On the other hand, it's not a great treaty. Ron got the Redskis to sit down and talk butterball by being tough and filling Europe with cruise missiles and so forth. Maybe he should have been really tough and nuked Leningrad. The Soviets might have signed away the whole ranch if he'd done that. Also, the commies are the only people on earth who think Star Wars will work. If they're that gullible, maybe we should have held the summit at Atlantic City and let them lose all their missiles playing Keno.
Oh well, it's not as though either side really needs many warheads. A couple dozen apiece would do the trick. The Russians could have some aimed at Japan, so if we act up they can destroy our economy. We could have some aimed at The Village Voice, so if the Russians misbehave, we can kill a lot of communists.
After the treaty signing many VERY IMPORTANT THINGS happened, all of which I scrupulously followed in every painstaking detail on the giant-screen TV at the Kit Kat Klub. Make that a triple, please. This is another technical term journalists use: "Covering a story from Mahogany Ridge."
Tuesday night, the Gorbachevs had dinner at the White House and Mikhail kissed Van Cliburn a lot. Wednesday, Gorby met with congressional leaders and discussed whether the Soviet Union is an Evil Empire or just like the United States or both. Later that day The Gorb met with a delegation of American intellectuals, led by John Denver. Raisa went to tea with Nancy. If body language is anything to go by, they got along like two cats in a sack. Raisa had to sit through the whole Just Say No routine but managed to resist the temptation to shove the First Lady's face into a plate of cucumber sandwiches.
On Thursday Gorb-O breakfasted with George Bush, but George just spent the whole meal buried in The Wall Street Journal, grumbling about bond prices. Barbara says that's the way he always is in the morning.
And, of course, Ronny and Splotch had a whole bunch more meetings, which seems to make everyone feel warm all over. I can't think why. The last time an old, sick, addled American president (Roosevelt) sat down with a Soviet leader who'd had great press ("Uncle" Joe Stalin), half of Europe was given away.
Mexican Border Idyll
OCTOBER 1986
I just came back from a month on the Mexican border, where I personally captured three illegal aliens. This saved the United States a lot of money in welfare, social services and unemployment benefits. Therefore, each of you owes me 50¢. Unless, of course, you happen to be illegal aliens, in which case you owe me a kick in the ass. Thoughtful-type readers-the kind who worry about the morality of the whole issue-may be confused about whether to send me money or wring my neck. I'm confused myself. A month on the border would confuse anybody.
It was in Laredo that I captured my aliens. I didn't mean to capture anybody. I just got over-excited, temporarily forgot I was a journalist and started acting like a law-abiding citizen.
I was riding around town with a very affable young border patrol agent named Howard Adams. His job for the evening was to keep "illegals' from hopping the midnight freight to San Antonio. A radio call came in saying three aliens had been spotted slipping into an equipment pen next to the rail yard.
The pen was a link-fenced half-acre filled with couplers, wheel trucks and other giant, rusty train junk. The moment we pulled through the gate, two young men hopped out of the scrap iron. Adams ran them down while I trotted after him, trying to take notes, get my flashlight to work and not bark my shins on things. The illegals got as far as the fence, examined its height, shrugged and surrendered.
Adams locked these two in the car and went looking for the third. I followed him as he ducked behind a derelict semi-trailer. He shined his flashlight underneath and said something in Spanish. There was a wiggling in the gloom. A rather plump adolescent had managed to squeeze himself into the trailer suspension, into a six-inch gap between the axle and bed. He squeezed himself out, shrugged, and Adams marched him to the car. I peered underneath, jiggling my defective Everready, trying to see how somebody could fit in that miniscule space. Somebody could, I guess, and with room to spare, because when the light finally came on, there was another somebody staring at me. He had pushed himself even further back above the axle.
"Howard!" I shouted. "I found one more. Is there something that I'm, like, supposed to say to him?"
"Say, `Vamos!"' yelled Howard.
"Uh, vamos," I said. The fellow crawled out and stood next to me, shrugging a great deal.
