The community of Sells, Arizona, sits alone in the border desert on the three-million-acre Tohono O’odham reservation, with its Customs Service patrol. The name Tohono O’odham means “people of the desert.” They have been at this place since the sand began. Their ancestors were the Hohokam, who can be traced back to 300 B.C. Agents in this unit must be at least one-quarter Native American.
Here are the two agents from this headquarters pulling up to the three strands of barbed wire that make up the border fortifications. They are Doug Bothof, of the local tribe, and Kevin Carlos, a Sioux from South Dakota. They are here on account of drug smuggling, not illegal aliens. The three strands of wire are the fence that is supposed to be keeping all of Mexico’s immigrants and marijuana out. It isn’t even government wire. It has been put up by ranchers on the reservation. The top strand has been cut and the end hooked once around the post to hold it up, as if it had not been touched. The second and third strands were the same. Unhook all three and this part of the wire fence becomes a gate.
The two agents watch a van parked just on the other side of the wire, in Mexico. A woman is selling water to the immigrants about to sneak across and whisky to members of the Tohono O’odham tribe who cross over because tribal laws do not allow whisky on their lands.
The agents drive along the wire at five miles an hour, hanging out the windows and training on the ground below the most complex, miraculous technology: eyes that have been trained by their blood since time began to look at the ground and see great pictures and precise diagrams in the empty dirt.
They stop and get out. Bothof looks down at the tire marks of a vehicle that has come right through the wire.
“They’re old. You can see people walked across them the next day.” The outline of a foot is over that of the tire treads. Then he mutters, “Look at these people. See?” In one spot, a second set of treads suddenly runs over the first set. “They crossed here in two vehicles. Vans, I guess.”
“Drugs?” Indicating the footprints.
“Immigrants. The footprints over the treads are too shallow for somebody carrying a heavy pack.”
The agents are stocky, with equipment bringing Bothof to about 200 pounds and Carlos up to 260. They carry Steyrs, Austrian rifles with a thirty-round clip, plus another clip on their belts, a radio, receiver, a big Magnum handgun, and a flashlight.
Border areas like this one are speckled with buried sensors that pick up people walking, sometimes even their speech. Any activity lights up on terminals back at the base. But so often the metallic technology isn’t worth the air its signals soar through. Whoever passes over the sensor can be gone before anybody gets out to the spot. So the agents track. The depth of the footprints indicates the weight being carried. A person with a backpack of marijuana rubbing, cutting into the shoulders has his feet sinking deeper into the ground than some little illegal carrying only his hopes, who skims across the dust, leaving the imprint of a grasshopper. To desert trackers, the term backpacker means a drug carrier, not some Ohio State student on summer break.
Sensors are often made futile by all these centuries of hunting and tracking that run in these border agents. Carlos points out that whether a track is fresh or old can be seen immediately. If the prints of a desert rat are on top of the footprint, it means the footprint is not fresh.
The ones the agents want come across with drugs strapped to their backs. It is usually marijuana, weighing from fifty to seventy-five pounds. The backpackers are usually wrecks who come slogging along until they hit this long stretch of scrub, under a remorseless sky that has them gulping water every few yards. At the start of their trek—back where it was slightly cooler and the paths softer—they can do two miles without stopping. Soon they are down to a mile. Now, outside Sells, they do only a half mile before dropping their packs and collapsing.
They pray to Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of drug peddling: “Let my legs be strong. Let the border guards lose their eyes. Help others know that we carry the good. Nothing that is harmful. Our marijuana causes songs. The Border Patrol kills.”
And behind them are the natives with badges, tracking them.
Carlos looks at the bits of branch that have been knocked off bushes by a backpacker lumbering through. He feels the leaves. If they are moist, then somebody just went through. If they’re dry, it was a while ago.
The coyotes traveling with the backpackers usually try to cover the track by taking branches and sweeping over the trail, as if they were scrubbing a saloon floor. Always, the sweep marks are a better trail to follow than the footprints.
The coyotes tried tying pieces of carpet to everybody’s shoes, causing a smoothness where there was supposed to be footprints. Noticing this, the trackers began to sift the dirt. They found colored fabric strands from the carpet. They followed them. Next, the drug packers used mop rope, with strands the color of sand, but it still showed fresh and bright in the agents’ eyes.
