El Sombra figured El Indio was dead. El Ruso said he was imprisoned, not in the United States but in Mexico, which, in his opinion, was much worse. So Negro tracked down the police officer who’d provided protection and escorts for the operation from the lookout at Summit Canyon. “El Indio disappeared like magic,” the officer said. “Everything ended without us knowing anything about his whereabouts, where he was headed, or if something had happened to him. Maybe he is in Paris—a man with money is appreciated everywhere.”
I was pretty certain of El Negro’s declaration on the day we met, the day I first heard the name El Indio: “You are never going to find that person.”
Given the discrepancies in the accounts of their final days, it is interesting to note that the polleros seemed to settle with finality, as a group, on a single number: seven thousand. Independently, each of them said that they crossed seven thousand cyclists beyond the most enforced and technologically advanced five miles of a two-thousand-mile border—that they then dumped the bikes and delivered the people to their destinations.
Accurate migration numbers are so difficult to come by that Customs and Border Protection is unable to supply Congress with the real numbers that might put their successes or failures into context. A simple reason for this is that successful crossings go uncounted and, most often, undetected. Many in Congress have demanded a border security plan that would stop 90 percent of all illegal entries. The obvious question is: 90 percent of what? It’s just not possible to estimate a percentage of an unknowable number. The bicycles, however, left an interesting tally. A bike cannot pedal itself. Presumably, each abandoned bicycle represented one or more migrants. After talking to the residents of the Tijuana River Valley, I could account for roughly half the volume of bikes that El Indio’s polleros claim to have shepherded across.
Yet, I arrived at the border much too late in the game. Abandoned bikes had been wheeling back into America’s streets, uncounted, in every imaginable fashion for two years. It is more than likely that copycats picked up the trade, too. There is also anecdotal evidence that bikes were collected from the valley floor and sent back to Tijuana and returned with a new migrant on top.
If the bicycle polleros’ claim is true, however, at $4,500 per migrant—in Tijuana, an average sum for the time—El Indio’s gang pulled in over thirty-one million tax-free dollars in under three years. Everybody along the chain was paid: the customs agent (who bought a Lincoln Navigator), the police (who were soon swept up in Tijuana’s most violent period ever), the American police departments that sold the bikes, the truck drivers, bike mechanics, recruiters, checadores, comunicadores, ganchos, guías, and levantons. In every operation, el coyote received the largest chunk. Which would suggest that a child whose parents left him with an elderly grandfather in an impoverished village, who attended school part-time to the seventh grade, came to the border, lost everything dear to him, and became a millionaire.
Then, he vanished.
Around about April, I finally accepted something I’d long suspected in Dan Watman. It occurred in the obvious, sudden way one discovers that the Easter Bunny isn’t real. It was that Watman possessed almost no ability to lie. Moreover, he was terrible at withholding information of any kind. At first I thought he’d made a philosophical stand related to his activism. Watman’s group was called Border Encuentro—border meeting—and its primary purpose was to get people talking across the boundary. To show any tendency to fabricate, I assumed, ran counter to his faith in complete and open dialogue. The problem with this was that Watman worked on a dangerous border, and communicated with everyone from petty criminals and smugglers to enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. All of these people lied to Watman. Be it inability or moral stance, his transparency placed him on a lonely one-way street.
There was, however, one curious instance in which Watman withheld information—for a little while at least. He lived in Tijuana and crossed the border daily to teach Spanish at a law college in San Diego and to work with other activists. But because he had a punk streak in him, and just didn’t care for the whole idea of a militarized wall separating our sister cities, one day, he presented himself to customs agents at the end of the long line to cross the border and refused to produce documentation, his identity, or any citizenship status. To questions, he replied, simply, “I don’t want to say.”
