All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  Which is a hard word to translate, but “bitch supreme” is a start. As if to prove it, Sophie slides open the bottom drawer of her desk and removes a Stun Master 100-C, capable of delivering 100,000 volts of energy. “It is like hitting them between the legs,” she says, waving it in the air. “They are paralyzed for a while, and you have time to handcuff them. My pistol is in my car.”

  “What do you say when you Taser someone?” Greg asks.

  Sophie flashes another catlike grin. “I say, ‘I am not here to play game. I get you your freedom. I just ask you to call me once a week and show up for your court date.’ If they don’t call on Friday, they have Saturday and Sunday for their drinking and relaxing, but by Monday, if they aren’t calling, I am a-hunting.”

  Stun guns aren’t the only way Sophie retains her clients. Also on her desk is a package of birthday cards, the kind you buy in bulk at the Dollar Store.

  “For your clients?” I ask, sorting through them.

  “Oh yes. Some people I have bailed out twenty times. Thirty times. You know when you find a hairdresser you like, and you follow them around? It’s like that. Some clients, they won’t call anyone but me. Once I was in downtown and this guy with jeans down to his ankles and tattoos everywhere, he comes up and he hugs me and he says, ‘This is my bail bond lady!’ to all his friends.”

  The hairdresser analogy is an apt one, as Sophie spends the bulk of her day listening to her clients dish. “They want to tell us all about their life, about how they were abused. Often they are young people who live in a broken home, and Mom or Dad is nonexistent. In this business, you are a social worker. You are a psychiatrist.”

  And while it’s probably not in her business interest to do so, she counsels her clients, encouraging them to go back to school or at least get their GED. More than one parent has called to thank her for straightening out a prodigal son over the years. But for the most part, Sophie says, “When you walk in the door, you must take out your heart and put it in the drawer. If you don’t, you can’t make it in this business.”

  Sophie’s cell phone rings again. Her husband, Larry—a watermelon grower turned bail bond agent turned French restaurateur—needs her back at Andre’s. Sophie gives us a lift there, but after we say our good-byes, I ask Greg to return so we can poke around. As we coast down County Road 201, I see that Sophie has chosen a prime piece of real estate. Several other bail bond agencies dot the road—Cristellas Bail Bonds, Apex Bail Bonds, Arnoldo Mireles Bail Bonds—with billboards advertising many more. A quarter mile later, the reason comes into view: Brooks County Detention Center. Through its double perimeter security fence, I can make out men in bright orange suits exercising. At one point in our conversation, Sophie declared that 90 percent of South Texans live with drug money. “You take a drug dog and go to any bank in South Texas and it will go crazy. There is drug on every dollar.”

  None of this is news, of course. This is practically the only story we ever hear about our southern borderlands. But confronting it so viscerally makes me realize I have a decision to make. Is it more ethically responsible to report our region’s most notorious story—or to refuse to perpetuate its stereotypes and instead portray the artists, activists, and faith keepers who salve our many wounds? I don’t know the answer to this. But staring out at the inmates, whose tattoos are visible even from the road, I decide I should at least try to talk to one—to complicate the stereotypical narrative, if nothing else.

  ONE BALMY NIGHT IN SEPTEMBER 2006, the Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia dispatched twenty masked men to a discotheque in the Mexican state of Michoacan. After summoning everyone’s attention by turning off the music, they ripped open a sack and rolled five human heads4 onto the dance floor. Then they escaped into the night, leaving behind a note that read, “La Familia does not kill for money. It does not kill for women. It does not kill the innocent. Only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice.”

