Our hope is to find out from the Grupo Beta how effectively they practice “the protection of migrants” in a zone completely run by narcos. Once we arrive, it doesn’t takes us long to learn the answer.
The normal turnover rate for Grupo Beta officers here is one month. That’s because nobody wants to bring his or her family to this place, and nobody wants to stay. When the commander (who prefers to remain anonymous) ends his shift at six in the evening, he explains how they work here.
“We seal ourselves in. We don’t even leave the office to go out to the store. It’s super dangerous. The smartest thing is just to keep a low profile.”
We try to negotiate with the commander to get a quick tour of the crossing zones, but he says no and won’t budge. The best he’ll offer is to show us La Pista, an out-of-the-way crossing point hardly used these days, or so he tells us. We want, however, to get a look inside the funnel, to see the intermixing of drugs and migrants, to get to La Sierrita, El Chango, or La Ladrillera, but his response is firm.
“They don’t let us work around there.”
“Who doesn’t let you work?” I ask.
“You know very well who. Pretty much everyone’s in the business here.”
The commander says that the narcos don’t let them work in El Tortugo anymore either. It was there they used to stop trucks, count migrants, and warn them of the dangers of the desert: the climate and the animals. It was the Good Samaritan work of Grupo Beta. But then they were run off. Or so the commander’s story goes.
I hear a different story. A trusted source tells me that Grupo Beta simply got a better offer. They explain that Grupo Beta officers used to charge 200 pesos a head on the migrants who were passing through El Tortugo. But when the narcos got wind that the government was using some of their own strategies, they got jealous. So they offered the agents a monthly salary to lay off the crossing tax. The officers accepted. I hear the identical story from a driver as well.
Before we leave El Sásabe, the folks at Grupo Beta want to offer us something. It’s the least they can do, they say. They take us to another semi-active crossing point, far from El Tortugo. There, unexpectedly, we catch a peek inside the funnel and come away with a good idea of why the high-rolling narcos like getting involved with poor migrants.
Two pickup trucks pull up. One has fifteen migrants. The other has twenty-three. In fifteen minutes the narcos collect more than $2,500 in tax. And that’s without trafficking a single bud of marijuana. It’s roughly the monthly salary of a hired hit man. The coyotes are carrying a veritable gold mine in those trucks. And if they succeed in getting all of their clients across, they’ll earn at least another $84,000—more if any of the migrants are Central American. We hang out for a few hours, passing the afternoon and the early evening, and in those few hours we witness more than ten trucks pass through.
CLOSE TO JUÁREZ, FAR FROM JUÁREZ
A forty-minute drive from Altar, still deep in desert terrain, lies another town with a name often mentioned on the border: Naco, a town with a population of less than 5,000. It’s another one of the flashpoints that cropped up in the 1990s, and to this day it’s a town that doesn’t cultivate or manufacture a single thing. People here work as bandits or coyotes, or they have a small hostel for migrants or restaurants specializing in cheap food. Naco serves as a pit stop for those who are crossing as well as those who have just been deported. It’s one of the slots through which disoriented Mexicans are shoved back, deported to a country many of them hardly know.
The problem is that in the past couple of years the twenty-mile radius surrounding Naco has become a tight bottleneck, and the narcos, as they have everywhere on the border, have since laid out their rules: the hill known as Gadiruca, where it would only take two nights to reach the US town of Sierra Vista, can only be used to cross drugs. So now Naco shares another route with Altar, but migrants there have to pay an even higher price to be packaged into trucks and taken north.
Benjamín is a well-known coyote agent in Naco. He spends his time loitering in the small plot of concrete where the deported get dropped off, waiting for clients who can’t imagine a life in their native country and so decide to go back to the United States. When I walk up to him he seems willing to talk. A coyote agent isn’t regarded in these parts as a delinquent, but rather as a necessary laborer in a widely accepted commercial framework.
“They say crossing gets ugly around here,” I say.
“Fucking hell.”
