An especially grisly discovery occurred in Edinburg in May 2012 when a Spanish-speaking man called 911 and, in a hushed voice, pleaded for help. He was being held prisoner, he said, and feared for his life. When police arrived, scores of immigrants fled from a house and trailer at the end of a caliche road. During their search, police found even more people locked inside of a cinder block building with security bars on the windows. All told, 115 immigrants had been stowed inside the three-building property, and they claimed not to have eaten in days. They also said that their ringleader, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican national named Marcial Salas Gardunio, had greeted them upon their arrival with an ominous “Welcome to hell.”
After Salas gets sentenced to a hell of his own, I persuade Greg to join me in paying the former stash house a visit. (“Only if I can wait in the car,” he says.) Traveling south on U.S. 281, we pass ranch after ranch until a delta of taquerias and RV parks opens up. This is the Rio Grande Valley: one million Tejanos, Mexican nationals, and snowbirds coexisting on the northern banks of the famous river, minutes from Mexico. It’s a 100-mile strip where Spanish is offered before English, where churches are either grand and Catholic or plain and Pentecostal, where the grapefruit is ruby red and the sky is denim blue, where a side of beans comes with every meal, where a Border Patrol vehicle is never far from view.
Exiting University Avenue and turning east, the fast food franchises gradually give way to mom-and-pop restaurants with hand-painted signs. Vera’s King-O-Meats. Esner’s Playa Azul. The local newspaper gave only an approximation of the stash house’s address, so we drive up and down the avenue a few times before selecting a side street at random. The neighborhood is exceedingly humble with boarded-up windows and rotting cars, but in time a cinder block house appears behind a chain-link fence. Looking closely, we see a gaping hole has been cut through it. Is that it? Greg waits in the car with the engine running while I duck beneath the hole in the fence and dart to the nearest window. The house appears to have been ransacked. Overturned furniture covers the floor along with heaps of clothing and shoes and bits of ceiling streaked in sludge. In the farthest corner, an office-size photocopier lay on its side, coughing up moldy papers as if it had been bludgeoned. Do smugglers make photocopies? Maybe of contracts—or receipts?
Nearby is a house with a few licks of paint and some long-retired blinds. The truck out front suggests it might be occupied, so I knock. The blinds rustle. A woman’s face becomes visible, then disappears. I wait a while before knocking again, louder this time. The door creaks open, and a thin man in a threadbare cap emerges.
“Are you Immigration?” he asks in Spanish, anxiety pinching his face.
I assure him I’m only a writer, but that seems equally bad. Shaking his head, he says that he’s sorry, he would like to help me but he can’t, it’s too dangerous, this isn’t the kind of neighborhood where you can walk around writing things, I really should just leave. Yet he makes no motion to leave himself. If anything, he more firmly establishes his presence on the doorstep. We are sizing each other up now. No tattoos, pistol-bulges, or signs of unaccountable wealth: this man looks safe to me. He, in turn, seems to be digesting my college-ruled notebook. I start making small talk, banking on a year’s worth of experiences in Mexico that, in the end, the men always open up, whether out of politeness or machismo or a plaintive desire to be heard. Sure enough, after a few exchanges about the weather, this one does too.
On the morning of the stash house raid, he says, he woke up early to get ready for work and saw squad cars and Border Patrol circling his street. He told his wife to turn off the lights and not to answer the door. His family waited quietly in an unlit room, missing work and school, until finally the neighborhood emptied. He later learned that a friend had been arrested in the raid for the crime of living next door to the stash house. For thirty days, he got interrogated in a detention center1 until deemed innocent. Then he was dropped off at the international bridge in Brownsville and forced to retreat into Matamoros.
“He got bronchitis while he was in the detention center and they didn’t give him any medicine,” the man says, indignant on his friend’s behalf. “They took his money and they didn’t give it back.”
The friend had to hire a coyote to cross the border again—a debt he’ll be paying for years to come—but now he’s back in the neighborhood. They both work at the same construction site.
