Raising the 500-peso fee per migrant on the vans to 1,000, that’s the song Father Peraza started hearing. He explains what’s driving the price spike.
“There was a turf war about four months ago,” Father Peraza says. “Two separate fees were being charged because two narco groups were operating at the same time, until a fight broke out between them and one of them won. The group that had been in power before had contacts with the authorities, as well as a few soldiers. Not much more was heard about this. The double fee lasted two months. So now, since the other group has gone, the one that stayed knows that people can get used to paying 1,000 pesos, and they’re wondering if they should run with that rule again.”
The group that stayed is made up of the leading members of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful cartel in Mexico, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, who’s at the top of the US list of most wanted. As Mr. X explained, at least six local narcos pay Guzmán’s organization to protect them and let them rule over, and rent out, a few miles on the border.
Despite the current tension, Father Peraza is sure Altar will survive. It works, he says, like everything else: by supply and demand.
“The flow has thinned in Altar, as it has everywhere else on the border. Some 300 people show up daily [though a 2007 study calculated that the daily flow of people was up to 1,500]. Many are going directly to houses that they know will take them in, because they come with coyotes who guide them there. The norm is changing. They don’t stay around the plaza like they used to. If we go to one of those houses, I promise you it will be full. If we go to El Sásabe, some seven loaded vans will pass us, and if we go at night, it’ll be thirty. But a lot of this flow is moving to Algodones, because the fees are cheaper there, and the place hasn’t yet been exploited.”
Algodones is that small town close to Mexicali, on the border with California and Arizona.1 It’s about 150 miles west of Altar, and it wouldn’t show up on the map of 2007 migration routes had it not gained popularity thanks to the advantages of its outskirts. Narcos are just getting settled in there, so the fees are lower, and there’s no desert to cross, which means less environmental hazards, except for the mountains. Pros and cons.
It was about twenty days ago, Father Peraza says, when he was coming back from Algodones, that he realized something. Getting out of his car in the small town square, he heard two voices in chorus saying, “Padrecito.” Little Father. He turned and recognized two polleros from Altar. “What’s going on?” they asked him. “Did you decide to move here too?”
The priest uses this anecdote to explain that people are getting tense about there not being enough work or resources to go around, so they’re looking for new territory, and if the narcos pressure their workers too much or raise their taxes too high, they’ll be the ones responsible for losing control.
“Remember that the groups of polleros are also strong and organized. If they have trouble doing business here because the fees are so high, they’ll look for other routes, like through Algodones, where they’ll have to pay less to the mafia. And when they go, you’ll see just how much supply and demand reigns. The narcos around here will end up lowering the fee, and then the polleros will come back. That’s how this works. Always changing.”
Supply and demand. I’ll rob you less than that guy. But in the end, whether the fees go up or down, the ones who pay most in Altar are the migrants: they have to pay taxes all along the way for that one service they seek, that journey north through the desert.
The coyotes and narco agents have to be ready to adapt. If the meat gets overcooked, they’ll move on. But right now the meat’s still juicy enough to keep them milling in the central plaza. El Pájaro, El Metralleta [The Machine Gun], José, plus some other veterans, like Javier from Sinaloa, who sits at my table in the restaurant, they’re staying put for the time being.
THE ROUNDUP AND THE MULING
Originally from Sinaloa where some of the toughest narcos come from, hardened like the best of the coyote agents, and having done time in US prisons, Javier is proud to be alive after working for so many years. He introduced himself to me just as I was leaving the church, mistaking me for a migrant (it’s not uncommon) and offering me his services.
“Eight hundred bucks and we’re off, brother. Think about it. Food, clothes, a room, all included. We can leave tomorrow.”
It often starts as low as $800, but it always jumps to at least $1,200. And that’s what street vendors are good at, hooking you in at a low price and then squeezing you dry. The agent’s job is just to get you on board, and turn you over to the coyote. They get 200 bucks for each catch. It works so the guy who has to explain that the price is higher than advertised isn’t the same one who first hooked you in. That is, they don’t raise prices on you until you’re already on the move.
Javier first came to Altar after being deported in late 2007. He had just finished serving three years in a Texas prison. They caught him back in 2004 with fifty-seven kilos of marijuana in the trunk of his car. Back in Mexico again, the first thing he told himself was that he couldn’t stay. He asked around and heard that the best way to get back over the fence was through Altar. But without family to help him out and no money of his own, he had to start working, fast. He found a job selling chickens (actual feathered pollos, not migrants). But anybody with street smarts in Altar can find much better-paying work than in the food industry. A coyote, noting Javier’s smooth tongue, decided to try him out as an agent.
“It’s not great work. The bribes for the fuzz always come out of my pocket,” Javier complains as we sit down at the table. I told him I’m a reporter and he’s agreed to talk about his work. He talks with me for a while with no other motive than to chat, or maybe to see if I can throw a little business his way.
In a village of narcos, the agents are usually the most honest of the whole chain. That’s because the police, or the fuzz, as Javier calls them, are always looking to extort them. Javier has to pay 2,000 pesos a week to the police. It may sound official, but it’s nothing more than one man paying another man, the fuzz, who has a gun. If the agent doesn’t pay, he doesn’t get to work. That simple.
