Holidays in Hell

by P. J. O'Rourke

  "Maybe it's a test run," said one of them.

  "Or maybe it just shows how bad things are in Mexico," Garcia said to me while we were driving back. "The Mexican minimum wage is $3.21 a day. Unemployment is 50 percent."

  When we were about thirty miles from McAllen, Garcia spotted four illegals standing under a tree on the other side of the highway. They weren't hard to pick out. They were each carrying a little plastic grocery bag, usually the only luggage an illegal has. They wore shoddy jeans and dusty, cotton plaid shirts. And they were thin, the way only very rich Americans and very poor nonAmericans are. We were in an unmarked car, and when Garcia cut through the median strip to get to their side of the road, the poor ignoramuses stuck out their thumbs.

  Garcia patted them down and put them in the backseat. Then he got a snub-nosed revolver out of his briefcase and slipped it in his pants pocket. The illegals were all from the same little town near Reynosa. The oldest, who looked well past middle age, was forty-three. Two others were in their mid-twenties. The youngest was eighteen. They'd come across the river somewhere, they weren't sure where, between McAllen and Brownsville at ten o'clock the previous morning. They'd been walking ever since. It was three P. M. when we picked them up. They said they'd come out on the highway because they were hungry. "Why don't you interview these guys," Garcia said. "See what their lives are like?"

  I asked them how much money they had, Garcia translating. One said one thousand pesos. Another said five hundred. The eldest had four hundred. That was a little over $2.50 among them. The youngest had nothing.

  "Where did you expect to find work?" I asked.

  "Wherever," said the eldest. He told me he had eight children. He'd been to the United States three times before. The two guys in their twenties had each been twice. This was the first time for the youngest. When they'd been here in the past, they had worked on ranches, mostly picking fruit and vegetables.

  "How long did you hope to stay?"

  "As long as there was work," said the eldest. He had been here for two months the last time. Usually he got $2.75 to $3.00 an hour with room but not board.

  Garcia told them I was a periodista who worked for a magazine called Rolling Stone, "Piedra Rolar." They all thought that was a very funny name for a magazine. They were still chuckling about it as Garcia escorted them to the pedestrian walkway across the border.

  Not everything that comes over the Rio Grande is quite this benign, of course. Since Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas cleaned up south Florida, Mexico has become the main drug route into the U. S. There's also a lively trade along the border in "OTMs"-"Other Than Mexicans." These are aliens who get smuggled for a price out of South and Central America, China, Korea, India, even Poland. OTMs are routinely robbed by "Border Rats," gangs who commit their crimes in the U.S. then slip back to Mexico. The Mexican illegals are robbed, too, though there's little enough to take from them. And the Border Patrol has the highest casualty rate in the line of duty of any U.S. government uniformed service.

  I went on a drug stakeout with one of the agents from the McAllen sector. "The smugglers are armed, and they will shoot," said the agent, who was carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun. After hiding his patrol car, he and I stood alongside a road about a mile from the Rio Grande. Between the road and the river was a huge mesquite thicket. "The joke along here," said the agent, "is that you can stop your patrol car anywhere on this road, blink your headlights three times, and the smugglers will run out and jump in your backseat by mistake." He'd no more said that than a car came down the road at about three miles an hour. We hit the dirt.

  The car was a convertible with two flashy Latin girls in it, radio turned up loud. It rolled to a stop not twenty feet from us. "This is it," whispered the agent, and he belly-crawled forward, moving fast and soundlessly, until there was just one ragged shrub between him and the car. He could almost reach the door handle. I followed, more in the fashion of a trout across the bottom of a rowboat. I could see the agent slipping a clip into the MPS.

  I tried to muffle my frenzied breathing by shoving my face into the ground. But that only got dirt up my nose, so I had to muffle my frenzied sneezes by shoving my face further into the ground, which got dirt between my chattering teeth. This went on for thirty minutes. So did the legion of bug bites.

  Finally, the driver turned off her radio.

  Giggling voices filled the night air.

  `Antonio es muy simpatico."

  "St, st, cdmo no, y Roberto es muy generoso."

  We had been pinned down for a half-hour by an all-girl heartto-heart. The driver gunned her engine, and the two young ladies drove away to their disco date.

  But what does this tomfoolery look like from the other side? Not so snappy and dramatic, I'm afraid. I rented a car and drove along the south side of the border, from Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico to Tijuana on the Pacific. It was what TV news cameramen call "cut to obligatory squalor." The overfed white reporter goes around stuffing his microphone-or, in my case, pencil-in people's faces.

  "Just how poor are you?" "Mind if I look around in your hovel?" "Say, you wouldn't happen to have any kids that are a little more crippled or anything, would you?"

