Bodies were hung from bridges, including from a familiar bridge in Playas—an incident famous only because the hangman’s rope snapped and the body fell into traffic.
A coworker of mine and his friend were intercepted by men wielding assault rifles who suddenly blocked their route with a dark SUV. The two victims were pulled from their economy car and forced into the assailants’ Chevy Tahoe. While the vehicle sped through a turn on the way to who-knows-where, one of the abductors began to choke my colleague from behind the headrest. Seated behind the driver, his friend intervened, drawing the choker’s wrath. Just then, my colleague cracked his door and jumped out. In that speedy, distracted instant, his friend managed to do the same, but caught a bullet in the thigh as he fell from the vehicle. A few days later, my colleague arrived to work in San Diego with scabs covering half his face—it was the body part that had made first contact with the dirt embankment.
A friend’s gardener, a man who sometimes works at my own house, found a gagged corpse on the pavement outside his Tijuana home at 9:00 PM on a Tuesday. He hadn’t heard a sound preceding the discovery. The body came with a handwritten note that said, “We told you so.” In conference following the discovery, no one in the neighborhood admitted to knowing the dead man, or what he’d been told.
The most vicious year came in 2008 with 843 murders citywide. Then, as now, there was also an unknown number of missing. In 2009, one of the region’s warring kingpins was apprehended. By 2010, the homicide rate subsided, prompting a visit by President Calderón. He came to speak at an economic festival called Tijuana Innovadora—Innovative Tijuana. “Crime has dropped dramatically since its peak in 2008,” the president said. “Tijuana went from a city seized by terror and focused only on questions of crime to a city motivated by hope.”
Within days, however, a new wave of beheadings and executions swept Tijuana. Armed men entered a drug rehab center and assassinated thirteen patients. Shoot-outs erupted on major thoroughfares. Bodies were again hung from bridges. “Obviously, they [narco gangs] don’t want it to seem like we are a society of good people. That’s why they are doing these things again,” a woman attending the Innovadora festival told an Associated Press reporter. Like a last gasp, however, the most torrid violence seemed to end with 2010. Whichever cartel had won the Tijuana smuggling corridor, it had managed to keep it.
During the protracted siege, Tijuanenses had simply learned to live for, and entertain, themselves. Rather than dampen the city’s culture, the troubles seemed to make it anew. I was aware of these things, but I’d lost touch with Tijuana—it was a place I was happy to drive through. Once I reached the end of the bike trail in the Tijuana River Valley, however, I knew that if I wanted to discover the source of the border bicycles I would have to make Tijuana’s acquaintance again, and probably more. I didn’t have a clue where to start. So I did what most newcomers to cities around the world do: I took a tour. A weird one.
On an elevated Mexican slope overlooking the border fence—facing north across the wandering and brush-filled river valley to the blue bay pooled at the foundations of San Diego’s skyscrapers—sits the oldest cemetery in Ciudad Tijuana. The walled and hoary graveyard is named after an old, secondary border crossing that admitted large freight and lumber into Mexico. This casual crossing once stood just a stone’s throw from the cemetery. It was called Puerta Blanca, or the White Gate—an unobstructed dirt route guarded by a single US sentry post. Tijuana residents commonly crossed through to buy fresh fruit and eggs in Monument, the American town just across the line. That town no longer exists, and today, there is no entry point at Puerta Blanca either, only a triple-fenced steel wall. Adjacent to the boundary is the international sewage-treatment plant—built by US taxpayers to treat modern Tijuana’s waste—and then the broad saltwater estuary. Since the 1970s the old White Gate’s competitor, the official crossing at San Ysidro five miles to the east, has grown. At fifty million crossings per year, the sheer number of cars idling in line, waiting to enter the United States, made the customs complex one of the strongest emitters of greenhouse gases in Southern California.
The Puerta Blanca cemetery is quiet now. Almost nobody remembers the customs gate that lent the graveyard its name. Proximity to the boundary continues to resonate, however, as Puerta Blanca is home to one of Mexico’s new and rising people’s saints, a deific figure well suited for the vagaries of la línea. Like those of the deathly Santa Muerte (usually depicted as the grim reaper) and Jesús Malverde (a mustachioed Robin Hood celebrated by the narco underworld), the legend of Juan Soldado has been canonized not by the Roman Catholic Church but by the disenfranchised citizenry of Mexico. For Juan Soldado is the patron saint of los inmigrantes, and the fact that the mountain
s and deserts of the United States fill the vision of anyone looking north from Soldado’s shrine atop the cemetery hill is no coincidence.
On a cool November afternoon following Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, I joined a quirky, unsanctioned tour of Puerta Blanca. The small group was made up of former and current Tijuana residents as well as a number of young Americans. The drug warfare had pushed a large percentage of Tijuana’s middle class to relocate just across the border to suburban Chula Vista and greater San Diego. On any given Saturday night the waft of Mexican laundry detergent in a number of trendy American bars was palpable enough to suggest what 2010 census takers struggled to document—an exodus. On this tour, some of these natives were reuniting with a dusty but potent little corner of their original hometown.
I might have been lumped in with the group’s second half—young urban professionals—but their youth and the vitality of their presence surprised even me. As if in the wake of a storm, an arts resurgence had sprung from the rubble of Tijuana’s tourism industry. This in turn drew a cadre of hip, media-savvy Americans south to participate in it. They made music and visual art; they wrote. The city’s color, dilapidation, and chaos contrasted sharply with the suburban meditation on the “safe” side of the border. These artists mined that divide. As a result, in print and in conversation, Tijuana had been dubbed “the poor man’s Paris,” a cheap, liberal, culturally rich city.
Initially, I found the comparison of Paris and Tijuana a strange one. I pictured Hemingway and Fitzgerald sharing a bottle of mescal and a bucket of Tecates in the vinyl booth of a Tijuana bar last updated with pinup posters of the 1970s, discussing a narco soldier nicknamed El Pozolero—the Stew Maker—a body-disposal expert made famous by his technique of dissolving human remains in acid; or maybe how fans and defenders of bullfighting increasingly found themselves put on their heels by animal rights groups, even here in Tijuana. Slowly it dawned on me, however, that Paris had been the poor man’s city. For as disparate as Paris of the 1920s and Tijuana of the 2010s might have been in the imagination, the structural elements were there: war ruin, a flexible legality, openness to the arts, lots of space for rent, and a favorable exchange rate. The only element that seemed to have changed in the century between the Gilded and Computer Ages was national culpability for the organized violence and destabilization. I truly wanted to believe my neighboring city was in the process of rebirth. But my on-the-ground sense was that the ceasefire that made this trip to Puerta Blanca seem intriguing and worthwhile existed only in lull, a moment between moments.
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