SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2
“Let us ask God to forgive the politicians who created these walls,” Armando Ochoa, a bishop from El Paso, says in prayer. We watch him—through the wall—from the Mexican side. To his left is the fence that divides the two countries. To his right, the desert. In front and in back are thirty-eight double reflector posts, six motion-detecting towers, and five chunky Border Patrol vehicles.
Some 200 faithful from the United States and 500 from Mexico are attending this binational Mass in Anapra, the last crossing zone left in the Juárez area. This is the last haven people have, and yet it is nothing but desert, thirty-eight double reflector posts, six motion-detecting towers, etc.
It’s not a very good idea to cross here. Those who do try must not know any better. The Border Patrol divides the 1,500-plus miles of border into nine sectors. The sector that has the most agents is Tucson, followed by this area close to El Paso, which includes parts of New Mexico and Texas. 2,206 patrol agents looking for drugs and undocumented migrants over 267 linear miles. The numbers might be different now: this data was taken from the last stock of official information written in October 2007, before Operation Jump Start (with its 2,000 agents stationed along the border) came to an end. Also, more cameras and motion detectors have been set up. And out of the nine sectors, this is one of the six fortified with a wall, or fence, or whatever you want to call it.
The Border Patrol doesn’t build walls or install reflectors to stop migration. Right now, the top priority is drugs. And El Paso is the second-most-guarded sector.
“They come at dawn,” explains a man whose house faces the wall, “but not very often these days. Since the beginning of last year, this zone has been heavily patrolled because so many drugs were coming through.” His house is in a low-income residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, where every dwelling is made of aluminum, cement blocks, thatch, or car parts. It’s really more of a gaggle of houses than a neighborhood—a makeshift settlement on land where only thorny shrubs can withstand the blistering sun and cold nights.
Narco-trafficking warrants surveillance. That’s the logic that reigns in these parts. The Border Patrol informs us that they’ll continue to build up the wall until the end of the year. It’ll be ready by next year, depending on whether or not US legislators slash the funds for those operations that have already been approved.
When surveillance increases, migrants leave for increasingly remote areas. Such as Anapra, the settlement out in the desert, far away from Juárez’s urban shell. From here one has to walk for four nights, skirting highways, to get to Las Cruces or El Paso, the closest cities where one can find water, bread, transportation, or a telephone booth.
“We’d have a row that reached to the sea if we wanted to put up a cross for every death in the desert,” says Bishop Renato León in his sermon.
There are no absolute numbers here. Each institution or expert has their own estimate. No one tallies by area, nationality, gender, or age. The dead are dead. Dead in the desert, the rivers, the hills. Dead migrants. The number that US humanitarian rights groups use when counting the deaths of migrants in the desert is 4,500 since 1994, when the first border operation began. Most bodies found are reported as “Dead Unidentified Migrant.” The organizations that compile this information refer to it as “limited calculations,” “conservative numbers,” or “incomplete data.”
Two tables are spread with consecrated bread and wine. They stand flush against the border wall, one on each side. The friars give communion by sticking their fingers through the holes of the wall.
Mass is over, and so is our sense of peace. Five migrants, either Mexicans or Central Americans, wait for the Mexican-side table to empty so they can scramble on top of it and over the wall. A futile attempt.
One after another they jump, only to be scooped up by a couple of Border Patrol agents who promptly stuff them in their cars and take them away. Edu Ponces runs with his camera rolling, but the scene is short-lived. From this side of the wall the faithful sing their chorus: “Let them go! Let them go! Let them go!”
If this was their first attempt, they’ll be back in their country of origin within a week, whatever country that may be. If one of them is a repeat offender, he just got himself five to seven months in prison.
This crazy jump seems to be one of the few ways left to cross from Juárez. Last year, two people at this same Mass tried and were met with the same poor luck. The US authorities have promised to put a stop to it. But I can almost see how, what with the wall and the 2,206 patrol agents screening this zone, that cat-jump off the Eucharist table can seem like a reasonable option. The other option is to pay $8,000 at one of the currency exchange houses along the Santa Fe Bridge, for a fake visa, and hope not to get caught by customs, or be prepared to pay the consequences—up to two years in jail for falsifying government documents.
The congregation continues with Mass until the soldiers tell everyone on the US side that it’s time to pack up.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3
Three more Hondurans showed up last night at the migrant shelter here in Juárez. The rest of the folks—there are forty in total, all spread out on cots—are deported Mexicans. This is the most well-furnished shelter of the twelve I’ve seen across the country. The male and female areas, for example, are separate, each with bathrooms and showers. The eating room is large and well-lit, and the whole shelter is contained within a large concrete-block building behind the priests’ quarters. In the sleeping rooms the bunks are tidy, each equipped with a thick blanket for the cold nights. There’s a projection room with a large screen where you can watch TV in the afternoons, and every night there are volunteers who make the food, which, we discover, is hot and delicious. It’s not uncommon for them to serve meat.
