The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

by Oscar Martinez

  “Look,” he says, “it’s rare these days that you see any migrants around town. Sometimes you see them begging for food, but usually their coyotes herd them out toward the dunes. Things are too heavy here. There are even helicopters patrolling these days. What changed everything, what cut off the migrant flow, is that about a year ago some narcos killed a Border Patrol agent. That’s when they locked down the border. Now nobody passes through.”

  The deceased agent was a thirty-one-year old Mexican American named Luis Aguilar. He was killed on January 19, 2008, at around nine thirty in the morning. A suspicious brown Hummer observed crossing into the United States was being chased by Border Patrol vehicles. Luis Aguilar was laying down a tack sheet to pierce the Hummer’s tires when he was hit by the oncoming vehicle. Mexican authorities claimed that coyotes, not narcos, were driving the Hummer. The Border Patrol insisted it was loaded with marijuana, but, as the vehicle escaped back to Mexico, nobody was able to prove anything. Drug traffickers are careful to destroy any potential evidence. The Hummer was later found completely burned.

  The following February the Mexican federal police detained a twenty-two-year old man, Jesús Navarro, in Ciudad Obregón. Jesús had been a coyote since he was sixteen years old. When he confessed to being the driver of the Hummer that killed Aguilar, he claimed to be carrying drugs that day, not migrants. Through his testimony agents discovered two houses where Jesús’s bosses supposedly lived. In the subsequent raid they found false visas, high-quality printers (to make the visas), ammunition, and drugs. The group was obviously working to transport both drugs and people across the border. It was further proof that the two businesses have merged. Organized crime will try to make money however it can, smuggling whatever can be smuggled, whether drugs or people.

  Later on I spoke with the Border Patrol press officer of the sector, Esmeralda Marroquín, who is of Mexican descent. After Aguilar’s death, she said, they applied to Washington for reinforcements. Before that, this sector was one of the least patrolled of the border. “We had to respond vigorously,” she explained, “to show that we were going to be tough on these kinds of crimes. It’s one thing to smuggle drugs across the border. It’s quite another to kill a US agent.”

  And so they were sent two new helicopters, ten off-road vehicles, plus some thirty extra officers. Coyotes soon learned to avoid the area. If that Hummer had missed Aguilar, Algodones would have been a very different place today.

  An agent dies, and the FBI comes screaming in. It’s quite another thing when a migrant dies. On April 28, just outside of Mexicali, two migrants died and eighteen were injured as Border Patrol agents chased them. The nineteen-year-old coyote, Héctor Maldonado, trying to outdrive three BP vehicles, flipped his Chevrolet Suburban. Despite the crash and his injured passengers, Maldonado tried frantically to escape, stealing a Border Patrol vehicle while the driver was attending the victims, and speeding back into Mexico. He was eventually caught by the Mexicali police. When he was presented to the press, his face was completely swollen from the blows they’d dealt him.

  But then there was almost no follow-up. The two dead were undocumented. They became an anecdote, nothing more. Nobody called Washington. Nobody called the FBI. Nobody raided any house for more information, and no reinforcements came.

  So what’s left for the migrants—bottlenecked into the desert—are the dunes. Crossing within city limits is like walking straight into Border Patrol custody. Nobody bothers to try anymore. Instead of the quick jog into Yuma, migrants now have to walk as much as three days across the desert. And the desert doesn’t just mean risking heatstroke and dehydration. It also means crossing paths with the narcos.

  This is what’s come of the funneling: those carrying a change of clothes and the hope to find work now have to walk the same paths as those smuggling guns and drugs.

  THE GREAT FUNNEL

  When we leave Algodones, the metal wall reappears. Metal plate against metal plate. We’ll see it go on like this for the next fifteen miles, until the man-made line gains distance from the highway, as we drive into the open vastness of the Great Altar Desert.