“Because everything’s under surveillance on the other side?”
“No, it’s not that. They do keep guard, but only here in the city. We have an easy time over there, out in the hills where we cross. The thing is that the bosses don’t let us work it over there because there’s so many loads the bandits have, and they’re in charge. So we have to go look in Altar.”
“And that raises the prices, I imagine.”
“What can we do? We’re asking for 3,000 now.”
Some agents can’t count on a steady stream of migrants willing to pay to be taken to El Sásabe, and so they’ve had to start relying on the infamous kidnapper express. They tell migrants they’ll cross them over, but instead they lock them inside a house and get their information to call their families back in the States, and demand $500 to $1,000 in fast deposits.
This is an example of how the border keeps mutating due to the funnel effect: one tightening route drives migrants to new routes already saturated with narco-traffickers and coyotes, and the whole border, little by little, becomes tighter and tighter.
Our journey continues. After two hours of highway driving we arrive in Nogales, the only Sonoran city split down the middle by the border, with half on the US side and half on the Mexican side, both halves with the same name. We’ve only come here to quickly check out the terrain, thinking we won’t find anything new. The story of migrants getting pushed to the outskirts of a city has been the same at every point throughout our journey on the northern border.
Nogales seems to grow assailants. The Buenos Aires neighborhood that hugs the urban shell around the border wall is the most dangerous part of the city. Every night it’s crawling with dealers and drug mules ferrying their cargo of marijuana to the other side. The idea is to attract the Border Patrol there, leaving the hills free for bigger loads to pass unnoticed. This neighborhood is dominated by the Los Pelones gang, who are in an open war with Los Pobres. They are mostly underage boys, willing to kill in order to show they’re worthy of being recruited by a bigger cartel.
We’re received by Commander Henríquez, the head of Grupo Beta. Henríquez, known for his order and discipline, was part of the military and a judicial police officer in this area until his body became proof of what happens on this divisive line. Fourteen years ago he was shot three times while walking the migrant routes: once in the chest, once in the abdomen, and once in his right tibia, which is now metal. He says it was narcos who aimed at his chest, and a larger group of bandits was responsible for the other wounds. He survived and now works for the migrant aid organization.
He takes us to the Mariposa arroyo, a bed of dry dirt that’s the only open pathway in these parts for crossing over to the United States. Both sides of the creek end in coffee-colored hills and valleys that continue steadily and in uniform as far as the eye can see. From here we can spot the last sections of the wall and the start of an area so rugged it’s unnavigable, even by an ATV.
In a quarter hour we get a decent look at the stage and have even met a few of the actors. A black Suburban pulls up and fifteen migrants, their pollero, and a drug mule get out. All of them are following the same route. They’re going to a small town, Río Rico, which is a three-night trek away. A US Border Patrol officer watches the movement from behind the wall, and from the top of one of the brown hills on this side of the line two narco hawks watch the patrol. Today is a load-carrying day. Everyone against everyone, migrants caught in the middle.
Migrants tend to walk these dry, crumbling
lands until they get to the hill, El Cholo, and from there they duck into the desert, leaving the best roads open to the narco-scouts. Grupo Beta has to search these inhospitable expanses to find the bodies of those abandoned along the way—migrants who’ve died of starvation or who were shot by bandits, as well as any bandits shot by narcos.
“It’s impossible to know how many have died here,” Commander Henríquez says. “Sometimes, because animals eat the flesh, we only find skulls.”
~
We’ve quickened our pace. The border repeats itself down the line. In about four hours of highway driving we’ll get to Agua Prieta, Sonora. That’s the closest point to Juárez, the most violent city in the world.2 Agua Prieta is where all of the migrant routes on the western side of Mexico end. It has the most scattered and quickly tightening funnels. Beyond that, there’s only Palomas left, with its small suburb, Las Chepas, but because the cartels of that area have been in perpetual war for the past two years both towns have been abandoned as crossing points.