One of the Hondurans who showed up last night came for the same reason as the man I met a few days previously: the crossing points of Nuevo Laredo were unpassable. The heavy rains had swelled the Rio Grande, making the currents even stronger than usual. The man decided to follow the river upstream to see if he could find a spot to cross. The only place he kept hearing about was Juárez. Certainly, though, he must have heard it from people who don’t know the city.
Smoking with me out on the patio, he says he realizes he made a mistake. “There’s no work here, and it’s just too dangerous to be around town. Plus, there’s nowhere good to cross over.”. But then a forty-one-year-old Mexican, who’s been at the shelter for three nights, convinces him to attempt it with him tomorrow in Anapra.
According to the Mexican sitting with us, deported after twenty-two years in the United States, if you climb up one of the barren hills you can jump the fence and cross an empty section of desert where the Border Patrol doesn’t go. He himself crossed there twenty-two years ago. But back then Juárez wasn’t a war zone, and it did not have a wall separating it from El Paso, nor were there thousands of Border Patrol agents guarding its gates. Back then, the Mexican explains, it was an easy four-hour hike to El Paso.
The other two Hondurans at the shelter are determined to get out of town, reach Sonora, and try crossing through the Altar Desert. After Juárez the Altar Desert is the most watched sector of the border, but the difficult topography, including sections only accessible on foot or on horseback, makes it hard for the Border Patrol to catch so few crossers. The Hondurans are only here in Juárez because they too were tricked. A fellow Honduran told them he knew how to get across in Juárez and asked for $200 apiece for fake visas, but once he got the money they never saw him again. When traveling for the first time across this country, before you’ve learned the number one rule—which is not to trust anybody—it’s easy to fall into these kinds of traps.
I ask if they’ve already gotten a feel for what it’s like here in Juárez. Their response tells me that they have: “We’re too scared to go out. Everybody says that there’s a lot of bad guys on the streets, and nobody knows anything about crossing over.” The few Central Americans who
have found this shelter, I realize, have all lost their way.
The argument this Honduran makes is that Juárez is simply not the crossing zone it used to be. It’s not a place for migrants anymore. It’s a cartel war zone, which in turn has increased US border vigilance. One thing leads to another—violence and then vigilance—and the migrants bear the brunt of both.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6
Today we return. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday outside of the city, getting to know the outlying desert. Life in Juárez continues on in its frightening normalcy. Typical headlines over the past two days: “Three more murdered.” “Businesses complain of police extortion.” “Over 500 reported vehicles burned in 10 months.” “Their business burned.” “Their house a wreck.” “Threatened with being bombed.” “Body hanging from bridge causes outrage.”
We get a call from a Juárez journalist working for El Diario. “There’s been another execution,” he says. Edu and I make our way out of the downtown district. At a small farm nestled between two roads, lies a man, shot nineteen times. The journalists, three of whom have just arrived, look for the best shots. Little else seems to matter. This man is another body. One of the photographers summarizes the scene of the crime as he dips into a bag of candy: “A car came and out piled three men and that was that: pum, pum, pum.”
When they drove off, the shooters allegedly yelled: “Thief had it coming to him!”
A group of kids play around the farm while the forensic team wraps up the body. The neighbors spend the evening chatting on the front stoops of their homes. No one is shocked. The narcos have killed again. As common as a car crash.
Last Tuesday, the same day that a decapitated body was found hanging off a bridge, another body was found crucified on the balcony of a shopping mall, with a pig mask over his face and two gunshot wounds in his chest. Last night there were thirteen executions. When the mafia kills, you know it. They leave a signature.
This part of the border is racked by a madness akin to civil war. In the Chihuahuan papers the SAO lamented, “We weren’t designed to face this scale of threat.”
As Rodolfo Rubio, a researcher for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, put it while on the phone with me: “It’s not strange at all that the flow [of migrants] has gone down in this area.” In the 1950s, between 12 and 15 percent of all Central American and Mexican migrants chose this area to cross. In 2000 these numbers started plummeting. Now only 2 percent of the undocumented detained by the Mexican Migration are apprehended in Chihuahua, despite being one of Mexico’s largest states and the one that has the most miles of border.
Few migrants arrive having studied the landscape. They play a game of chance, clutching to the roof of a train that will take them to some new and unknown destination. Still, Rubio thinks there’s a vox populi on the migrant route that tells many which course to follow. Not an exact route, but a vague knowledge of where it’s best not to try. It’s the voice of the coyotes, who sprinkle some of their knowledge as they move northward. They know, not from official documents, but from living in the desert, in the hills and along the Rio Bravo, where there’s more surveillance, more Border Patrol cars, horses, motorcycles, agents, and motion sensors.
The interviews Rubio conducted with recently deported Mexicans on the Santa Fe Bridge revealed that most—some 72,000 every year—crossed at another part of the border, but that the US authorities deported them here with the goal of making reentry harder, knowing full well that this is one of the most dangerous spots to cross.
Rubio sums up the difficulties people face: “It’s almost impossible for a migrant without help, with nothing but his will, to pass through Juárez. This land is controlled by organized crime, so much so that it’s only possible to cross if migrants contract narcos to guide them through these areas.”