I looked back under the trailer to see how in the hell two people could possibly fit in that space and shit, there was a third guy as squashed as filet of sole. I was beginning to feel like the circus cop arresting all the clowns in the miniature taxicab. "Come on, vamos yourself," I said, and when he did, there was yet another goddamned kid packed in behind him. I had them all shrugging in my flashlight beam by the time Adams got back to the trailer.
"Me compadre es periodista," (My friend is a journalist) said Adams. The illegals nodded their approval. That they'd been busted by somebody with no power to do so and no business doing it and who, on second thought, wished he hadn't, seemed to bother nobody but me. One of the Mexicans said something, and Adams translated. "This is the eleventh time he's been caught in two weeks."
Illegal-alien traffic is so heavy at Laredo that there's no time to take people back to the border one by one. A school bus with chicken wire over the windows is parked by the freight yard until it's full. It made three trips to the border that night, by no means a record.
There was a lot of singing and laughing on the bus. The prisoners leaned against the chicken wire and traded jokes in Spanish with the border patrol agents. I talked to one of the women agents. "They're going up to get construction jobs in San Antonio, Dallas and Houston," she said. "Mostly they're young men. They'll send for their families later. We see a few women and children through here, and we worry about them because the trains are so dangerous. There was one family with two beautiful little girls. We caught them three times.
"We haven't seen them for a while," she added with a slightly wistful tone. "I guess they finally got through."
Adams took me to the freight yard where the train was being made up. It was terrifying in there. Switch engines were moving the stock around in the dark, and the sidings were so close together there was only a shoulder's width between the rumbling boxcars. Shapes and shadows appeared in our flashlight beams as illegals darted through the crashing machinery. I saw one roll himself across the rail bed between moving wheels, trying to get out of our way.
At the depot a railroad detective showed me photographs. In one picture a man, about twenty, had been cut into five distinct pieces-two legs, a head, a torso, one arm. His eyes were open. He died so quickly there wasn't much blood. "It happens two or three times a week," said the detective. "Sometimes in the yard and sometimes out on the line. The wets are all afraid of snakes. They sleep on the ties because they think snakes can't get between the rails."
When the train was ready to pull out, we went to the last switch onto the main track. As the locomotive moved through, dozens of Mexicans dashed out of the shrubbery and tried to grab hold of the gondolas and flat cars. Most of them fell back. The train was moving too fast. The illegals already on board whistled and waved. When the train was gone, Adams and the other agents rounded up the stragglers. One illegal said, "Will you drive around a little and look for my friend. He'll need a ride to the border."
"Oh, for chrissakes," said Adams and began scouring the neighborhood.
The boundary between Mexico and the United States is two thousand miles long with few natural barriers. It's just an imaginary map doodle through a bunch of scrub. There isn't even a linguistic gulf since the majority of people on both sides speak Spanish. But this ill-patrolled and undefended frontier is the one place on earth where a fully developed nation collides head-on with the filth and chaos of the Third World.
The burghers of northern Europe have Italys, Greeces and Yugoslavias between them and true want. The Japanese are a sea away from the needy Filipinos and Ch
inese. Even Russia has its own dirtball provinces of Kazakhstan and Uzbek to give it some distance from the hordes of Asia. But in North America the poor and benighted stand with noses pressed against the candy-store window, from the yacht basins of San Diego to the yahoo party beaches of South Padre Island.
A walkabout on the border raises all the big, ugly, stupid questions of the twentieth century: What makes a Mexico a Mexico? What makes a United States a United States? And what the hell are we supposed to do about it?
The Mexicans have another question: Why stay where money isn't when you can go where money is? A question they answer with their feet. And the U.S. Border Patrol doesn't have much of an answer to that. Manolo Ortiz, PR chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Southern Regional Office, told me that in 1968 the Border Patrol nabbed 128,000 people trying to sneak into the U.S. In 1984 it was one million. And last year's total was almost twice that. Ninety-seven percent of these folks are Mexican, and, though two million get caught, between two and four million don't. That means at least a couple Clevelands worth of Mexican citizens gate-crashed our country last year.