There’s a rule in these parts for the coyotes: Juárez might be close, but it’s off limits. There are simply no migrants crossing on foot anywhere near Juárez anymore. In the best case, a lucky migrant can get away with paying $3,600 for a fake visa and a ride to El Paso. That’s if Border Patrol’s laser technology doesn’t detect them first. It’s advance payment only and, of course, there’s no guarantee.
Agua Prieta is not quite a town and not quite a city. It hasn’t stopped being the one, and is just starting to become the other. It’s full of one-story houses that look built for a Hollywood stage set, with shops that sell only cowboy boots and billboards picturing tough-guy laborers with cigarettes hanging off their lips, amid neon-lit nightclubs and horse-drawn carts ambling between cars on the two-lane streets.
In the late 1990s, laborers would go over to Douglas for a day of work and be back in Mexico by six in the evening, in time for dinner with their families. Mexicans knew Border Patrol agents and would greet them as they walked by. Now there’s a wall with metal bars over two yards high, surveillance cameras, and flood lights. No one waves to anyone. Instead people are caught.
According to Grupo Beta, until two years ago Agua Prieta was characterized by its coyotes guiding large migrant groups. When coyotes caught wind of the growing number of Border Patrol facilities in the area, they rushed to cross large groups all at once, knowing that soon they’d have to face what so many others were starting to face along different routes. They were like cowboys feeling a storm approaching, galloping to bring the cattle in.
Two Border Patrol officers outside of Douglas apprehended a group of eighty migrants walking across the prairie in late 2008. Ten vans were needed to take them to the detention center, escorted by a helicopter and a troop of officers on horseback, making sure no one escaped back into the desert.
Then the arrangement started to crumble because of two events, one that happened four months ago, the other only three. The first was when a van, while trying to escape, failed to clear a ramp that was set resting against the border wall and got stuck, dangling on the edge of the wall. The patrol crew complied with the rule they had been given: if it’s not the mafia, it’s not anyone. They lit the van on fire and shot into the air as the people inside fled.
The second event was when two drug mules were detained by a Border Patrol officer who took them for migrants, and didn’t ask for backup. He got out of his car fingering his gun. One of the drug mules grabbed the pistol that the agent had left in the passenger seat. He fired into the air, disarmed the agent, ridiculed him, and fled with the agent’s weapons. The agent was later discharged for violating protocol, for being over-confident. And then Washington got yet another letter from the Douglas sector, requesting forty more officers, who now patrol the area.
It’s five-thirty in the evening and we pass by a crossing point some seven miles from Agua Prieta, known as the green bridge. Again, dry brown hills and plains full of thorn bushes. We’re 200 yards from the military checkpoint on the highway, hidden from the soldiers by the curve in the road.
Suddenly, one by one, fifteen migrants and their pollero show up. They quickly gain distance from the checkpoint and crowd into the thickets. In a few minutes, another group of twenty-four runs to catch up with the first. Five minutes later another group shows up, this time thirty strong. All of them jog rigidly, like a military garrison. They don’t pay us any mind, but we watch them until we can only see what looks like ants trudging up a distant hill. Eventually they’ll take cover and wait for nightfall.
Here are three different groups, each with their pollero, out to take advantage of the last quickly fading rays of light. They run, trying to evade the military closing in on them. They get so close to the agents they almost crawl inside their noses, risking being extorted or detained. That’s the only way to avoid narcos and bandits.
But they break all the rules that a good pollero would follow: don’t take a group larger than eight; don’t travel with other groups; give them at least a day’s worth of walking space; don’t get too close to the military; and the best route is the one least taken by others. But today’s border isn’t fit for following rules. The only rule now is to hurry, before the wall closes altogether and only leaves space for the narcos. It doesn’t matter that Border Patrol agents are waiting up ahead and that they’ve probably already seen you. Nothing matters except running, running like someone trying to reach a slowly closing door. There’s nothing to do but run.
