At the hospital, somebody called the Mexican consul, Miguel Escobar Valdez, in his office in Douglas. Now he is standing in the doorway to this first-floor room at Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, gathering himself for the sounds coming down the hall.
The girl, Ana-Laura, walks alongside the doctor. She is short and very dark. Her eyes are dry and fixed straight ahead. She has on a T-shirt and jeans. The tennis shoes are caked with mud.
The consul is going to say something to her as she passes, but he does not. I know this one in my heart, he tells himself. She will do this her way.
Ana-Laura stands in front of the brother, whose legs dangle from the examining table.
“Mama murio,” she tells the little face.
Escobar sees that the boy doesn’t understand.
“Mama murio,” Ana-Laura tells the boy again.
He shows nothing.
She leans to him and whispers.
The boy moves just this little bit.
She leans forward again and whispers.
Does he nod?
I am not about to get near her, Escobar tells himself. The nurse and doctor keep their distance. They understand that these are sacred murmurings, not for their ears.
The girl steps back and looks steadily and solemnly at Escobar.
She has told her brother that the mother is dead. Now what would you have me do?
She says to the brother, “Ven para aca.” Come over here.
He slides off the table and stands next to her. She walks over to Escobar. The boy is with her. The boy looks at her, expecting a decision from her. Now she is the mother.
Escobar asks her where she is from and for the names of her relatives, and the girl tells him that he must call her aunt in her hometown. The girl has the phone number memorized.
The nurses show them a table of food in another room. The boy sits down and eats. The girl wants only iced tea and then drinks only some of it.
In the town where they come from, people collected money to send the uncle to Douglas. The consulate paid for the mortuary dressing of the mother, and she is now being shipped home. The uncle and two children go across the border to the shabby bus station at Agua Pietra for the long ride to Hermosillo, and a plane to Mexico City and home.
Escobar stands at the bus as the family gets on. He pats the boy. Now the eleven-year-old girl, with the demeanor of a diplomat, steps up to him and shakes hands. She thanks him for their new tennis shoes.
Escobar throws his arms around the girl and hugs her. When he lets her go, he is crying.
She is not. Her eleven-year-old face does not change. She gets on the bus.
In Douglas, at the last alley that runs off the last yards of the American side of the Pan-American Highway, there is a tan picket fence, without barbed wire at the top, that separates the last houses of Douglas and the first of Agua Prieta, Sonora. Two kids in T-shirts, twelve years old maybe, climb the fence easily on the Mexican side and then climb down into the first alley of America.
Suddenly a white immigration jeep pulls up, and a woman agent gets out and starts walking purposefully toward the kids, who now are the heart and soul of the danger to America. Illegal Mexican immigrants. Right away, when they see her, they climb the fence back to Mexico.
A second white immigration van pulls up, and another one after that.
There are six officers to answer the call on kids climbing a fence. The female agent, who has caught the case, walks toward the fence.
From the top, one of the kids cackles and gives the woman the arm. One, two, three times. Which is the only reason he went over the fence to begin with.
Now a woman holding a baby walks from a house on the American side and goes up to the fence. A man comes out of the last house on the Mexican side. He stands at the fence and the two talk through the pickets for some time.
Our country spends billions for protection from these most dangerous enemy acts.
CHAPTER EIGHT
At the heaviest center for border commerce in the country, the narrow river crossing from Nuevo Laredo in Mexico to Laredo in Texas, customs agents estimate trailer trucks account for something like $30 billion in business each year.
Immigration and Border Patrol people in the Laredo area estimate that they catch one of every eleven who scurry across the border illegally.
All those people can barely understand the barbed wire and patrols when they approach American cities in the Southwest. Back in their home villages and towns, they learn in classrooms and at dinner tables that all this land was owned by Mexico, and that the cities and rivers and mountains keep their Spanish names because they are by common law Mexican. The Rio Bravo is the river, the Sierra Madre is the mountains, and the cities are San Diego, Laredo, Nogales, Albuquerque, and El Paso. California once was Mexico. To a traveler from Mexico, these are places that cannot be so far from Mexico; the names tell you that they must be so close that they are merely places that you go to and then return. They are baffled at being hunted at the border by the helicopters and searchlights and jeeps filled with men in uniform with guns. How can you oppose my coming across your line in the sand as I go from Tijuana to San Diego, a place that once was my country and remains that way now by population alone?
The journey to Chicago and New York is the foreign experience for Mexican immigrants. These American cities have far fewer Mexican tones than the Southwest. Much more so in New York, where Mexicans aren’t the dominant Hispanic group and have less history and are at the bottom of the Hispanic staircase, the foreigners of the Hispanics. They are more likely to have prominent Indian features than other Hispanics. When they come to Arizona, they feel they are walking on lands they have owned for centuries.
Still, the Border Patrol had a crackdown called Operation Hold the Line that drove people out to places where nobody with sense would dare go, into the worst of the desert.