  Although Mexico’s narcos had long been stealing headlines for their brazen acts, this was the event that catapulted them into international infamy. When President Felipe Calderón got sworn into office three months later, he declared war on the cartels, dispatching tens of thousands of soldiers5 to key regions of the country to hunt them down. The narcos responded with unthinkable cruelty, dismembering victims appendage by appendage on videotapes they mailed home to families. One cartel sewed a man’s face onto a soccer ball; another paid an underling6 $600 a week to dissolve victims’ corpses in barrels of lye. In time, it was no longer salacious enough to torture a victim to death. Cartels had to eradicate the entire family. Thugs started showing up at weddings and funerals and blasting everyone in sight. Then they took on entire communities. In August 2010, a cartel executed seventy-two undocumented immigrants on a ranch 100 miles from Texas. Their crime: refusing to enlist as hired assassins. Two years later, forty-nine mutilated bodies were found on the side of a highway near Monterrey. Two years after that, forty-three college students in Guerrero vanished and are widely believed to have been killed, burned, and dumped in a river by a criminal gang with the assistance of local police and by orders of the mayor and his wife.

  At least 60,000 people have died of drug-related violence since Calderón took office in 2006.7 Tens of thousands more have been carjacked, kidnapped, or beaten or have “disappeared.” The cartels spare no one, slaying policemen, soldiers, judges, gubernatorial candidates, and state legislators alike, often in daylight in the public’s view, as with the mayor from Michoacan who got stoned to death in the middle of the street. Journalists who dare cover these crimes are targeted, too. According to the Dallas Morning News, one gets assaulted every twenty-six hours, either by a criminal gang or by the government,8 making Mexico one of the world’s most dangerous places to be a journalist.

  When I moved to Mexico in January 2005, I also found it to be a land of superlatives: it had the warmest people, the tastiest food, the most exhilarating landscapes, and the greatest stories of any place I had ever visited. I returned to the United States that August but vowed to move back soon—until gory headlines started filling my inbox. With each passing month of Calderón’s presidency, the country seemed to descend further into chaos. In April 2010 I briefly visited Cuernavaca, a colonial city that had recently lost its capo-in-residence, Arturo Beltrán Leyva,9 and was thus a ticking bomb. Two mornings after my arrival, I opened the newspaper to learn that the bullet-riddled bodies of two young men had been strung from an overpass just a few miles from my hotel the night before. Their photographs splayed across the front page: one man hooded and bare-chested, the other with his jeans puddled around his ankles. The week after I left, police evacuated the city’s main plaza because of a bomb threat. By summer, the whole city was on lockdown after dark.

  In his authoritative book El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, Ioan Grillo traces the origins of this drug war turned civil war to enterprising Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century. Before boarding steamships for Sinaloa to work on the railroads, Chinese laborers slipped poppy seeds into their satchels. Though most smoked the opium themselves, a few recognized its market potential. Documents show Chinese-Mexican syndicates trafficking opium into California through Tijuana as early as 1916. Jealous of their surging profits, native Sinaloans soon ran the Chinese out of town and seized their trade, growing poppies in isolated mountain ranges and smuggling the gum across the border. The trade grew briskly: Grillo cites a popular theory that even the U.S. government purchased Sinaloan opium to make morphine for shell-shocked soldiers during World War II. Mexico’s marijuana production, meanwhile, skyrocketed in the sixties when hippies started driving their VW vans to border towns to load up on reefer. Nixon finally declared global war on the national habit in 1973 with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which employs more than 5,000 special agents in sixty-plus countries today. Despite those efforts, drug users in the United States currently blow about $100 billion a year on cocaine, heroin, mar
ijuana, and meth. Analysts say as much as 40 percent of that profit goes straight back into the cartels’ coffers.

  So who are these narcos? Even the most famous capos started out as barely literate campesinos whose farms could hardly feed their families. Either that, or urbanites whose major employment option was slaving on a production line at a sweaty maquiladora for twelve hours a day. Narcos are typically offered a cell phone, a pair of sunglasses, and an Uzi on their first day on the job. Not only that, they are exalted in virtually every aspect of Mexican culture, from TV, magazines, and movies to a musical genre known as the narco-corrido, which lyricizes their triumphs in catchy ballads. Narcos even have their own pantheon, including a terrifying female spirit known as Santa Muerte (Holy Death) who resembles a fanged grim reaper wielding a scythe.10 With nearly half of all Mexicans dwelling in poverty, it’s not hard to see narcos’ allure—especially for the youth population known as “ni-nis,” short for ni estudian, ni trabajan, those who neither study nor work. Mexico has roughly eight million of those. Tack on the fact that criminal groups often operate with the complete complicity of some of Mexico’s government officials,11 law enforcement, the military, and the occasional corrupted U.S. official, and the question becomes who is not a narco?12