“They keep fucking with you here. Never letting you work in peace. It’s like they did to Eliázar a few months back, they locked him up for pulling a grasshopper (trying to go into the business alone). They kept him tied up for thirty-six hours, wouldn’t let him go until he paid who knows how much. That’s why I make sure to pay my dues every week. That’s the only way to do it, keep slipping them their dues.”
Eliázar, who I met back in 2007, didn’t pay, so he justified it to me, because he simply didn’t have the money. The plaza was crawling with migrants and Eliázar decided to jump the line, to pull a grasshopper. But they found him. After that experience, he decided to go back to Sinaloa to pick tomatoes with his cousin.
People ask around here, “Who’s got your back?” and the answer, I’ve found, is not the authorities. In my brief conversation with the mayor of Altar, Romeo Estrella, when I asked him if he knew that his police charged the coyote agents to let them do their illegal work, he poked at his tortilla and responded, “Yeah, I know, but what am I going to do about it? If the agents want to pay the cops, that’s their problem. Who am I to tell them not to do it?”
Javier and the others prowling in the central plaza are proof that the narco taxes are here to stay, and that it hasn’t put a stop to the flow of migrants. Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, and even the occasional solo Ecuadorian are still passing through. And I see Javier constantly checking his phone, waiting to hear when the money will be ready and where to drop off his two pollos. He hasn’t hit his target of eighteen today, but it’s December, a slow month, and he’s earned $400 by lunchtime.
We finish our coffees and stand up from the table as soon as we see one of the many buses that pass through the city reach the plaza. Javier, jittery as usual, hovers around the door of the bus, waiting for potential catches.
Three migrants get off, but it turns out that they already have a coyote. Javier still waits, hoping his luck will improve. Minutes later two pickup trucks, crammed with young men, pull up behind the bus. The passengers jump down and start raucously shouting and milling about. Then they all jump back in and the trucks peel out. Javier throws up his hands and murmurs, “Fucking hell. They’re all mules.”
He’s right too, the young men are all drug mules from Sinaloa, expecting to earn $1,500 in four days of work. Today they’ll eat and sleep at different houses around Altar, and tomorrow morning they’ll set off. A pollero will guide them and their loads out into the desert. A narco hawk will also follow them, to see that if they don’t make the delivery it’s because they were caught by the Border Patrol and not because they sold the drugs for themselves.
The presence of the ant-like flow of mules is the deciding factor for most migrants in their choice to go through El Sásabe. Sometimes the little masks show up by the plaza vans not to collect taxes but to tell migrants they’ll have to wait another day to start their trip. Because if anybody went today, the crossing zone would get overheated. And if a migrant compromises a load of drugs, you can’t imagine what they do to him.
The ant flow stays steady all year round. Cargo always needs carrying. In September 2008 the Border Patrol in the Tucson sector decommissioned eighteen tons of marijuana. And they always say—both the Border Patrol and the mules—that what is found and decommissioned is only a fraction of what gets through. If that weren’t the case, the danger simply wouldn’t be worth it.
Though it’s only five o’clock in the afternoon, dusk is already beginning to settle when I arrive at the church migrant shelter. Within half an hour of my arrival I watch sixteen people come in after me. Fourteen of them are migrants. Two are mules. The two mules are set up in a shack about fifty yards from the shelter where thirty other mules are already staying. I figure them to be the young men I’d spotted earlier in the pickups. All of them are planning on crossing tomorrow to deliver their loads, but today they’ve been given the day to do as they please. The two men I saw enter were hoping to save some money by eating a free meal at the shelter.
I sit down with the two mules just as the cook starts to stoke the stove. A man from Veracruz, who was deported after walking three days in the desert, and another quiet migrant, both looking to cross again, join us at the table.
The older mule, who is twenty-three, hardly says a word. He asks me if I have a joint and after I tell him no he shrugs and doesn’t open his mouth again. The younger mule, who is twenty, very short, and has a Red Sox hat sticking out from under his red hoodie, talks without a break. I get the feeling he’s sniffed a line or two of cocaine. His pupils are widely dilated, all of his gestures are a little wild, and he fills any pause between his words with onomatopoeic mumblings: “The thing is, is you got to put it all out there, and, um, mum, mum, give it your all, yep, pep pep, without stopping, no stopping until you’re done.”
I find out that this is his fifth trip as a mule. He started when he was eighteen, as soon as he realized he had more of a future muling dope than picking tomatoes in Sinaloa. The last four trips he hoofed with the typical forty-five pounds. Three of the trips were three-day walks, the most recent was five days. Tomorrow, now that he’s proven himself to his boss, he’ll walk with over seventy-five pounds on his back.
“Tomorrow we’re going to head out. We’re going out in groups of six and eight. Setting off at night, shhhwooo, so you hear nothing but the wind. All the way to Highway 19, on the Tohono Rez. There we’re gonna, woop, deliver the goods, and then, vroom, get the fuck back out of that country.”
