Scorpions for Breakfast

by Jan Brewer

  By that memorable morning of the I-10 shoot-out, mom-and-pop smuggling operations had largely been replaced by cold-blooded, high-stakes, organized criminal gangs. And instead of moving individuals or small groups of illegals, these gangs are responsible for smuggling thousands of illegal aliens into Arizona each day.

  Human smuggling is a multibillion-dollar business in Arizona and the Southwest. Today, organized smuggling operations can command anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000 per person—and much more if the illegal immigrant is from China, Central Europe, or any country other than Mexico. They deal in bulk, herding groups of twenty, fifty, or a hundred people at a time. As it stands, the risk these smugglers take is nothing compared with the money they can make. They can average $2,000 a head smuggling a hundred people across the border up to three times a week. You do the math.

  As if this weren’t bad enough, something else has happened to the cross-border traffic in human beings that has made it even more dangerous: The Mexican drug cartels have gotten involved. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that it was only a matter of time before this happened. If you can move humans across the border, you can also move drugs; it doesn’t take a genius to see the enormous profits that can be made by combining the two. So, increasingly, the drug cartels are turning aliens seeking to cross the border—even those who just want to come to the United States to work—into reluctant drug mules. Double the illegality—quadruple the money. The GAO has estimated that the Mexican cartels earned $8 billion to $23 billion from U.S. drug sales in 2005 alone. At the high end, reported the Arizona Republic, that puts the Mexican cartels at ninety-seventh on the Fortune 500 list, just below Coca-Cola.

  Law enforcement officials tasked with detecting and dismantling these operations tell us that the cartels will typically take a group of illegal crossers, isolate the healthy males, and “make them pack,” as they say. For the most part, these immigrants are poor, desperate people. They are in no position to resist the demands of armed, bloodthirsty gangsters who offer them the infamous choice of plata o plomo—silver or lead. So each crosser is forced to carry, say, a backpack containing fifty to sixty pounds of marijuana. The cartels use duct tape to secure the backpack so completely that the immigrant can’t remove it—they’re literally taped into their drug loads. Then they are marched sixty or seventy miles across the border and through the desert up to one of the major interstate highways that parallel the border in Arizona, I-8 or I-10.

  These crossings can take days, and they are very dangerous. In remote areas of Arizona, like the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, you can walk through the desert for hours without seeing any people, roads, or buildings. There are rattlesnakes and scorpions. The sun is relentless, and water is nonexistent. Here, an injury—even a slight one—can mean the difference between life and death. Drug-cartel coyotes think nothing of leaving behind the sick or injured, and the Border Patrol routinely comes upon their decomposed remains.

  When they reach the interstate, the smuggling bands are usually met by gang members with vehicles. Before they are piled into the trucks, vans, or SUVs, the illegal immigrants’ backpacks are literally cut off them. But the Mexican cartels are careful. They know better than to have their human and drug cargoes in the same place. So the drugs go off in one vehicle and the people in another.

  It’s along the interstates and back roads of Arizona that our law enforcement officers most often encounter illegal aliens. The smugglers’ vehicles are typically in bad shape, and heavily laden, often with more than twenty people inside. They travel at high speeds, and rollovers are common. I remember when, a couple of years ago, an SUV carrying at least twenty-seven people rolled over around midnight on a remote stretch of highway in southeastern Arizona. The reports said that the illegal aliens were “stacked like wood” in the back of the truck. Eight people, including the driver, were killed. Five had to be airlifted to a Tucson hospital.

  The initial destination of human smugglers traveling along Arizona’s roads and interstates, more often than not, is the Phoenix metropolitan area. But even when they reach Arizona’s largest city, a couple hundred miles from the border, the mayhem isn’t over. In many ways, it’s just beginning.

  Earlier this year, federal authorities raided a house in a quiet west Phoenix neighborhood of single-family homes. Inside the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house they found 108 frightened, dehydrated illegal aliens.

  Welcome to Arizona’s notorious drop houses.

  A drop house is a house—very often rented—where smugglers hold their frightened charges until they have received enough payment from the immigrants or their families to let them go. Rarely does a week go by in Arizona that our newspapers and televisions don’t carry news of law enforcement finding another drop house. In an unfortunate confluence of bad trends, the foreclosure crisis has combined with the immigration crisis to give smugglers their pick of homes in Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs. In Phoenix alone, law enforcement has discovered more than 600 drop houses in recent years. Many, many more go undetected. Meaning that, at any given time, literally thousands of people are being held hostage in these houses.

  Coyotes used to hold illegal aliens in drop houses until they had paid the prearranged price of their crossing. The immigrants would use the place to rest, lie low, and pay their bills, and then were sent on to their final destination. But the more vicious breed of criminals who now control the human smuggling business sensed an opportunity. Why should they be satisfied with a $2,000-to-$3,000 negotiated price when there’s more money to be had, provided you don’t have a conscience? So these criminals started to hold the migrants hostage, demanding additional cash payments from their relatives before they’d be released.