  These 714,556 hectares without horizon are considered one of the most inhospitable and arid areas of the world. A desert of brown rock and hard limestone pocked with jutting silhouettes of cacti, loose sand dunes, and a large volcanic reservoir, El Pinacate. It’s a wonder that once upon a time someone with a native eye was able to qualify and differentiate these seemingly faceless natural landmarks, naming one hill El Alacrán (The Scorpion), another Cactus Blanco (White Cactus).

  We reach Sonoíta, the western entry point into Sonora, a state that in the last few years has become a major crossing zone for migrants. Because of its small collection of suburb-like towns sparsely spread out along the border, the area is now also a smuggling corridor for narcos. Nogales is the only big city nearby. This rural scene is the perfect environment for the narcos, who don’t have to negotiate with high-level authorities and can instead focus on buying rural sheriffs and municipal police. There aren’t many big cities or police squads on the US side of Sonora either. Lukeville, for example, is a tiny border town with a population of one hundred (seventy of whom are of Latin American descent), and with nothing in its downtown but a gas station.

  Authorities of the Mexican justice system are known to call the stretch of border between Sonora and Arizona “The Golden Gate.” Between the desert and the so-called Golden Triangle—an area of high drug production, just southeast of Sonora—lies the money-laden paradise of drug smuggling. Most of the narco-tunnels that have been uncovered along the US–Mexico border have been in the seventy-two municipalities of this area.

  Little by little, however, military barracks have been put up beside these towns. A couple of weeks ago a military unit took three days to burn two tons of marijuana seized at a ranch. The air of Sonoíta reeked.

  Father David receives us in his parish. We need to ask him for help in getting to La Nariz, which is an hour away from this city, with a population of 10,000. “Sure,” he says. “It’s better to go with someone you know, because narco hawks are always there, watching from the hills. And as soon as you get to La Nariz, right at the entrance of the town, go to the little store and ask for Doña Baubelia. Tell her you’re there on my behalf, and that you need to be put in contact with Pancho Fajardo. He has all my trust and is an honest man. Just make sure not to miss your turn, and go directly to La Nariz. If you miss the right turn and still try to walk into town, you’ll be in for it.”

  But directions like straight ahead, right, or left are of no use on this dirt road. It’s pure desert, and choosing a route means trying your luck. We end up taking a wrong turn and find ourselves in the calm emptiness of the narco desert. There are just a couple of signs in sight, pointing to some ranches lost in the nothing of the desert scrub. Not one living thing. Nothing but silence and desolation. The complete emptiness is how we realize that we’ve picked the wrong path. We turn around.

  Doña Baubelia eyes us suspiciously when she receives us. Her sons are known coyotes, and she doesn’t like journalists. But soon Pancho Fajardo shows up. He’d been working on his tractor. Hearty, sixty-one years old, and with a leathery complexion, Pancho is the stereotype of a rancher. He’s lived over half his life in this suburb of thirty houses, built in 1979 thanks to a growing market for wheat and alfalfa. But those were other times. Now most residents live off migrants. Most, as they say here—a sort of nod to the obvious—live off “who knows what,” or “best not to ask.” And a minority, like Pancho, live off their cows.

  “I’ll show you guys the area. Everyone knows me here, and they know I don’t mess with anyone, that’s why the mafiosos don’t touch me. I just hope no one sees you guys alone and gets to thinking you’re deep into something else.”

  That “something else” can lead to a particular and horrifying situation. Four months ago, the body of Pancho’s nephew-in-law was found a few yards from his ranch. The body had five nine-
millimeter impacts. One of them right between the eyes. He was “deep into something else.”

  We pass by a suburb called División del Norte, where five military personnel play football in a store and a group of migrants sit waiting for nightfall, when they’ll make for the border line.

  We walk into the desert.

  “I’m going to take you to the military’s hiding spot,” Pancho explains. “It’s close to one of the military offices right next to the line.” He knows the place like the palm of his hand because of the rounds he makes on his pickup, keeping an eye on his thirty-five cows as they graze on desert shrub.

  We pass two slumping, battered homes in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing. There’s no grass, no water, no roads.