Fifteen-thousand Native Americans live on the Tohono O’odham Reservation that runs along the southern Arizona–Sonora border. Tohono O’odham means, literally, people of the desert. Living on their own reservation gives them certain degrees of autonomy, including their own police force and even their own laws. Even the Border Patrol needs to ask for authorization to work on their land. The narcos, however, just need to pay.
Tomorrow, the young mule tells me, they’re going to give the red light to all the migrants. Because tomorrow, like on that day when 300 migrants were kidnapped, a major shipment is going through, and the narcos want the trails as quiet as possible. “They already gave the notice to the van drivers,” he tells me, and he seems proud, like he feels he’s taking part in an important event.
When I step back out into the evening I see two migrants on the patio of the shelter, one young and the other in his forties, sitting on their backpacks and chatting. The older one gets up when I walk out. I go and take his place.
The young migrant, Mario, is a Honduran who has been working for the past two months in the neighboring state of Chihuahua. As soon as he realized the border wall spanned much of the state, closing it off from New Mexico and Texas, he crossed over to Sonora. But the thing is, he tells me, the situation here isn’t much better.
“There, at least,” he says, referring again to Chihuahua, “I could get right up to the wall and see if I had a chance to cross. Here I can’t even get out of Altar. Without 600 pesos for the ride and the narco tax, I can’t even get close to the wall. My plan was to walk with the will of God instead of with a pollero, but how am I even going to try if I can’t at least get to El Sásabe?”
There’s little that Mario can do here. Altar is still the principal crossing point in the state, but it’s also been turned into a toll road with strict rules. It’s not like it used to be. Now there’s nothing but migrants with money, those who can afford to pay, no exceptions made. Because along this border, as Mr. X said, as Father Peraza explained, as Paulino grumbled, as Javier confirmed, and as Mario came to realize, there are always taxes. And if you dodge them you’re playing with your life. The taxes in these parts are sacred.
So for a migrant without money there seems to be no one left who can answer Mario’s question: “Where can I at least give it a shot?”
1 We saw the situation in Algodones months later (around April 2009) as described in the previous chapter.
11
Cat and Mouse with the Border Patrol: Arizona
I remember what the photographer Edu Ponces told me at the end of this trip: “The story about the Border Patrol is more myth than reality.” It turned out that the bad guys of this story aren’t so bad, and that the border, with its wall, its radar, and the constant patrolling, is still porous, though in reality it makes way for drug traffickers far more than it does for migrants. Undocumented migrants aren’t high on the Border Patrol priority list, and so the chasing of some counts enough for the ones who get away. And getting caught, what migrants call failure, is looked at by some Border Patrol agents as winning the game. A game that is played again and again, every hour of every day.
One of the twenty-three revolving radar systems located on these 220 miles of desert border flashes a signal. Four dots appear on one of the screens at the Control Center Headquarters. The radar system, located near the town of Arivaca, hovering over one quadrant, has stopped revolving. It has detected movement and has focused on one of those small red circles projected on the monitor.
The game has begun.
At least three patrol SUVs have received the signal on their screens. The four dots are moving. The SUVs make their way to a surveillance zone. They park on top of a mound overlooking the plain. The same message blares from sixty Border Patrol radio transmitters: “We have movement.”
Twenty minutes pass after the radar first flashes its signal. The agents fail to come to a consensus. They don’t know who to go after. From the radio of the patrol car we’re riding in, we can hear the confusion swelling when those four red dots meet up with another four that have just appeared on screen. It’s three in the morning and down below, in the middle of the desert, there are eight people walking through the deadly December night.
The uncertainty on the radio goes on: is it two groups of migrants? Two guides mixing their groups to
gether? Are they drug mules meeting up with the guides who will lead them to a drug stash?
Esmeralda Marroquín, the border agent we’re with, decides to get closer. She steps on the accelerator of her SUV, crosses Arivaca, passes ranches, and turns off at a road that goes to the town of Amado. We stop before a hilltop. We see the agent who was most talkative on the radio, glued to his infrared-vision binoculars. He observes the mound from the roof of his truck and signals the three patrol agents who have gotten out of their cars to go look for the migrants or traffickers—the eight red dotted silhouettes on the viewer: “One eleven, one nine, from your position heading northeast.”
Three agents leave on foot with a screen that lets them see in real time what the agent on the car roof is seeing through his binoculars. The silhouettes disappear and reappear. “Look for a kite stuck in one of the broken parts of the wall.”
The task isn’t easy. Whoever those walkers are, making their way across the Tucson desert, they have changed direction three times in half an hour. They come in and out of tiny of pockets of lower ground that provide shelter from surveillance. They probably don’t know that an entire technological system is focusing in on them. They probably don’t know that some fifteen agents are following them.
Agent Marroquín warns: “On this job, patience is key.”
Meanwhile, the five patrol agents standing at the foot of the car with the mounted agent and his binoculars are chatting over coffee and cigarettes. They talk about coworkers, kids, the weather. “How’s Michael?”
The others are still tuned in. “We haven’t spotted them,” the patrollers report.
“They were going northeast,” the one with the binoculars says, “but then changed direction and I lost them. Locate the kite and I’ll direct you from there.”
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 22