The customs agent said, “Don’t give me any drama.” This caused a stalemate. He was sent to “secondary.” His obvious American accent and Caucasian looks would have created a dilemma for the agents. They couldn’t just kick him back to Mexico because he could be a terrorist. They couldn’t let him pass without documentation. So the agents took Watman to a back room and interrogated him. His demeanor exacerbated the situation; he was committed but never heated. He answered their questions with a simple, “I don’t want to say.”
After a number of hours, the lead agent admitted that, well, despite this being the most voluminous land crossing in the world, Watman had presented them an entirely novel problem. “I have never seen this before,” said the agent. Honored, Watman sought to take credit and soon offered up his name and citizenship. So, with better things to do, Customs and Border Protection allowed Watman into the United States despite his deliberate lack of documentation. In his retelling of the story, the strongest element I took from it was Watman’s great relief in unburdening himself of the information he’d held for eight hours, and his pride in never having actually lied to the agents.
El Negro’s stance on fabrication and withholding, however, was quite a bit more nuanced and artful. From the start, he withheld information from me like a master. I was the dunce before a shell game. But there was more. For example, on a few occasions he’d relayed the story of his first crossing to the United States. It was standard: in the 1980s he walked across at Otay with a close friend from his home village who had made the trip before. One day, however, El Negro told me about a rare return to Michoacán he’d made ten years later. As soon as he struck the dusty streets of the village, he ran into his original crossing partner, which was a godsend. Despite their tight bond, life in the United States had separated them over the decade. So El Negro suggested they grab a couple of beers in the village cantina before he sought out his mother’s house. The friend was agreeable, and rather than two, the pair downed several beers, talking all the while about their lives and adventures in el Norte. Finally, El Negro said he really must complete the trip to his mother’s house, and the men parted with hearty hugs and a vague plan to meet again in the future. When El Negro reached home, he found his sisters and his mother beside themselves. “Where have you been?” they asked. “We heard you were in town, but you never arrived. We thought something terrible had happened to you.”
“Oh no, nothing terrible at all,” said El Negro. “I ran into Eduardo, and we haven’t seen each other in years. And he’s such an old friend, we drank a few together. I’m sorry I’m late. But what a time we had catching up.”
El Negro’s family looked at each other; they looked at him. The mother said, “Mijo, Eduardo has been dead for two years now. He’s buried over there in the cemetery.”
El Negro told me this story as if it were something that had happened during his shift at the bathrooms. He could both share in my disbelief—because it was fantastic—and confirm the tale as a truth. It was as real as a thing—as thin and gauzy as the sheets of toilet paper he handed to his customers, and as essential to everyday life as well.
It wasn’t the first incident that gave me pause. El Negro was no longer just a source, he was a research assistant. He tended to drop weight rather noticeably from time to time—because he was so poor, he couldn’t always buy food. I began to hand him cash here and there, enough to eat, anyway. I needed to keep El Negro alive. But this changed the status of our relationship. As long as I was paying him, the incentive was only to become more elaborate, more wicked, and to stretch the search to the grave. I considere
d the characters he interviewed—each ingeniously eccentric, they popped up and disappeared like a game of Whac-A-Mole. I’d seen some of the peripheral characters with my own eyes and confirmed the existence of others; but still, the one figure who mattered most—El Indio—remained a mystery. And because of this, I swam in a still pool of doubt. I began to suspect many conflicting things: that El Negro himself was the bicycle coyote, or a version of him. Or that El Negro had made the whole thing up, or a large portion of it anyway. Along the border, a story that is not worth embellishing just isn’t worth telling. Was it possible that El Indio represented something like the ghost of El Negro’s friend in Michoacán—both nonexistent and essential to the experience of migration as well?
The bowl-cut pollero I encountered in front of the bathrooms on my first visit to Playas had confirmed the moniker El Indio as belonging to the famous bicycle coyote. And then, without knowing me, or my purpose for being there, he and the bathroom worker had discussed this person with a sort of regard that reminded me of the way local ballers might mention a big leaguer who’d dropped by the neighborhood court one day.