The drug haulers left signs where they sat to rest. One time, there were traces leading up to the start of mountains, and then on the rocks they found a small boulder dislodged, another overturned when somebody slipped and kicked it. Soon the agents were on four backpackers sitting with five huge packs of marijuana. Bothof was waiting for them to say they didn’t know anything about the extra pack. Instead, one of them said it belonged to a group that was just over the next small slope. Which they were. On that day, there were thirteen arrests, and hundreds of pounds of marijuana were confiscated.
Over the course of a year the unit seizes 640,000 pounds of drugs. They are tremendous. They stop a third of what comes across. Because of his ability, Kevin Bothof was sent to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to show the police of these states, once part of the Soviet Union, how to track people trying to smuggle nuclear weapons to terrorists in places like Pakistan. When Bothof arrived, the police thought he was going to have sophisticated technology to show them. Instead he said he worked only with a stick and a knife and a lot of walking and bending. Any day now, his expertise will have him back in Uzbekistan.
Yet with all the history and energy, you still have as much chance of stopping drugs as you do of swimming to China. An hour and a half’s drive away, in the Mexican town of Nuevo Nogales, there was a dispute over a dispute, and somebody walked across the street to the border crossing station and announced that there were two bastards coming across in their pickup truck with cocaine. By the time the word was passed along, the two Mexicans were through the desert and into Arizona, driving on Highway 19 in their 1997 Ford Lobo double-cab pickup, the truck’s windshield smacked up and its rear license plate hammered around, but not enough to obscure its numbers, which had been reported by the stool pigeon. Here was a lone police officer who had just been advised to be on the lookout for a pickup with two men and a lot of cocaine. The policeman needed no surveillance system shooting data to a satellite near the moon and then back to his machine on earth to identify the pickup. Nor did he need a copy of the Constitution to know that he had a right to stop the vehicle; every car is a violation, even parked in the garage—a certificate is pasted in the wrong part of the window, the license plate isn’t attached properly. This vehicle also had over six hundred pounds of cocaine. So a common patrolman with a panting German shepherd in the back pulled the pickup over. The Nogales police had received a phone call about the truck. All the cop had to do was look and press the button for his siren to make them stop.
The cop came out of the car with the dog. The police said that upon sniffing at the pickup, the dog went insane.
“Él huele el sandwich,” one of the Mexicans said. He smells the sandwich.
He could have been right. No matter how well bred, how strictly trained, a dog’s sniff is for fresh liverwurst. Plus, a handler and his dog must be together for some time if they are going to be effective. Smelling is a two-man game. But often you’ll have the handler transferred and a new one taking over, and by the time this one and the dog are familiar with each other, the
officer is up for a new post, and the next guy not only is new but hates dogs. That means the police dog isn’t worth the leash he comes on.
This time, who knows what the dog on the highway outside of Nogales smelled? That didn’t matter because the cop knew that there was cocaine on the truck. There sure was. He tugged and pulled out 607 pounds of cocaine. The two Mexicans in the truck shrugged. They didn’t know what the cop was talking about.
Usually, figures that police announce as to the value of seized narcotics are fantasy. This time anybody with experience could tell you that in New York you certainly could get $6 million for the packages.
And it was discovered by a local phone call, which is the technology used in the ancient method of informing, not with any skilled trackers. Which is a sign of the hopelessness of fighting drugs. For if one truck with 607 pounds is found this way, you need no imagination to estimate all the organized smuggling that doesn’t get stopped. Maybe they stopped half a mountainside of cocaine, which was worth millions and millions in a big city. The trouble was, the other half of the mountain came through the border in another pickup truck. Lawmen on the border learned of this some days later.
On the highways around Nogales, I-92 and I-80, right in the middle of the barren land, suddenly there is a traffic tie-up that seems like the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. There are cars and trucks sitting on the highway, and finally up ahead are the flashing red lights of law enforcement. The traffic moves slowly. Now traffic cones push the cars and trucks into one lane. There is a small military green tank trailer, which holds water. There are white Border Patrol vans parked, a large van, and a table with agents around it. Out on the road are many Border Patrol agents. One pokes into a car or truck for a few moments, the vehicles move out of the one lane and onto the highway, and he looks into the next in line. Now you are even with the Border Patrol people. Sunglasses, trim mustache, great big gun on his belt, he looks in. No warrant, no discussion. He just looks in. Then he pulls his head out. “Have a nice day.” The hand waves and you drive off.