Margarita Alvarado, thirty-two, and her brother-in-law, Juan Manuel, nineteen, walked into the plaza at Nuevo Laredo, a couple of short streets from the bridge going over the river to Laredo, Texas. The square has a fountain in the center and benches where common people sit to rest and inspect the air. They are alongside the street royalty, the young men who claim that for cash they can guide you across the river and into the land where money floats through the air.
The streets around the square are lined with open-air drugstores, some of which sell American prescription drugs at the lowest of prices and others proclaiming “Farmacia Express,” meaning all you want of what you want.
Strolling into the square are people in dresses and tight jeans, some of whom might be women. The yellow and white church, Santo Niño, is on one side. Through the open door you can read a great banner hanging inside and advertising La Indulgencia Plenaria del Jubileo 2000. For the anniversary, a plenary indulgence is granted somehow. A plenary indulgence sends you through the gates of heaven as if you actually belonged.
The indulgence is believed in by most everybody, and, because of such things, the Mexicans come north with a faith that seems as deep and strict as that of the Irish.
The interior of the church in Nuevo Laredo is painted gold. In San Matías, which is even poorer and thus spends on worship until there is true pain, the pillars have many decorations of heavy gold in the form of wreaths. The gold goes to the ceiling and across it, and candlelight causes the entire church to seem to burst into small fires.
Now in Nuevo Laredo, Margarita Alvarado walked up the steps to the church, said a prayer, and returned to pay the coyote whatever she had and followed him out of town, into the desert of thorn bushes and, after that, great stretches of sand fire. Apparently they had bought one gallon of water in a store off the square. A gallon weighs nine pounds. The woman would actually need five gallons alone, but she couldn’t carry forty-five pounds. Margarita risked thirst rather than trudge along with the five gallons she needed.
She got through the desert brush, in heat that made her stagger, and then she collapsed a
nd died on the bank of the shallow narrow river.
She was another name on a roster of people who died looking for the Job.
CHAPTER NINE
Until the attack on New York, the United States believed in the word war as a vital part of any effort against the things troubling the country.
Lyndon Johnson had a war on poverty.
There is a war on cancer.
There is a war on illiteracy.
There was Jimmy Carter’s moral equivalent of war on an oil shortage.
And there is the war on drugs.
There is a peace wing to this war. “Just say no,” Nancy Reagan said with a straight face.
“We can get the job done with a helicopter gunship,” promised General Barry McCaffrey when he was the nation’s official drug czar.
However, the word crusade then came into the language and replaced war. All the real Crusades did was kill innocent people who believed in a different faith, but the word has lived on to imply Christian valor.
The dates of the Crusades suddenly are eerie. They were held in 1350. Muhammad appeared on or about 650. Now, 1350 years old, Islam produces terrorists who attack America in a crusade that uses another name, just as Rome sent out its Crusaders in the year 1350.
Now we say there is an antidrug crusade.
We also have an antijaywalking crusade, a crusade against overtime in the Department of Sanitation, and personal political crusades: “I am on a crusade to become the state comptroller!”
The late Senator Paul Cloverdell, a Georgia Republican, and Representative Porter Goss, also a Republican from that state, came up with a bill that would have stopped anybody from doing business with any company that might somehow have some financial ties with a Mexican drug lord. No evidence was required. Just the presence of Mexicans.
“How can we be sure that the Mexican company doesn’t have drug money invested in it?” Cloverdell was asked.
“So many of these Mexican companies,” he sighed. “Well, you take these people coming across the border. How many of them do you think are carrying drugs?”
He thought the answer was just about all.
Yet for those coming from places such as San Matías, none. “Nobody uses drugs here because they don’t have the money to buy them,” Eduardo’s father, Daniel, said one day. “It is not that we are so much better.”
IN THE BRICKYARD in San Matías, Eduardo was shackled with shyness. He could hardly talk to Silvia when he was in the same room with her. Talking to her on the phone might be easier, he thought. At her mother’s store, he played the video machine and after it, offhandedly, he asked how Silvia was. The mother said she had not heard anything from her and that she was worried. All these stories on television about people dying trying to cross. Where was this College Station where she had gone? He had never heard of any jobs there, and that was the only way to determine where he would go. You move to the Job.
Gustavo, who lived behind him and had gone to America earlier, had called several times from Brooklyn and said he had a construction job and that the boss, Ostreicher, could use more workers. The pay was immense: Gustavo said he was making $7 an hour. Seven dollars in one hour! Eduardo carried bricks all day for the equivalent of $5 a day and talked about the money Gustavo was making in America. Hearing this, his father knew that he was about to lose a son. There was a compelling reason. Eduardo and Daniel had started to build a new two-story addition at one end of the courtyard after work, with Eduardo mixing concrete and his father and a couple of relatives digging a foundation, but the money ran out. All these things that go into putting up a building of any size—the lumber, the supports, the ironwork—cost more than they had.
Eduardo began to put money away to pay a coyote who would get him to America. It took eighteen months of saving, but by the spring of 1998 he had enough. He went first to the corner by the store to look for a coyote. Nobody was around. He went two doors from his house and spoke to a neighbor, who knew smugglers. Two days later, the neighbor came into the brickyard and told Eduardo it would cost $1,500 to get him to America. With this much money to be made, Eduardo didn’t have to look for coyotes. They found him. Just walk with the money and the smugglers will go over mountains and through water to follow you so they can lead.