Mateo, the man who lived adjacent to the bicycle gang’s favored little canyon, independently confirmed that trucks carried bikes into the declivity in the same place and manner that El Negro described, aligning the period of time the gang lasted and the numbers of crossers as well. He identified the policeman El Gordito, who would later appear in El Negro’s interviews, but Mateo would not even mutter the nickname of the figure who ran the operation almost on his doorstep.
With a scholarly approach, Oscar Romo studied the cycle excursions mounted from Los Laureles Canyon, the structure of the polleros’ organization, and the volume of their clientele, but he was not privy to the main actors’ identities—only what he saw as the fun and resourcefulness of the idea.
That each of the ranches along Monument Road, as well as the state and county parks, received a share of the abandoned bikes suggested the breadth and diversity of the coyote’s tactics. But really, the cycles themselves told so much more. They were so varied—from style to price point to national origin, with their police auction stickers, city registration labels, and shop emblems—that few who came into contact with them believed that the bikes had sprung forth, with any consistency, from Tijuana’s streets—these were American bikes.
Although Customs and Border Protection has been derided as one of the most opaque and obfuscating American bureaucracies (one investigator told me she took a “tongue lashing” for even speaking to me), border communities eventually become the agents’ homes. I talked to friends of friends. I met with willing yet anonymous agents to discuss both smuggling and enforcement tactics and to put the screws to the plausibility of this bicycle pollero’s claims. One of these continued to send cell photos of migrant bikes discovered long after El Indio was said to have retired. Environmental activists in the valley, likewise, sent photos of bikes obviously abandoned by migrants as late as 2014.
I’d heard the term garantizado some time before I came across the case of the Villarreal brothers. “Guaranteed,” in this sense, meant that illegal migrants traveled under the ironclad protection of immigration officials. This mind-twisting reality only became clear once the Villarreals—Fidel and Raul, former Border Patrol agents who fled in the face of an internal investigation—were repatriated from Mexico and placed before a federal court. They had been esteemed professionals—one had been a spokesman for the agency—and they had been crossing migrants in Border Patrol vehicles while on the job. The price per migrant was $12,000.
I attended the federal trial to confirm the tactics of both Border Patrol and smuggling operations. The case was seen as a black eye to Customs and Border Protection, even at a time when hundreds of agents had been indicted and convicted of corruption since a 2004 surge in new hires. And the case was a rare airing of the agency’s dirty laundry. I’ll never forget a levantón prosecutors brought to the stand. He was a young, squirrelly Mexican American who I swear could have been in my high school algebra class. He was currently serving time on a drug conviction and was led into the court in cuffs. Until that point, the defense had been focusing on every detail of the agency’s kilo trucks, which the Villarreals sometimes drove—basically, a full-sized truck with a metal camper that served as a jail cell mounted in the bed. But on the stand, this levantón began to describe a planned meeting at Smuggler’s Gulch—a pickup of nineteen migrants—and he said that he’d met one of the Villarreals, who was driving a Border Patrol jeep.
Spotting an obvious hole in the getaway driver’s story, a defense attorney immediately interrupted the testimony. All along they had been talking about kilo trucks with the ability to transport large groups. Nobody had yet mentioned a jeep. And how was it possible that nineteen people could be transported in a jeep?
The courtroom hushed. It looked like the levantón’s credibility was about to crumble. This was when he leaned into the microphone and, with the confidence of an ironworker talking iron, said, “Sir, I happen to know from experience that you can fit nineteen people into a jeep.”
He knew, and he knew it with such a steely certainty that, suddenly, we all knew that you could fit nineteen human beings into a bucket-seat jeep. And the entire courtroom erupted in laughter.