  “Those two houses were dismantled by the military a couple of months ago,” Pancho says. “Used as a hiding spot for clavos [drugs] before the loads were smuggled across. One of them was the home of a relative of mine, until a man who wasn’t from here came and bought it. Not much later they found the house filled with drugs.”

  Such houses are deliberately scouted out by criminals because they are in the middle of nowhere, far from any military. Migrants, at least those who know, walk as close as they can to a military unit, so as to avoid invading the mafia’s turf.

  Pancho turns out to be an excellent guide. Some 300 yards from the military office, without saying anything, he climbs down from his pickup and walks into the scrub. In a couple of moments we hear his hoarse voice: “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

  Hidden among the thorny bushes, huddled in a bunker of dried branches, there’s a group of four Mexican men and one Guatemalan woman. They’ve been there two days, they say, waiting for their moment.

  A forty-year-old man, making his second attempt, explains: “One group left early today. The groups make sure to leave one by one. We’re giving them their space before we head out.”

  The greatest obstacle here is not the border wall, which is only good for stopping vehicles, but the narcos and bandits hidden on the American side, near Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

  This desert, it seems, is too big to be corralled. There are about 370 miles of border that still have unmonitored breaks, allowing narcos and migrants through. Areas that by the same token—not a person or a town in sight—imply a treacherous walk for the migrants. At a good pace, one has to walk seven nights to get to Tucson. That’s what the wall has left us.

  One of the sheriff patrol squads is in charge of keeping an eye on the US side of the border. On that side we see a coyote (the animal, not the person) terrorizing a herd of donkeys only a few yards from the spot where the migrants are bunkered down.

  Pancho later invites us to a meal of beans and coffee at his house. A rancher from División del Norte stops by for a visit and gets started on the current situation. Pancho had been reserved, but his friend speaks with resounding anger.

  “We used to live comfortably here,” he complains. “Only familiar cars with familiar people drove around here. Now it’s big trucks that pass by at night and nobody knows who’s driving them. Migrants used to cross in peace, without having to mess with anyone. Now that the mafia’s trying to move their drugs, the migrants come back all beaten up. They hit them with baseball bats to make sure they don’t take over their turf or heat it up or anything, attracting migration officers. Or the mafias get hold of any bandits working against them and break their legs. The narcos have even started warning taxi and bus drivers not to bring any pollos this way whenever they have an important load to cross.”

  Night falls in Sonoíta and we find ourselves drinking beer with two Oaxacan coyotes who are guiding a group of five migrants. They’ve decided not to take their first-choice road through Altar, which is some miles to the west.

  “The mafia is charging too much: 700 pesos a head just to let you walk up to the line. It’s not like they don’t charge over here, but it’s 500 and there’s a lot more room,” explains the leader, who’s young and very small, with tight, clear skin.

  Tomorrow they’ll pay what they have to pay. They’ll pass La Nariz and they’ll walk close to one of the military units and they’ll go on, so the coyote guesses, for six nights until they reach the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, where they’ll be charged another $3,000 to be piled into a van and driven an hour away to Phoenix.

  “We would’ve walked less through Altar, but things are too hot over there. It’s not like there isn’t mafia here, it’s everywhere, it’s just that there’s more of it over there.”

  Morning breaks and we walk toward Altar.

  THE CRABWALK VILLAGE

  I’ve visited Altar five times now, and each time I think that things couldn’t get worse. And each time I’ve been wrong.

  The migrants don’t have much of a choice. If they’re in Altar it usually means that they’ve backtracked to Altar, that they’ve been pushed here by the narcos, that they’ve had to turn back. They’ve had to crabwalk. This used to be a village where you could get a cheap ride, where you could start your walk to the United States in peace, on an easy road to the border. There wasn’t even a wall, and there weren’t narco taxes. The open desert was wide enough for everybody who wanted to walk. Now migrants seem to wait around in Altar for nothing more than bad news.

  We talk with Paulino Medina, a taxi driver who has lived here for the past twenty years.