  Though in-fighting has led to a number of splinter groups in recent years, Mexico watchers generally recognize six major drug cartels, each with its own geographical turf: La Familia Michoacana/Knights Templar,13 the Juarez Cartel, the Beltrán-Leyva Organization, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, and the Zetas. All are fearsome, but the Zetas constitute a category all their own. Cofounded by a special forces commander of the Mexican Army to serve as a paramilitary arm of the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas syndicate built its ranks by seducing highly trained soldiers away from their platoons with the promise of glory. It is the cartel that introduced terror tactics like mass kidnappings into the war. That brags about having developed forty-three ways to kill a man in under three minutes. That counts among its leaders Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales14 (aka “Cuarenta,” or Forty), who purportedly likes to remove victims’ still-beating hearts and take a bite.

  According to the DEA, the Zetas Cartel is also one of the syndicates operating in Corpitos.

  ONE OF THE GREAT GEOPOLITICAL mysteries of the twenty-first century is how the United States—the chief consumer of Mexico’s drugs—has avoided the bloodbath across its border. Juarez, a city that tallied more than 3,000 murders in 2010,15 is only a slender river away from El Paso, which registered 5 homicides that year (its lowest since 1965). Four of the biggest U.S. cities with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin. But this low death toll doesn’t mean we’re not affected by the violence. A friend of mine from Pharr, Texas, has a tío who loves to fish. Early one morning, he was wading through the river with his nets and poles when some beefy Mexicans wielding automatic weapons called him over. They were Zetas, they informed him, and this was their new port. They suggested he go home and not return. He hasn’t. My Mexico-born friends, meanwhile, are literally begged not to come home for Christmas. It’s too dangerous, their mothers say. Stay in El Norte, where we know you are safe. Hear enough stories like these, and eventually they take a psychic toll.

  When I was a child, piling in the Chevy and driving to Mexican border towns like Progreso and Nuevo Laredo was my family’s favorite way to spend a Sunday. We’d cross the border for no-prescription-necessary penicillin when one of us fell sick. We’d cross the border for cajeta, a goat-milk spread that tastes like caramel, when one of us craved something sweet. We’d cross the border before birthdays to buy piñatas shaped like Wonder Woman. We’d cross the border for salt-rimmed margaritas and bottles of tequila with little worms floating inside. We’d cross the border to feel Mexican. We’d cross the border to feel American. Now, we never cross. Neither does anyone else we know. The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken passionately about “the danger of a single story,” and how it can reduce an entire people into a stereotypical caricature. Even worse is when a community internalizes a single story about itself. In this sense, the drug war has erected a border wall that surpasses anything Congress has constructed, only in reverse. Far too many of us have stopped crossing the border to find stories of our own.

  I DON’T USE DRUGS MYSELF. I was too straight to try them in high school, and by the time I moved into a co-op in college where housemates displayed their bongs on their windowsills, I suffered delusions of running for political office someday. (That’s the Clinton administration for you.) A cousin had also succumbed to addiction, and I’d seen the toll it had taken on her family. What truly turned me off drugs, however, was dating a Colombian whose parents paid hefty bribes to dissuade cartels from turning their coffee plantation into a coca farm. After traveling to southern Colombia with him and witnessing the destruction that U.S. drug use had wreaked on a more global scale, I became one of those vitriolic Chicanas who, if offered a joint, will snap, “Sorry, I don’t smoke the ashes of my people.”

  So after resolving to talk with a drug dealer, I’m at a loss where to begin. Judging from their (juiced up) cars and (gangster) tattoos, they don’t seem to be in short supply in Corpitos. I’m pretty sure one lives down my parents’ street. But journalists like Alfredo Corchado16 have already written eloquently about the serious narcos out there—and received death threats in the process. I’d much prefer a small-town dealer who’d be willing to share his story over chai lattes in a well-lit café and then never contact me again.