  Today’s drop houses have been described as prisons and torture houses. Captain Fred Zumbo, who heads the Department of Public Safety’s illegal immigration task force, describes the men who run Phoenix’s drop houses as “a violent subculture of twenty-to-thirty-year-old Mexican men who have no regard for human life and dignity.” In addition to torturing the immigrants they smuggle, this subculture of criminals, Captain Zumbo told me, “puts citizens at risk.”

  Drop houses can be found anywhere, even in middle-class and upscale neighborhoods. Because they’re so hard to detect, police often rely on tips from terrified relatives to find them. Sometimes they find drop houses by watching for a few telltale signs. Police watch the interstates for bulky, heavily laden vehicles that might be carrying large numbers of illegals. Very often, these vans and SUVs have temporary license plates, or tags from a stolen car. If the police get suspicious, they follow. Smugglers like to make their drops late at night, while the neighbors are asleep. If police see the weighted-down vehicle pull into the garage of a house, watch the garage door close, then see it open again a few minutes later as a suddenly lighter vehicle emerges, they know they’re on to something.

  What goes on inside these houses is literally the stuff of a horror movie. Immigrants are beaten, they are raped, they are Tasered, and they are murdered. Smugglers pack them in, forty, fifty, sixty, and more to a house. Dozens of human beings are shoehorned into rooms in which the furniture has been removed and the windows boarded up. To prevent their escape, the immigrants are sometimes forced to remove their clothes. On one memorable night in 2008, Captain Zumbo’s task force responded to a Phoenix police report of fifty naked, bloody people running down the street. They were a group of illegal aliens that had overpowered their guard and busted out of a drop house by breaking through the back patio doors.

  Captain Zumbo told me about one undocumented Mexican man who was running a very violent—but tragically typical—drop house. Like other smugglers, this guy was as clever as he was sadistic. The smugglers know that most people seeking to enter the United States have relatives here. And those relatives have money. So this guy would take those immigrants who he suspected had lucrative connections in the United States to a boarded-up “tortur
e room” within the drop house. He would call their relatives on the phone and demand $3,000 in exchange for the immigrants’ lives. Then he would take a wooden dowel—a cylindrical piece of wood not unlike a baseball bat—and beat the men. The relatives would listen on the phone as the men were beaten and begged for their lives. What would anyone do in that situation? The relatives would pay to free their loved ones, and the torturer would get rich. And that’s what happens in anonymous drop houses in Phoenix and across the country every day. People suffer and criminals get rich. The ones that we’ve discovered are just the tip of the iceberg. The smugglers tell illegal aliens that their families in the United States and Mexico will be targeted if they tell the police. And for good reason, the immigrants believe them.

  The evidence that Phoenix has become the drop-house-and-kidnapping capital of America can be found outside the police reports as well. After 9/11, wire transfer businesses were required to report data on senders and receivers to state attorneys general, so we took a look at what was reported for Arizona. The result was astounding. The data showed that Arizona is a magnet for money transfers, with a great deal of money coming in and very little going out. Delaware, for example, sent sixty times as much to Arizona as Arizona sent to Delaware. South Carolina wired thirty-eight times as much cash to Arizona as Arizonans sent there. In all, the wire transfers entering the state dwarf the transfers leaving it by a factor of thirty. What that tells us is obvious: A lot of people are paying a lot of money to bring illegal aliens safely into our country.

  The most recent phase of the escalating violence has been its most violent yet. This is the stage in which the stakes become so high that the criminals turn on each other. It is the point at which the amounts of money being made are so great that, criminals being criminals, they start to prey on one another. Smugglers start to rob smugglers. Drug dealers steal from drug dealers. And freelance criminal gangs organize to rip off both. This is where Arizona is today, and where much of America may be tomorrow.

  The driving force behind the criminal-on-criminal violence is simple: Human beings and drugs are both more valuable to criminals on the U.S. side of the border than they are on the Mexican side. After all, our side is where drugs can be sold, and where illegal aliens want to be. In the eyes of the criminal class, the value of both drugs and people is very little before they cross the border. But once across, their value soars, and the loads of illegal aliens, drugs, and the cash they bring become ripe targets for thieves.

  The Spanish slang that surrounds the human-smuggling trade probably best describes the rise of intra-criminal violence on the border. If illegal aliens are pollos, or chickens, and human smugglers are polleros, or chicken ranchers, the thieves who rip off the smugglers are known as bajadores—chicken thieves.

  Bajadores are typically illegal aliens themselves. They’re opportunistic rather than organized, but they are heavily armed. Their motive is money, pure and simple. Like the thieves in the I-10 shoot-out, they kidnap loads of illegal immigrants from smugglers and hold them for ransom. According to police, immigrants typically fetch $1,500 to $2,500 a head. Not infrequently, these criminals kidnap their competition. Kidnapped smugglers pay off at $10,000 to $50,000 each. Thanks to criminals preying largely on criminals, Phoenix now has the dubious distinction of being the kidnapping capital of America, second in the world only to Mexico City. And recent audits indicate that Phoenix officials have actually underreported the number of kidnappings in Phoenix.