It’s always the same story on this route. Migrants as well as narcos search for areas far from state control. Some to cross, others to smuggle. The undocumented migrants will go on walking narco turf without permission. And narcos will go on showing that without payment, no one comes or leaves this place unpunished.
It’s six o’clock in the evening and María stops running every which way, then sits down to talk. Needless to say, her real name isn’t María. She works close to the Santa Fe Bridge, selling half-price bus tickets home to the recently deported. She has an agreement with Grupo Beta to offer these discounted tickets. Much like the scammers and delinquents, she’s been working this corner every day for the past year.
In her words, Juárez and the sum of its circumstances always mean the same thing: fear plus corrupt officials plus US surveillance add up to one maxim. “Be very careful.”
“As soon as you step onto this street you’re being watched,” she says. “By now you guys must be closely monitored.”
I tell her we’ve been here many times, and so far nothing has happened to us.
“Sure,” she responds,” because you haven’t done anything to upset them.”
To upset who?
But this is a dangerous question to answer in Juárez. Upset the scammers? The corrupt police? The cartel minions? The military? The bar owners? The prostitutes who lie to the freshly deported, in order to lead them to some dark corner where someone will assault them? Who isn’t there to upset?
María isn’t exactly sure who we should be afraid of. She’s been running in circles with the deported, and barely has the time to drink a glass of water. She suffers this situation firsthand. “They come to threaten us twice this week,” she says. “I’m not sure if they’re from the mafia or if they’re polleros. They don’t like it when we take away their migrants. The first time they threatened us by phone. Then a man in a hoodie came to tell us, in so many words, that we needed to shut down the business.” You either shut it, you sons of bitches, or we set fire to your business, this was the message to María.
The mafia’s pattern is no longer surprising. They attack when they don’t get paid. They’ve burned a number of businesses on this street. It’s a common problem, but the polleros? What are they doing here, if hardly anyone is trying to cross?
“Look,” she explains, “there are lots of polleros here who are trying to hook deported migrants, some of them Central Americans, who are going around asking for help. Of course you won’t see them in the streets, they’re inside exchange houses, hotels, and bars. These polleros take them to other states to cross.”
Migrants in Juárez, though their numbers are so small, still mean business.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8
We cross over to El Paso, leaving the city to fly to Laredo, Texas, and from there cross over to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, to see how the undocumented are crossing the Rio Grande. On the plane I read Juárez’s newspaper, El Diario. On page 11A there is a letter perfectly expressing the feelings of many in the city. It’s a petition, a desperate plea to those in charge:
Dear Hit Men,
I’m a citizen who is tired of our useless, good-for-nothing politicians. This is why, in all respect, I’m writing you, not wanting to be another statistic. I suggest to you the following: I’m willing to pay you a fair tax and I’m willing to respect your business and not involve myself in it either for good or for bad.
I’m willing to accept you as the authority here. And in return for this respect, I ask of you the following: that you help us not to pay taxes (which we’ll be paying to you) to our useless government. That you respect reporters. That your shoot-outs take place outside of the city, so our children and loved ones can be safe and so that we can walk the streets without fear of being attacked or getting hit by a stray bullet. And that you execute only people who have harmed society.
If politicians can’t manage, you help us and we’ll help you.
1 Originally a derogatory term for members of a lower-class Latino subculture, the term is now used by many as a badge of ethnic pride.
14
Dying in the Rio Grande: Tamaulipas
To cross the Rio Grande you eit
her pay a coyote or you drown. The bloated bodies trapped along the rocky banks, and the flailing attempts of migrants trying to make it upriver, prove how desperate people are to cross. Some of their plans are as rudimentary as dive in and swim. And then we meet Julio César. He’s a Honduran who shows us that patience and sacrifice are the difference between letting the currents decide your fate and taking fate by the horns.
The Rio Grande spat out two more bodies last week. They were found washed up on the rocks by a fisherman in an area known as El Resbaladero (The Slide). Nobody knows how long ago it was that they drowned. Their bodies are swollen and their flesh soft and pale. Tied around the waist of one of the corpses is a plastic bag that holds a few personal effects and a passport. The drowned man was Honduran. A migrant. He died trying.
The bodies first bobbed up in one of the bends in the river that is a typical crossing spot, just behind the migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo. If the Hondurans had successfully made it to the opposite bank, they would have reached Laredo.
The Rio Grande runs 900 miles of the 1,900-mile border, but Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and Laredo, Texas, are the sister cities that people talk about when they talk about swimming this river. The waters are deep and a churning green here. The currents are strong and swirling. And the thick brush on the US side makes it difficult to climb up but easy to hide. The river in these parts acts as a natural wall. Many who try to cross it turn out swollen, soft, and pale.
In Nuevo Laredo the difference between having knowledge of the river and not having this knowledge is a matter of life and death. It’s the difference between swimming out at a random deep bend, and launching with a raft in a shallow area with just a few swirls. It’s the difference between arriving in the United States, and ending up as a lump of rotting flesh.
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 27