Twenty minutes later, the traffic is backed up again. A van full of Mexicans is being held on the side of the road. The dog and his handler walk around the van and get nowhere.
But there are Mexicans out on the roadside. The big trucks with white drivers go right on through.
“Good afternoon, folks,” the Border Patrol guy says as the next car pulls up.
He starts to put his head in.
“You got a warrant?” he is asked.
“We’re within twenty-five miles of the border and we have the right to search,” he says.
Now his head comes in, he sees the three whites in the car, and his head comes out.
“Have a good day.”
Mexicans come into Nogales like blowing sand. And every step is dedicated to silence. This is a town where the most prominent sound in the still air is made by the warning bells of the railroad crossing gates on the freight tracks that run through the center of the town. When the striped gate arms go down, the cars and a small crowd of mostly women with paper shopping bags wait on the street. Three diesel locomotives hooked to each other—two Southern Pacific and a Union Pacific, with all engines throbbing—run through the crossing. Their red and green sides glare in the sun even through the coating of grime. The engineers sit high over the street with chins resting on arms. In a town of adventurers, they pose as the most exciting. The engines go through the crossing and run down the tracks behind buildings and stop. The bells commence and the crossing gates go up. The drivers cross the tracks, the women shoppers rush to the other side. A whistle sounds from one of the engines. The bells chime and the gates come down, halting traffic. The engines back up through the crossing and run on up the tracks a couple of hundred yards to freight cars with several workmen waiting. The crossing gates remain down as the freight cars are coupled to the locomotives. With a whistle, the locomotives come back to the crossing, pulling their freight cars. Suddenly they stop at the crossing. The engineers stare down. The gates are down and the locals sit frustrated in their cars. Finally the locomotives pull the freight cars out of the way and disappear down the tracks. Citizens of Nogales complain that the engines block the crossing out of insolence, to show the majesty of the rails. This controversy spills over to the local newspaper, whose stories are picked up by Tucson television. This was the major local news in a town that everywhere else, from movies to nightly news, was the stage for the cops and robbers of the international drug trade. It also was the place where the wave of immigrants drew itself up and then cascaded across the sand and into America.
Despite the large numbers of immigrants who came in without danger, for many the crossing turned into torture. So many Mexicans, afraid of the Border Patrol at Nogales, circle into the desert to find their way across the border. Others risk arrest and simply jump a border fence or crawl through sewers.
The business street in Nogales ends at a new coffee shop that is owned by a young woman whose husband is with the Nogales police department. She says that she gets a good trade of police as they come off duty.
A few yards down from the coffee shop, there is the high sheet-metal fence and a border crossing point, a tiny customs station with two passageways. On the left as you walk up, a customs agent sits on a straight-back chair and makes sure that the Mexicans who came through have their border identification passes. The people taking the other short passageway, to Nuevo Nogales, need to show nothing. They take a few steps through the passageway and come out into the riot of the first street of Nuevo Nogales. On one corner is a crowd of men, cab drivers, hangers-on, who gave the appearances of being open to any proposition. On the opposite corner is an old building with a big Times Square sign: Girls! Girls! Girls! Underneath it is the less flamboyant and more comforting Liquor.
From the border crossing station, the fence runs up a hill that immediately becomes steep. At the top there is a house on the Mexican side that is right up against the fence. The front porch of the house is as high as the fence and requires only the easiest of leaps to go from the porch to America.
“Where does the fence end?” the customs agent was asked.
“Right up there a few hundred yards out of town.”
“What happens when the fence ends?”
“They all come through,” he said, waving a hand. Yet too few realize this and go out into a dangerous desert.