  Sometimes these gangs simply zero in on a drop house, break in, kill the guards, and start taking over the payments made by the illegal immigrants. Other times they will discover a house where they think people, drugs, or cash are being held, arm themselves with military-style rifles, dress up like police officers or SWAT teams, and raid the house.

  For these guys, anything they get is pure profit.

  But more dangerous than even the loosely organized bajadores are the rival Mexican drug cartels whose brutal fights to control smuggling routes and market share are increasingly spilling over from Mexico into the United States.

  By now most Americans are familiar with the out-of-control violence in Mexico related to the drug wars. The murder and mayhem there are truly beyond comprehension. But even this incomprehensible violence has a purpose. Forty thousand Mexican citizens have been killed since President Felipe Calderón began his campaign against the cartels in December 2006; but for the drug cartels, this has not been enough. They have moved beyond murder in their viciousness and brutality. Cartels routinely mutilate victims for no obvious reason. And they don’t “just” behead their victims anymore. They skin them and rip their hearts from their chests. In one case, the cartels actually cut the face off a victim and stitched it to a soccer ball. Law enforcement officials agree that this is done to send a message both to the Mexican people and to the other cartels. To the first: The government is powerless to help you. And to the second: Don’t cross us.

  The lifeblood of these cartels, of course, is the smuggling routes across the U.S. border. These are literally their livelihoods, their superhighways to outrageous fortune. As a consequence, the cartels seek to control these routes using any means necessary. The mountaintops of the Southwest desert are infested with hundreds of so-called spotters—cartel members who monitor the smuggling routes for other cartels, bajadores, and the Border Patrol. Two to three hundred of these spotters are in the hills—deep inside U.S. territory—at any given time. They use radios to communicate with smugglers leading human trains of drug mules across the desert, letting them know if it is safe to pass or if thieves or rivals are on their route.

  Despite the fact that they squat in primitive caves called “spider holes” for months at a time, the spotters are highly sophisticated. They have the usual high-powered weapons, including, in at least one case, shoulder-fired rocket launchers. They use (and leave behind) car batteries to power their encrypted satellite radios. Sometimes they even use solar panels. They have GPS and night-vision goggles to monitor the smuggling routes. If they see a U.S. official or a rival gang member, sometimes they just report it. Sometimes they shoot.

  And, sad as it is to say, the cartels have established a degree of control over the border that the United States government has never come close to having. I remember reading a story in the Dallas Morning News about a drug cartel that was waging war on another smuggling ring for control of a route in the Tucson sector. The reporter had talked to one man who wanted to come to the States for a construction job but couldn’t. The border, the man told the newspaper, was “tapado por la mafia”—closed by the mafia. “There’s too much vigilance, too much,” he said. “And it’s not the border patrol.”

  The “vigilance” of the drug cartels is making the Mexican mafia very rich, and the American Southwest increasingly dangerous. The cartels now control the U.S. markets for marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine, and they are moving more and more of it across the border. The amount of marijuana seized by the Border Patrol in 2010 was more than 3 million pounds, with an estimated street value of over $2 billion. That’s billion with a b. During the past two years, the amount of marijuana seized by Sheriff Paul Babeu’s office in Pinal County—which is seventy miles from the border—more than doubled. The trend that is truly alarming is how the smuggling of hard-core drugs has skyrocketed—cocaine is up 90 percent, heroin is up 40 percent, and methamphetamine is up 20 percent.

  And despite the Obama administration’s claims to the contrary, the cartels are bringing violence across the border along with their drugs. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed earlier this year in a gunfight linked to the cartels. The cartels are now openly threatening law enforcement. Jeffrey Kirkham, chief of police in the border town of Nogales, reports that his officers have been threatened. Informants in the cartels have told Chief Kirkham to ignore cross-border drug shipments or pay the price.

  Along with drugs and violence, the cartels are bringing thei
r unique criminal methods across the border as well. Just last year, their passion for beheadings became evident in the Phoenix area. Police entered an apartment in Chandler and found a head in one room and the body in another. And increasingly, the cartels are recruiting American citizens to join in their criminal activity. Earlier this year, on the Tohono O’odham reservation, federal agents and tribal police arrested forty-six people accused of working with the Mexican cartels that use their land to smuggle people and drugs. The cartels are even recruiting Arizona high school kids—American citizens—to do their dirty work. They pay them $200 or so to use their parents’ cars to transport drugs across the border. Eventually these kids typically drop out of school because the money is so good. They effectively become members of the cartel. And if they want out, the cartels won’t let them go—once they’re in, they’re in for life, however long that lasts.

  In addition to the drug cartels, Arizona is plagued by garden-variety criminals sneaking in from Mexico. Each week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection publishes a report of the arrests made in the area near Tucson. Recent reports detail arrests of illegal aliens who are gang members. Some have previous criminal convictions for crimes against children, including child molestation. It’s easy for federal officials with political motives to sit in Washington, D.C., and tell us we’re exaggerating the criminal threat coming across the border and insinuate that we’re racists and xenophobes. But we see it every day. We live it every day. And we have had enough.