"We only have 3,200 agents in the entire Border Patrol," Ortiz said. "All it amounts to, really, is controlled illegal entry."
An agent in Ortiz's office put it this way: "We could stand on the border with linked arms, and they'd still get across."
Ortiz took me to meet the INS Southern Regional Commissioner, Stephen H. Martin. Martin is a prominent businessman from Louisiana, active in Republican politics, but not too full of gas for a federal appointee. "Our mandate," said Martin, letting a little of that gas out, "is to protect the border and to protect all the people along the border regardless of nationality."
Ortiz, who had a better sense of humor, said, "There's a fence on the international boundary in El Paso. It's called the `Tortilla Curtain.' Aliens were cutting themselves going through the holes in it. So the government built a flimsier fence."
"What causes all this illegal immigration?" I asked. Here was a real stupid question, but it's a stupid world.
"Economics," said Martin, looking as if he'd been asked a real stupid question.
"Okay, then, why is Mexico so poor?"
For the next month I asked everybody on both sides of the border this question. The only answer I got that made any sense was from an El Paso bartender. He said, "You know, this old Texas boy and this Mexican were having an argument, and the Texan says to the Mexican, `How come you-all are always mad at us and blaming America for everything and so on?' And the Mexican says, `You stole half our country. And not only that, Senor, you stole the half with all the paved roads."'
There are a lot of other stupid questions that I asked, too. In McAllen, Texas, I asked Silvestre Reyes, chief of the Border Patrol division that covers the boot toe of Texas, if we should use the military to seal the border.
"The border is dangerous enough, without bringing a war-time mentality to it," he said and made a face. "That's an obvious conflict in philosophy to use our military against a peaceful ally."
In San Antonio I asked Deputy Southern Regional District Dirctor John A. Abriel what would happen if we did seal the border.
"Some congressmen have said if the border was sealed off we'd get a revolution in Mexico," he said. Abriel looked tired and harried. He looked like a man facing a question so big and so stupid that it might need a big, stupid answer.
"But maybe," he said, "sealing the border would give Mexico impetus to reform."
"Is the United States," I said, "using its border as some kind of political safety valve for Mexico or something?"
"I wouldn't throw that theory down the drain," said Abriel. "I have a similar gut feeling." And he gave me another load of horrible wetback statistics.
"Look," said Abriel, "illegal immigration is not malum en se, not evil in itself. We sympathize with the illegals. We empathize. But the bottom line is the taxpayers expect protection, expect enforcement of the immigration act. I think it was President Taft who once met with an old Indian chief and asked the chief if he had any words of wisdom for the president of the United States. The chief said, `Watch your immigration laws."'
In McAllen I went out on night tour with two supervisory patrol agents, Travis Johnson and Benny Greenfield.
Both were Texans in their forties.
Greenfield was a tall, laconic, cowboyish man who dipped snuff as most agents do, lest a cigarette give them away on stakeout. Johnson was shorter and very kindly mannered, with a chuckle that might be called giggling in a man with less dignity and no gun.
We drove to a low dyke near the Rio Grande, overlooking half a mile of fallow bottom land. There are electronic sensors planted along the U.S. bank of the river, old Vietnam War equipment, the same sensors that were used to stop traffic across the DMZ and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. And you remember how well that worked.
The sensors are monitored in the sector HQ, where an operator had radioed Johnson and Greenfield. There had been two "hits below the dyke. Greenfield had a pair of binoculars, and Johnson was trying out an experimental infrared scope that made him look like he was wearing a nineteen-inch television around his neck. "Most of the illegals are good fellows," said Johnson. "You'll see, we kid around with them." Although they didn't much, that I saw.
The agents scanned the darkness until Greenfield said, "Yep." Then Johnson handed me the infrared scope.
It showed heat as light so that the warm soil and grass glowed faintly. Coming through this luminescent hay were two brilliant, featureless silhouettes, looking like aliens indeed, like Close Encounter of the Third Kind aliens. It made me wonder, for a moment, how many nine-eyed refugee-oids from collapsing-white-dwarfstellar systems are out there in the Milky Way.