  Anyway, it's a mess over there. To tell the truth, it isn't a worse mess than the Brownsville section of Brooklyn or downtown Detroit. But it's a different mess. Even in the best parts of Nuevo Laredo or Juarez, the pavement is coming to bits. There's garbage all over the place. The buses and trucks belch smut. Buildings are being made from such bum materials that it's hard to tell if the construction is going up or coming down. In fact, neither. Since the oil bust and foreign-debt crisis a couple of years ago, most Mexican building sites are just sitting there.

  The individual poverty was grim-o. But it was the corporate, the commonweal poverty that jerked the senses. Mexico isn't just squalid homes. It's squalid industry, squalid infrastructure. No adequate capital investment has ever been made in Mexico, not even by capitalists in the machinery of their capitalism. The whole country looks like it's run by slum landlords. Especially the bathrooms.

  There aren't many sewage treatment plants in Mexico or, for that matter, many sewers. Even septic tanks are a luxury. Mexico is a nation of cesspools, of holes in the ground. You can't put toilet paper in a cesspool; that clogs it. So all the used toilet paper goes in wastebaskets or, more often, cardboard boxes on the bathroom floor. Except people forget, and half the toilets in the country are overflowing. I think public rest rooms are crucial to understanding a culture. Look at the street-side pissoirs of France, the ancient water closets of Britain, the ceramic relief palaces of the United States. But don't go to the john in Mexico unless you plan to learn more than-you-want to know.

  Besides bathrooms, I figured I'd also better go see some politicians. If you're looking for fleas, you have to lie down with dogs. When I got to Juarez, across from El Paso, I went to the local headquarters of PAN, the National Action Party (the acronym means "bread" in Spanish). PAN would be the opposition party if there were such a thing in Mexico. But the ruling party, the PRI, has won, by this means or that, every presidential and gubernatorial election since 1929. PRI stands for "Institutional Revolutionary Party," a name that manages to include most of mankind's bad ideas about governance. PAN occasionally wins a municipal election.

  PAN HQ was a large building in one of the better commercial districts. But all the windows were broken, and the walls were defaced with spray paint.

  I arrived in the middle of a press conference-as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do. When it was over, instead of running for the bar like American reporters, some of the journalists stayed and argued vehemently with the PAN spokesmen. They were employees of the governmentcontrolled papers and TV stations. Imagine Peter Jennings giving you grief on the air and then sticking around to tell you President Reagan thinks you're a shit, too. When all the reporters had finally left, I asked Juan Torres, the pissed-off looking
president of the PAN Juarez committee, my favorite question:

  "Why is Mexico so poor?"

  "Corruption!" said Torres. "We are in a sea of corruption! There has been nearly sixty years of the same party! Because of that political party, we have not become an economic power."

  "What should the U.S. do about illegal Mexican immigration?" I asked.

  But Torres had had enough for one day. "The U. S. can do what it likes," he said and handed me off to PAN committee member Pepe Marquez.

  Marquez spoke very quickly, as though the Mexican social disaster might overtake us at any minute and we'd have to hightail it across the Rio with the rest of the wetbacks. He, too, blamed everything on the PRI, throwing in many statistics about how the Mexican government controls 75 percent of business and industry and 80 percent of agricultural land and so on-the kind of facts and figures responsible reporters dutifully copy down and all readers blithely skip. In the news trade, this stuff is known as "MEGO," short for "My Eyes Glaze Over."

  Marquez noticed that I was beginning to snooze. He paused, trying to figure a way to put his case succinctly. "If the government was given the desert to manage," he said, "there would be a shortage of sand."

  "Is there something the United States should be, you know, doing?" I asked.

  "The Mexican government," said Marquez, "is kept alive by the United States agreeing to bank loans."

  Interesting that our administration, so sis-boom-bah about anti-communism, is footing the bill for their administration which sounds pretty communistic.

  "Well," I said, "how'd your windows get broken?"

  "A group of leftists did it, the CDP, the Committee for Popular Defense."

  "Did they attack the PRI offices too?"

  "They never attack the PRI."

  "Why'd they hit you and not the ruling party?"

  Marquez gave me one of those world-explaining, whole-body Latin shrugs, an educated version of the shrugs I got from the illegals on the border. "The CDP, they are supposedly against the government."

  I drove south out of Juarez, across the beautiful edges of the Sierra de la Magdalena mountains, through the prairie scrub of northern Chihuahua State and into vast rolling hills, green and well-watered and empty. A Cleveland a year, full of would-be immigrants, could be built out here for decades.