I ask if he had known so many immigrants were being held at the stash house, and he admits to having noticed some unusually nice trucks in the neighborhood lately. Having lived here seven years, he sensed something was wrong, but he knew better than to ask any questions.
“The people involved, they are very bad. Whenever we see a new car, we know to stay away because we don’t want any problems.”
He shows me where the stash house is located, down a distant caliche road. “But don’t go down there. They know what’s happening in this area. They keep watch.”
“They’re still here?”
“Of course. They’ve got two or three more houses just like it, right down the street,” he says.
I turn around to look.
“Don’t!” he hisses. “They are watching. Get in your car and don’t come back. And don’t use my name. Or identify my house. Please.”
After thanking him profusely, I climb back in the Honda to confer with Greg. Whatever nerve I had to investigate further evaporates when a shiny new Ford Expedition with chrome grilling approaches from the opposite direction. Though Greg will later say it didn’t, I am (almost) positive it pauses when it passes us. I try to sneak a glimpse at the driver, but the windows are impenetrably tinted. We watch as the Expedition cruises down to the caliche road, then makes a right.
SOMEHOW SHE SURVIVED THE STASH HOUSE STAY. The coyote might have crammed her in with fifty others and the toilet was clogged and there was no place to shower or even to sleep and she ate only tortillas for four days straight, but Immigration never came, so early one morning she got corralled into a dark-windowed van with some other travelers and glided down the street. At first the signs were in Spanish—Casa De Empeño, Yusma Paleteria, Iglesia Rosa de Saron—but gradually the buildings grew taller and the signs got fancier and started saying things in English, too. Wendy’s, KFC, Domino’s, Subway, Family Dollar. Then came the restaurants with flashing neon signs, the multileveled stores, the impossibly glamorous shopping malls. So this is El Otro Lado, she might have thought. No street vendors selling helado, no mothers carrying babies on their backs or groceries in their fists, no pack animals, hardly even anyone on their feet. Just an onslaught of trucks and eighteen-wheelers, plus palm trees in the medians.
Soon enough, she exited the city. Now the landscape consisted of a narrow strip of road ahead and a narrow strip behind with nothing along the sides but brush. Well, sometimes a fruit stand. A vacant restaurant called El Luzero. An abandoned Hop N Shop. Remnants of burst tires and bits of raccoon and deer. The grass grew darker and thicker. She settled into the drive. She knew she should nap, but she felt too anxious. So long her journey had been, but surely it would be ending soon.
Perhaps an hour had passed when the driver slowed and turned down a gravel road. He followed it far from the highway, stopping to open and close gates along the way. He finally parked beneath a mesquite tree and everyone climbed out. The pinche checkpoint is up ahead, the coyote might have said. We have to go around it, just a few miles, no problem.
No matter how far she walked to avoid the first border crossing, no matter how many blisters she formed or how badly she sunburned or wind-burned or dehydrated or overheated, she needed to do it all over again. Probably no one told her this. But the chokepoint at Falfurrias was notorious for catching immigrants, upward of 10,000 a year. She’d come so very far. The next one couldn’t be her.
So she was hiking again. Just a few miles, the coyotes said (when in fact it was nearly thirty). She carried, at most, a gallon of water, when what she actually needed was three.
She’d packed, at most, a granola bar, when what she really needed was a cache of protein. She wore, at most, a cap, when only a beach-size umbrella and SPF 50 sunscreen would do. She was profoundly unprepared, but she didn’t know that yet. Houston, the coyote said, was just a few miles away. But really, it was more like three hundred.