Eduardo’s father had only one thought for him: that liberty is not the country you are in, but the job you have. “If you do not like the job, then you quit and go to another,” he said to Eduardo. “It is your only liberty.”
People like Silvia and Eduardo had no idea of growing or selling drugs. Crossing the border was about the Job. Because of the drugs, however, they had to face new and imaginative obstacles in order to reach minimum-wage jobs in the United States.
Those carrying drugs into the United States are in the business from the start. A fellow at the New York Botanical Garden gave a lecture one day on the cepas of Bolivia—peasants named after cepa ants, which move as a chain. The human cepas carry packs of coca leaves strapped to their backs from one side of a Bolivian mountain to the crest and then down the hill to the lowlands, where it is cooked into a paste for shipping through Mexico to be sold in the United States, where the demand on Wall Street and in nightclubs and, in rock form, in crack cellars keeps the chain going. Cepas coming down the hill in an unbroken line, one sandal after the other, cepas coming down, cepas going back up the mountain, cepas in a chain draped on a hillside covered with brush. And far off, in Detroit and St. Louis and New York, the stockbrokers hold out cash for powder or, in poor neighborhoods, cash for crack.
Marijuana is smoked so widely in the United States that U.S. law enforcement believes that Mexicans must be wholly responsible. In New York, most pot smokers get their pot by an organized system of messengers, second in size only to the network delivering ad copy and publicity releases and large packages of letters and memos and legal briefs. The papers are carried to offices by bike messengers who are generally black. And then on the streets are these neat white young men pedaling away, carrying knapsacks full of white envelopes. The envelopes are filled with pot and are delivered to offices around Manhattan like take-out food.
The messengers are from offices that take the orders by phone. A woman answers usually, and the caller gives his code: “RF for number 7.” As he says this, he can hear the woman typing the number into a computer to verify that the caller is a legitimate customer and not a cop. You get on the list by having a friend call and then the woman gets your name and number and calls you back to make sure you’re not the police. After that, you are on the customer list.
Now, ordering pot by phone, you tell the woman what you want. One envelope. They deliver from 2 P.M. to 9 P.M. You have to call before five to get it delivered by nine. They do not deliver heroin or cocaine. That is another and smaller business.
The bicycle messenger is white because cops don’t stop whites. He wears a helmet and backpack and carries a driver’s license. He brings the envelope up to the reception room of a business, the customer comes out and hands him an envelope with the standard $60, and the messenger gives him the envelope of pot. The guy goes back to his work and the messenger goes out to his bike and wheels his way through heavy Manhattan traffic on his way to the next customer.
Marijuana is so widespread that its status seems to be close to that of booze during Prohibition. You can’t actually tell because pot smokers don’t talk much. Drinkers boast, “I had a thousand beers last night.” Pot smokers are home alone. But the reception rooms have people waiting, and the messengers are in the elevators, and somewhere they are bringing it in across the Mexican border.
OUT OF THE ATTEMPTED sealing of the Mexican border comes a most imaginative and effective drug and illegal immigrant enforcement, and it makes no difference. They find a tunnel of one hundred yards in length between Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Arizona, that has been in use by drug smugglers for twenty years. It was three feet wide and four feet high, and they found about $1.5 million in cash and 2,668 kilos of cocaine.
By the time they were through counting the money there was another tunnel.
Stopping illegal immigrants and stopping drug peddlers are two separate and fairly hopeless occupations. In the 280 miles of desert leading to Tucson, authorities intercepted 387,406 people in 1998. The next year, there were 470,449 officially returned Mexicans from this area. The population of Tucson is 460,000. And some people feel a million Mexicans got through, but just enough did not, with 500 dead in the desert, to become an international scandal. Simultaneously, 25 percent of the nation’s crime caseload comes from the Mexican border. Federal public defender Sandra Pules sat at her desk one afternoon in early 2000 with case number 3,500. The courtrooms are filled with so many Mexicans, the overwhelming number having to do with illegal crossing. As only one or two guards are available to a courtroom, the Mexicans are always shackled like dangerous animals. All day long, courtrooms are filled with the chiming of chains.
At border crossings like Tijuana and Laredo there are signs up saying that there have been four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand—who knows how many—pounds of pot seized at this location. It is something to be satisfied about, like bridge painting. Upon finishing, you turn and start back, chipping and stroking. With drug arrests and seizures, you catch Mexicans and their drugs; meanwhile the majority of drugs come into the country from Puerto Rico. Drug users are supposedly impoverished and despondent and helplessly addicted, and will steal the nearest silverware. Drug rehabilitation can’t possibly be effective with these derelicts. The only thing to do is put a million in prison.
And far away from studies and statistics are the people who use drugs because they are fun. Do I use cocaine? You bet. Am I addicted? Don’t be silly. Then why do you use it? I told you. Because it’s fun.
The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Page 5