1 Minerva is the officer’s code name. All municipal and federal officials work under a code name.
2 According to both Mexican and US news sources, violence in Juárez has considerably dropped since. See Jesse Hyde, “ ‘The Broken Windows’ Theory Worked in Juárez” Atlantic, March 26, 2013, theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/the-broken-windows-theory-worked-in-juarez/274379/ and Lorena Figueroa, “Juárez Now Ranked 19th Most Violent City” El Paso Times, February 8, 2013, elpasotimes.com/juarez/ci_22545964/ju-225-rez-now-ranked-19th-most-violent.
10
The Narco Demand: Sonora
After visiting this city for the third time, I’ve only now started feeling comfortable. It wasn’t easy finding the principal migrant- and drug-crossing zones the first few times. Two cartels were fighting to control the passage, but then one of the cartels won, and everything changed. Now people at least know which bosses to ask permission from to approach the border. Now the undocumented know how much and who to pay. And now the coyotes know, because it’s still fresh in their memory, what the consequences are of slipping up. Even though it’s more expensive these days, it’s a lot simpler and more peaceful when there’s only one cartel in command.
The last time we talked, he was trembling. Nineteen months ago when we met in the hotel room he had hand-picked, Mr. X was shaking, his voice was cracking, and every few seconds he’d glance at the closed blinds, hoping he wouldn’t glimpse the shadow of a man with a machine gun. But not today. Today he’s not shaking, nor is he jumping at every noise or asking repeatedly if I work for the narcos. He’s calm, even smiling.
When I first met him he made me go through a process that seemed overkill for a tiny border town like Altar. He had instructed me to come alone, arrive at nine on the dot, and then knock three times on the door before we could talk for thirty minutes. After our talk, he told me to get in his car so he could drop me off at a street behind a church. Not until he drove away should I begin to walk toward my hotel. This was what Mr. X made me go through back in May 2007.
Today our meeting is at the same time, nine at night, and again we’ll meet in a hotel room, but this time that’s all there is to it. Meet and talk.
Outside of the hotel, Roman candles are lit and firecrackers explode in celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe Day. I watch Mr. X get out of his truck. When he takes off his thick brown coat I see his black norteña-style shirt with flashy buttons and gold embroidery on the sleeves. He enters the room and surprises me by calmly as
king, “How are we gonna dance this time?”
“You should know,” I say. “I want to talk about the same thing we talked about last time. About migrants and their situation with the narcos. I’d like to get an idea of how things have changed in the past year.”
The last time we talked, more than a year ago, he was jumping at shadows, mistaking them for assassins. Just before we met there had been a mass kidnapping of 300 Mexican and Central American migrants. They were holed up in a narco ranch not far from the border. Nobody except for the priest, Prisciliano Peraza, knew anything of their whereabouts. Prisciliano negotiated the release of 120 migrants with an unnamed narco. Most of them were beaten black and blue and had had their ankles broken by a bat. “Of the rest of them,” the other 180, the priest later told me, “I don’t know a thing. They refused to give them up.”
The 120 were released by the truckload. And all of them soon got lost, fled back to their houses or to other border towns where they wouldn’t be recognized. Nobody filed a single report. No official denouncement was made. And nobody ever learned the fate of the 180 left back at the ranch.
This is how it works: if a narco (one of the unnamed narcos) doesn’t want to give up 180 migrants, he doesn’t give them up. That’s it. That’s how the game plays out.
THOSE WHO KNOW DON’T TREMBLE
Mr. X knows a lot about how the dirty work gets done in Altar. He’s someone who since he was eight years old, in order to survive, has tried his hand at everything. He isn’t a narco. Despite looking like one, with his big truck and gold embroidery on the cuffs of his black shirt, he really isn’t a narco. All the same, the deal we made back in May 2007 is that I wouldn’t reveal who he was, what job he had, where he was from, what he looked like, how I found him, or anything at all about anything he does. “Anything about anything,” that’s how he put it. We agreed to baptize him as Mr. X.
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 20