LAVOYGER DURHAM IS STRAIGHT OUT of central casting for an old Western flick. Everything about him is big: his voice, his earlobes, his cowboy hat, his smile, his white Ford Excursion with the Super Duty extended cab. His starched button-down shirt is monogrammed with his initials on the cuffs and topped by a silky black vest. He grew up roping cattle on the King Ranch and has been managing the 13,000-acre El Tule Ranch in Brooks County for twenty-two years. His chief responsibility is entertaining high-end hunters, which have included Bushes Senior (who was his best man at his wedding) and W., as well as Dick Cheney (with whom he lunched the day after Harry Whittington got shot). But Durham also devotes considerable time to dealing with “the situation,” as he puts it.
He invites me aboard his boatlike Ford one morning to show me “the little spot where illegals trash me up.” I take a seat between a rolled-up Wall Street Journal, a pair of silver spurs, some Elvis CDs, and multiple boxes of 9mm Luger 100-round Winchesters and .22 Long Rifles bullets. Not far from El Tule’s main gate, we turn onto a dirt trail that leads into a blur of huisache and live oaks. Almost instantly I lose my bearings. In every direction, the scenery is identical, with nothing long or tall enough to gauge distance. That’s probably why once or twice a month, Durham hears a thump at his door and opens it to find a hopeful or desperate immigrant on his step.
“I ask where they are going, I find out what is the deal, and then I say, ‘I’ll give you a ride up to the highway,’” he says. “I send them on a pipeline so it’s easy to follow, and then I call the Border Patrol. I just get rid of them and that’s it.”
We are driving parallel to the highway now, perhaps 250 yards away. A gallon jug of water comes into view, uncapped and on its side, gleaming in the sun. Then another. Then a third. Then a sweatshirt and a shoe. Then a dozen jugs of water and a pile of sweatshirts and shoes. We pull up to a massive live oak tree that has been draped in plastic bags and hoodies as if it were a demented Christmas tree, with baseball caps, squashed energy drinks, backpacks, bottles, and plastic jugs strewn beneath. Footprints crumble the dirt.
“That’s about a year’s worth,” Durham says. “I don’t clean it up because I bring people like you out here to see it.”
While a somber sight for me, it must be a welcome one for the immigrants, as it means they have successfully evaded the chokepoint. Hanging a hoodie could even be a celebratory act. I won’t be needing this anymore; I’m going to Houston! From here, they just have to wait until their driver honks, then dash through the brush and into the getaway van. Assuming, of course, a driver does indeed come for them, and that they are still capable of dashing when he does. Durham points out a spot where two bodies were recently discovered.2 “You only find 25 percent of the bodies before the javelinas and the vultures get hold of them. They start to eat, and then you might find one bone over here and another two hundred feet over there.”
Right on cue, a pack of javelinas waddle out from the brush. Pepper-black and prickly, they resemble wild pigs with sizable tusks. They have a reputation for meanness.
Horseshoeing at the live oak, we start heading back to the gate. After a time, a Border Patrol SUV appears in the rearview mirror. Durham pulls over and rolls down the window.
“We got the bodies,” an agent announces.
“They were dead?” Durham asks, surprised.
“No, we got the subjects,” the agent corrects himself. “We got eight, but four or five scattered by the creek.”
“Shit, they’ll probably be coming by my house next,” Durham says. With a sigh, he rolls up the window and taps the accelerator. He wishes the Border Patrol would shut down that Falfurrias checkpoint altogether and beef up security at the border so more immigrants would get caught the first time around. That way, whoever made it through could just hop on 281 and cruise on into Houston, waving at Brooks County through the rearview mirror. Durham thinks immigration is too grave a problem to handle locally. “The piglets have outnumbered the teats on the old sow around here,” he says.
THE FIRST HOUR PASSED QUICKLY. She believed the coyotes. Houston was just a few miles away. The sun prickled her skin and the burrs ripped her jeans, but her energy was ample. She clutched her bottle of water, and every now and then she sipped from it.
At some point in the hike, her group probably met up with another coyote and his travelers. She likely felt grateful for the additional company—until someone collapsed. Maybe he was older; maybe she had a bum knee or heart condition. Whatever the case, their coyote probably made a face and said We’re already late and Do you think you can manage? The traveler gasped yes but could barely hobble. The coyote made a show of placing a call on his cell phone. A van is coming for you, he said, so stay right here. The rest of you, come with us.