  “It’s all gone to shit! All to shit! They just upped the price again. Now it’s 700 pesos a head to get to El Sásabe. They’re saying they need more because the peso fell, or maybe the dollar rose.”

  When I was last here, six months ago, the price was only 500 pesos a head and Paulino was busy hunting for migrants to take to the border town, El Sásabe. Now he doesn’t bother. He only does service between Altar and Caborca, which is a small migrant launching town about a half an hour west.

  After strolling around for a few minutes I run into Eliázar, who I know from my first visit here in 2007. Back then Eliázar worked as something like a coyote agent, receiving $200 for each migrant he could convince to join up with the coyote he was working for. But now he too is having to adjust to the new laws of the town. He recently went back to his home state of Sinaloa to ask for official permission to work the main square. In Sinaloa he had to convince his boss to pay off Minerva,1 the municipal policeman in charge of collecting bribes from the coyotes. Minerva then grants permission for the agents and coyotes to work. He also provides security to make sure nobody who hasn’t paid is herding migrants. Minerva charges $150 dollars a week for each coyote-agent to work. There are fourteen of them. This works out to $260 dollars a month in bribes for the eight municipal policemen, and that’s on top of their official salaries.

  Eliázar receives a call as he explains the new setup. When he gets off the phone he says everything’s in order. The plaza is, for the next few hours, his to work.

  “I gotta run,” he says. “I don’t get twenty-four hours to work like before. Now we have to take shifts. Six in the morning to six at night. Then the night shift takes over.”

  The plaza is the best place to swindle migrants. One classic stunt is to sell a migrant’s information to the people who work in the “call centers.” Coyote agents, who are typically pretty chatty guys, like to squeeze names, numbers, destinations in the United States, and any other info they can out of migrants. They listen in, build up trust, redial phone numbers, whatever it takes. The call centers pay 1,000 pesos for a family member’s phone number. They call migrants’ families and tell them their loved one has been kidnapped, and is going to be beaten or killed unless they wire 5,000 pesos through Western Union.

  It’s a cutthroat money game here. There are no sales and no special offers. It’s like the whole town and all the crossing zones are being taken over by parasites, by anybody who can leech off the system. The whole package to cross costs $2,400 and includes a grueling seven-night walk across the desert. If the migrant is a Central American, the coyotes charge an extr
a $600, just because they can: because in Mexico most Central Americans have nowhere to go but north. On top of this each migrant has to pay the seventy-dollar narco tax once they get over the line. There’s usually another tariff as well—one hundred dollars for the marijuana farmer or cattle rancher who lets the groups cross through their land.

  In the morning we have a meeting set up with Grupo Beta. It’s in El Sásabe, which, as Paulino tells us, might be a problem. Our car has plates from Tijuana, and El Sásabe is run by the Sinaloa Cartel whose lookouts (hawks, as they’re called) don’t like to see unfamiliar faces coming from Tijuana, faces that could mean the Tijuana Cartel is making inroads.

  We make a call to a friend, Father Prisciliano Peraza, to see if he can clear the way for us, if he can tell the right people that we’re journalists interested in migrants and not narcos, and that we don’t want to make moves on anybody’s territory. He responds to our plea: “Okay, okay. Let me see what I can do.”

  Everybody has the number of the head boss here. You have to call him to let him know you’re coming to town, or a new group of migrants is passing through, or something unusual is happening. Even the priest has the number, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s in the game. It just means that he follows the rules of Altar. In other words, everybody follows the rules of Altar.

  Driving by the gas station on the road leading to El Sásabe, we realize we’ll be fine when the young attendant steps out and signals us to stop. “You guys are the reporters, right?” he says, before we’ve opened our mouths. “Going to El Sásabe to write about the migrants? Just make sure to take the turnoff at Sáric, it’s smoother than the dirt road.”

  He is the first of many lookouts. We’re being watched, we know, and we’re also being covered. The narcos know who we are and are giving us instructions, telling us to play by their rules. “Take the road to Sáric,” they tell us. “Twenty-nine miles on the pavement and thirteen on the dirt.”