"They'll head for the brush," said Greenfield. To our left, the front slope of the dyke was covered with trees and undergrowth. Johnson went down to the foot of the levee, and Greenfield and I walked along the top and lay down in the grass at the edge of the shrubbery. A few minutes later, we could hear the illegals crashing through the sticks and leaves.
Immigration may be a moral quandary. But, at the moment, it was lots of fun too. I almost forgot the thumb-sized mosquitoes and the fact that I'd plopped down in what seemed to be a patch of fishhook plants. The noise came directly at us. It sounded as though the illegals would step out of the bushes onto Greenfield's head. And the first one almost did. Greenfield let him walk between us so that we were, the three of us, as close together as people in a cashmachine line. As the second illegal came out of the woods, Greenfield jumped up.
The second man did a back dive into the greenery. But his friend seemed too startled to move. Greenfield took him by the arm, and the fellow sighed and-shrugged.-
When the first illegal had been locked in the car, we went through the strip of brush, just like you do to flush grouse. Greenfield pushed up the middle. I walked along the top of the dyke. And Johnson took the edge of the field. It was a moonless night, and cattle were grazing everywhere. I walked into a cow and scared the socks off myself. Meanwhile, the second illegal disappeared, a "got-away" as they're called.
We went to another crossing point, which Johnson said was a local favorite. There was a long, sandy road running down to the river between sugarcane fields. The infrared scope picked out two tiny bright dots, and we hid in the cane until an old man and a boy walked by. Greenfield and Johnson grabbed each by an elbow. Neither protested. They shrugged as they were patted-down for weapons and put in the backseat cage with their countryman.
These three desperados had been caught red-handed. Their crime? Looking for work. If they'd pulled the caper off, they would have scored less than minimum wages in conditions not fit for farm animals. But they'd been nabbed. Now they'd have to face the music. Their punishment? Greenfield and Johnson would take them to the nearest international bridge and let them go home.
"What do you do if they run away?" I asked Greenfield.
"I chase them."
"I let them go."
"You don't shoot them?"
Greenfield looked shocked. "What for? They're trying to make a living. They're not criminals." He thought that over. "They're just breaking the law."
The next day I drove an hour and a half north to Falfurnias, with assistant chief patrol agent Juan A. Garcia, to look at a highway checkpoint. We pulled over a couple miles short at a rest stop. "If somebody's carrying illegals," said Garcia, "they'll stop here and make them walk around the checkpoint to be picked up on the other side. It's a long walk."
We went over to the fence behind the rest stop to "cut sign," as the Border Patrol calls tracking. The land was dry, baked scrub, hot and flat as a griddle for fifty miles in every direction. "That business about Mexicans being close to the land and never getting lost and being able to withstand thirst and heat forever is nonsense," said Garcia, whose own parents had come over when nobody minded.
There were plenty of footprints at the fence, mostly cheap men's sneakers. But mixed with these were fresh prints from a woman's high-heeled shoes and from a small child's sandals. We followed the tracks a hundred yards into the scrub. Those high heels must have pinched like a thumb in a car door. And how far did the kid get before it started to bawl? "We'll check for them at the drag," said Garcia.
The drag looked like a wide dirt road crossing the highway between the rest stop and checkpoint. But it was raked daily so that any tracks across it would show. We drove for two miles along the drag without any sign of the little sandals or the high-heeled shoes. "They've gone wide into the brush," said Garcia. "Sometimes we spot them because of the vultures."
At the checkpoint the patrol agents had just caught a young man, an illegal, with four pounds of marijuana in his pickup. They opened the package for me, and I sniffed it. It was really fortytoke, am-I-high-yet? Tampico ditch weed. I'll bet I wasn't the only person in the room who felt like a dick nodding over the gravity of this crime. The dope had been hidden in a hole cut through the floorboard behind the pickup's seat. A section of sheet metal had been carefully sawed out and put back in place with auto-body filler. Then it had been sanded, spray-painted and covered with carpet. The Border Patrol agents were mystified about why anyone would go to so much trouble over four pounds of stems and seeds.
Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This? Page 25