She exchanged glances with the other travelers. How could they know for certain? It seemed they should wait, to be sure. It wasn’t right, abandoning someone in the brush with only half a jug of water.
And yet, the future of their families depended on whether or not they made it to Houston—and Houston was just a few miles away.
When the coyotes turned to walk deeper into the brush, she followed close behind.
THE GUATEMALAN CONSULATE OF MCALLEN, Texas, has no distinguishing features, neither a flag nor a sign, and hardly any windows. Unlike the Mexican Consulate a few blocks over, which is so overpopulated that mothers and children spill into the street, this beige brick box seems vacant. But when I knock upon its mirrored door, a sharp-dressed man whisks me inside to the office of Consul Alba Caceres. In her early thirties, she wears a silky floral blouse and dangly earrings. Smiling warmly, she invites me to sit. When I say that I am researching immigrant deaths in Brooks County, she shakes her head slowly, as if remembering each one by name.
“That’s the biggest mortuary in the United States,” she says, adding that the remains of forty-seven Guatemalans were recovered there in 2012. That’s why they decided to open this consulate in November 2011 in the first place: so many were dying in South Texas, they could hardly keep track of them all from Houston. They processed 1,393 cases of missing persons during their first eleven months of operation through this one office alone. Their biggest obstacle isn’t logistics or resources but rather gaining the trust of the families they serve.
“Say someone dies and goes to the mortuary,” Caceres says, sliding her hands across the top of her desk as if to simulate a battlefield. “The coyote will still make the family believe he is still alive. The coyote will call and say he needs money for medical attention. We try to fight the situation, we call the family and try to explain it to them, but then the coyote will call and say we are lying. The families need to believe their relative is still alive, and so they do. They believe the coyote.”
Consider what happened two months ago. A rancher found the body of a Guatemalan man, and as soon as he was identified, the consulate called the family to deliver the news. Yet two days later, the family wired $3,000 to his coyote, who had convinced them that their father/husband/son wasn’t dead but injured and accruing medical expenses that needed payment.
When I ask how anyone could trust a coyote over a consul, Caceres points out that families tend to know the first coyote their relative hires. He is usually not only a community member but also one “with status,” meaning a nice home and a large truck. Yet this coyote escorts his clients only across the Guatemalan border. From there, they are transferred to someone else to guide them across Mexico and over the U.S. border, to a third to sidestep the checkpoint in Falfurrias and continue on to Houston, and to a fourth to transport them to their final destination. With so many people in multiple nations, it is easy for the original coyote to shru
g off responsibility when something goes wrong.
When it comes to finances, however, the coyote is more fastidious. The full transaction for Guatemalans costs $5,000 a head, plus a 9 percent interest rate every month, Caceres says. Many take out loans against their property to raise the funds, meaning their families could go homeless if they don’t make it to the United States. And coyotes generally grant travelers only two chances. With stakes that high, you’d think only the very reckless or the very desperate would try it, yet through this single consulate, some 12,000 Guatemalans were apprehended, processed, and sent back home last year.
“The problem is, they know someone from their same town who came to the U.S. for one year, and they made enough to buy a house and a car all in one year. They know they would need to work twelve years in Guatemala to have those same things. So Houston is like Israel. It is the promised land,” Caceres says, her large brown eyes growing moist.
She can relate to this sentiment because she was once an undocumented worker herself, in Spain. Her boss there was so lecherous, she quit—then realized how privileged she was to do so. Her family back home was politically connected and financially solvent; no one needed her income for survival. She started working for the consulate with hopes of helping those less fortunate. Yet the tragedies she witnesses here daily—the frantic cell phone calls fielded all hours of the day and night, the corpses to process, the mothers to console—eventually become so devastating, she will resign from her post in 2014.
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