At the top of a hot dirt hill, whose street signs said East East Street, there was a Postal Service jeep parked on the side street, North Short Street. It was a low-level slum of houses that appeared to be empty. The street ended at the border fence a few yards away. On the other side of the fence, at the house with the porch touching the fence, a man stood and watched the mailman, Tom McAlpin. Tom was born in Cabrini Hospital on the East Side of Manhattan and has a distant connection to the old Hotel McAlpin on Thirty-fourth Street. He was opening rows of silver mailboxes on a neighborhood stand outside one of the dry, cracked one-story houses. He said that there were no mixups with letters to Nuevo Nogales, Mexico, and to Nogales, Arizona, because, he said proudly, they handle the mail with great efficiency at the post office.
“The Border Patrol parks here a half hour, then goes off for a half hour, then comes back, but they still come over the fence as if nobody was around,” McAlpin said. “They put a baby in a basket and lower him over the fence on a rope. Then the father climbs over the fence after him. Sometimes they ask if they can hand me the baby while they climb over. I’m not against the kid. I was a baby myself. But the least I can do for my country is not help them break the law. Besides, we had some guy take the baby and the Mexican jumped over holding another kid and he breaks his leg. The Mexican with the broken leg gets taken to the hospital and who knows when you see him again. Now the guy here has not only one baby but two.”
“Where do they go when they don’t break their legs?”
He looked around the street of silent decrepit houses, the fronts overgrown.
“The house right behind us. I don’t want to look, but you can. Just quick.”
The house was boarded up and had a rusted tin roof.
“I bet there’s thirty-five of them in there now,” he said. “They call this a safe house. Sleep on the floor with rats. Then they get out of here. They go up to Terrace Avenue and catch a van.”
On Terrace Avenue, there are two hundred licensed taxis and parking lots filled with vans with signs advertising Nogales-Tucson or Nogales-Phoenix. The taxis are numerous, but they, along with cars, can be confiscated if the Border Patrol finds the back packed with Mexicans. The law states that vans cannot be grabbed no matter how many passengers are yanked out and taken to the detention center. Of course the Greyhound buses are best. Nobody touches them.
The vans are for rushing immigrants away from Nogales and on the way to their American dream. One woman van driver complained to the mailman that it was a slow day. “She says she’s made only thirteen hundred dollars so far today,” he said.
At 42 Terrace Avenue, five men sit under an umbrella in front of a store. None of them has a job, and all of them are on cell phones. They look over a rail at the thousands of cars coming through the customs plaza from Mexico. They know what they are looking for in the river of metal. A fortune coming through in one car, two cars, three cars, maybe a dozen cars.
The largest number of immigrants coming through Nogales—when overwhelmed, the county sheriff says a million a year, and thus far nobody has refuted him—come by foot. All the sophisticated sensors and night lighting and cameras are in the end useless against a population that starts moving like a glacier. In Nogales the modern technology comes down to two Border Patrol vans parked on the highway going out of town and looking into the mouth of the town’s sewer drain. The moment they are not there, out of the sewer, scrambling like crabs, come waves of people from Nuevo Nogales. They spread across the land and head north, crossing the ranches of people like Sara Ann Bailey, who at sixty-eight sits on a tractor somewhere on her five-hundred-acre ranch with a .380 Smith and Wesson pistol in her jeans. She bought it at Wal-Mart for $150. She also has a sawed-off Mosberg shotgun at her feet. She grows hybrid grass, sudan-sorghum, on seventy irrigated acres for cattle grazing and is out there from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. every day, driving the tractor alone through acres of bushes and low trees. Sometimes an illegal immigrant suddenly appears a few yards away. She has never shot at a Mexican, nor has anybody on the surrounding ranches. She served as a federal magistrate in Nogales for five years and never heard of a Mexican carrying anything but a knife or club to protect himself from snakes or the four-legged coyotes or an occasional sixty-pound mountain lion. Yet the immigrants scare her. When the Mexicans see that she is armed, they disappear in the brush. She lives her days like this. In 1982, an immigrant named Martínez Villareal broke into her house twice. First he stole art, which he sold at the train station in Nogales, Sonora. Then he stole two hunting rifles. He went to the next ranch and had a run-in with the foreman and a cowboy and he shot them dead with one of her rifles. He is still on death row, and she has never gotten over it.
The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Page 6