  I start asking around.

  “Anybody know a good dealer?”

  “Pot or coke?”

  “Uh, I’d like to talk to them, actually.”

  “——”

  I do hear some wild stories this way. At one dinner party in Corpus, a middle-aged Tejana surprises us all by revealing that her father, three of her cousins, and two of her tíos have all dealt drugs at one time or another. They stopped when one tío left to pick up a load in Mexico five years ago and never returned. “I think he’s dead,” she says flatly, “but I don’t care, because he sent someone to my house who held a gun to my son’s head.”

  Six men invaded her home one night and ordered her entire family down on the floor. They held one gun to her head and another to her son’s while they searched the house for nearly an hour, overturning every drawer. Then they warned them never to tell the police. “We’re from Roma,” they said—the same town where her tío once worked.

  Yet she has no contacts to offer either.

  Around this time, a story breaks in a nearby town that generates headlines across the state. The owner of a popular taco stand has been arrested for selling cocaine by rolling baggies of it into his customer’s taquitos.17 This intrigues me for a couple of reasons. First, what a clever front! Drive-thru taco stands have lines twelve trucks deep in South Texas. You could pass all matter of paper-bagged goodies through those windows, and no one would suspect a thing. Second: the dealer is exactly my age and has a family to boot. That doesn’t de facto put him in the latte category, but, well, there’s hope.

  Deciding I could use some protection, I convince Greg to join me. Six days after the dealer’s arrest, we arrive at his town at high noon. Yard signs either praise Jesus or forbid trespassing. Houses tilt, as if drowsy. About a third of the residents here live below the poverty line, which probably explains the appeal of dealing. Just a month ago, a sixty-six-year-old man got busted selling heroin and cocaine out of a home health care agency right on Main Street. Driving by, I notice the business’s motto: BECAUSE THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

  To my surprise, the taco stand is open for business. Housed in a white cinder block building, its name is painted across the front in large letters. Security grills cover its windows, and a white Blazer is parked out in front. We walk inside to find five empty tables and a mural of a taco wearing a sombrero engulfed in flames. A handmade sign says RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY. A computerized one read
s SHOES & SHIRTS REQUIRED; BRAS & PANTIES OPTIONAL.

  The man working the counter—or rather, the service window that obstructs the register and the kitchen from view—is a stocky Tejano with a moon-shaped face. He looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t contemplate how. I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, so I can think only of food. Though the menu is printed on the Pepsi marquee above, I initiate conversation by asking what kind of taquito fillings he’s offering today. In a voice that’s bored but polite, he rattles off the options: bacon, chorizo, sausage, chicharrón, Spam …

  “How about a fifty?” I ask brightly. Until last week, that’s how customers requested a side of cocaine along with their guacamole here, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

  He looks at me in surprise, his mouth a perfect O. “We don’t got anymore of that,” he sputters. “The health inspector came and cleared it out.”

  “I’m surprised you reopened so fast.”

  “We were able to open on Friday,” he says, craning his neck to look back at his kitchen. “What kind of taquito did you want?”

  “Potato, egg, and cheese, please. So, how long have you been here?”

  “A long time,” he says, then ducks out of sight.

  I return to our table to find Greg scribbling in my notebook, “I think that guy is the owner!!!”

  Clearly I am not cut out for interviewing narco-trafficantes. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he could have gotten out of jail so quick. Never mind that I had just learned from Sophie that, if you’ve got a $35,000 bail (as he did), you’d only need to post $3,500 plus a $500 deposit to walk free, and surely any respectable dealer is capable of that. Now I’ve pissed him off. He’ll never agree to chai lattes with me.

  When my taquito is ready, I send Greg to retrieve it and unwrap it with caution. Supersized and piping hot, there is a square of bright yellow cheese in the middle. Greg laughs as I douse the eggs with salsa for courage. After a few bites, I return to the service window and call out the dealer’s name. A Tejana appears. Thirtyish with long black hair, she has his name tattooed in Gothic script across her chest.