Much later, I found myself waiting in the greenroom of our local public radio station. I was there to discuss an article I’d written. A serious-looking man with a shaved head and a navy-blue jacket entered the room. He wore a small Border Patrol pin on his lapel. This was Shawn Moran, a spokesman for the Border Patrol agents’ union, and he was there to discuss the wave of Central American children who were crossing the border in the summer of 2014. We struck up a conversation about the cunning and curious techniques of smugglers, a favorite topic of mine and of many agents. Then Moran happened to mention that, until recently, he’d been stationed in Imperial Beach, a stint that had lasted well over a decade.
Oh, I said, so he must know all about the abandoned bikes.
Know about them? He’d pursued their riders on several occasions. And Moran vividly recalled a chase that had occurred one Christmas Eve a few years back.
“How many bikes would you say were abandoned?” I asked.
“Hundreds.”
“I know a rancher who said he collected a thousand in six months,” I said.
“I believe that,” he said.
Then Moran was whisked away to opine on an even more daunting crossing—occurring at that moment—undertaken by tens of thousands of children with no wheels at all.
From my own investigations, I could confirm the what, where, when, and how. But only El Negro’s interviews elucidated the who and why.
I had many doubts. But then I would sift through the cache of interviews again. I thought: if this grade-school-educated Playas de Tijuana bathroom worker who lived in a fake ship could create these characters and this story from thin air—all the while nailing the cadence, vocabularies, dispositions, personal histories, and knowledge sets of a cast of desperados who had convened at the border from all over Mexico and the United States, situating their testimonies in a time frame and geography corresponding to the observations of my outside witnesses—then the world had let an awesome talent slip past on a river of poverty, because El Negro was, if not an honest investigator, a master storyteller.
I confessed my concern to Dan Watman. Because we’d become friends, I assumed that Watman and I could argue the finer points of reality versus illusion in confidence. In effect, I suspended my earlier assessment of Watman as someone who was unable to lie or withhold information. I asked him if he thought El Negro could be inventing part, or all, of Indio’s story. Watman said only, “Hmm, I don’t know.” And sure enough, on next meeting El Negro in the binational garden, Watman spilled his guts about my doubt, my disbelief.
El Negro and I had been working together for nearly three years. His early and increasing skill at investigation and interviewing nurtured in him a
pride that lifted his posture, even. It offered an identity other than deportee, pauper, indigente sheared from his family and life’s path. In many ways, that journalistic skill set was his most tangible possession, and in my presence he had openly questioned why he hadn’t discovered this gift until so late in life. He’d told me he’d pondered that slight of fate, until one day he realized that, “No, this thing didn’t come too late, but just in time.”
Understandably, Dan’s revelation of my doubt caused a falling-out between my research assistant and me. And because he didn’t own a telephone, lived in another country, and tended to disappear, the break was all the more severe.
“You won’t believe how we crossed,” said a young woman sitting in a shack where she and a friend had recently found themselves guests. El Negro supposed she was about twenty-four years old. She’d offered the statement as a challenge. And having issued it, she bunched up her soft lips, threw her shoulders back, looked at her girlfriend, and awaited a response.
In combing the streets of Tijuana, working his contacts, and ferreting out the story, El Negro truly had found his passion. His first interviews were good, he felt, but when he read them beginning to end on cold nights aboard the ship, he really saw the growth in each subsequent piece. And in that summer’s vacuous heat, when El Negro and I believed we’d discovered everything we could concerning the tale of a ghost coyote called the Indian, El Negro decided to write his own book—an account of Tijuana’s deported.
To do this, he employed the same techniques he’d developed in our search for El Indio. Deportation stories were a dime a dozen. He wanted the good ones. As we talked through the border fence one day, me on one side and El Negro on the other, he said, “A story is like a machine: you need all the parts for it to work right.” And in speaking to a woman in the Zona Norte, he learned of two girls residing in el Cañón de los Laureles—they’d both crossed and were deported together. El Negro had documented the stories of several men, and he thought the perspective of two women might deepen his piece. He mostly hoped their story had all the parts.
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