  In Chihuahua City the Institutional Revolutionary Party was setting up a press conference, too. President de la Madrid would address the media the next day in an enormous hotel ballroom, full of comfortable chairs, buffet tables, red velvet draperies and putting-green-size Mexican flags. I asked the party officials for a PRI spokesman, and they got me an appointment with Arturo Ugalde, the Chihuahua state director of economic development.

  I had an hour to kill so I went sightseeing. There was a beautiful eighteenth-century colonial baroque palace on the main plaza. Father Hidalgo, the leader of Mexico's revolt against Spanish rule, had been imprisoned here until his execution in 1811. The walls of the palace courtyard were covered with murals painted by Pina Mora in the early sixties. They depicted, in heroic style and with villainous content, the entire history of Mexico. The literally heart-wrenching Aztecs were shown sacrificing people and skinning them alive. Then came the dirtsack Conquistadors, with dim Montezuma mistaking Cortes, of all people, for a god. Then Catholic missionaries converting the Indians to death.

  Father Hidalgo figured large, murdering Spanish civilians and getting the stuffing kicked out of his revolution in its only pitched battle. Mexico didn't become independent for another decade, not until the local Spanish aristocrats declared it independent because the government back in Spain was getting too liberal. This was faithfully depicted as was the period of bloody chaos from 1821 to 1848, the period of bloody chaos from 1858 to 1867 and the period of bloody chaos from 1911 to 1920. (Artist Mora was forced to use every conceivable variation of the determined peasant with upraised face holding a gun in the air with one hand.) Also portrayed was Benito Juarez, the "Abraham Lincoln of Mexico," who freed the Indian peons but accidentally destroyed their livelihood by letting communal land fall into the hands of speculators; the comic opera emperor Maximilian, installed by Napoleon III because Mexico defaulted on French bank loans (Citibank take note); and dictator Porfirio Diaz, who sold the country's natural resources to foreign companies for peanuts and gave press swine William Randolph Hearst a 2.5 million-acre ranch in Chihuahua as a thank you for good newspaper PR. In the middle of all this was a cluster of pale, slightly vampiric-looking characters in blue uniforms carrying a frightening and complicated flag full of stripes and things. They were taking California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas away, Rt. 66 included.

  I drove to Ugalde's office in an industrial park on the edge of town.

  "Why is Mexico so poor?"

  Ugalde hemmed and hawed a while about the Mexican economic system and then blamed it on the Indians. "We never," said Ugalde, "had the saying `the best Indian is a dead Indian.' I will put it this way: We have three types of people. People in the south of Mexico, they want. People in the middle, they think. People in the north, they work."

  What he meant was the south has the most Indians. And in the middle, Mexico City, the intelligentsia make their Indian heritage a point of pride. But in the north of Mexico, people are mostly European. We weren't going to get anywhere with this line of reasoning.

  I asked about Mexico's one-party system of government. What I have in my notes is: "Yr. gov.-fucked or what?" Though I'm sure I phrased that differently.

  "If we had a perfect democracy-everyone votes, without any education-you could hardly expect anyone to win," Ugalde said, going all glasnost and Gorbachevy on me. "There will be five, six parties. Seventy million Mexicans want to be president, but only one can be. The PRI system has been the right people at the right time, avoiding dictatorship and political strife."

  Then Ugalde pulled out a heap of charts and graphs that he said showed Mexico's rapid pace of development. "And the Japanese are coming soon," he said.

  I told him I'd just spent a week with the United States Border Patrol, and I hadn't seen many signs of what you'd call rapid pace of development.

  "People can go live in the U.S.," he said, as though it were a matter of whether to winter in Aspen or Palm Springs, "but it's hard. We are not so disciplined. We have to learn the laws and rules of living in a new place. There is a rigidity to the North. In Mexico we have an expression"-he gave me that wised-up shrug-"Everything is negotiable."

  Ugalde sighed as though I'd made much more alarming allegations about the Mexican state of things than I had. "Mexico," he said, "is rich in raw materials but poor in resources of technology and of ways to use technology." In other words somebody stole the half with all the paved roads.

  I left Ugalde's office and drove around the industrial park. It had been laid out in sectors like a spoked wheel. There were absolutely no buildings in the entire park, except Ugalde's little office suite. Grass was growing in the pavement cracks. And in the middle of the park, at the hub, there was an enormous welded-steel sculpture of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill.

  So what's going to happen at our southern border? Is an enormous, terrifying, beaner tidal wave going to roll across our fair nation? Well, we don't have to worry about that. It already has. We've suffered a huge invasion of cheerful, hard-working, poor people, who grabbed all the shit jobs nobody else wanted and caused a fearsome outbreak of Tex-Mex yuppie restaurants.

  We don't have a problem. It's the Mexicans who have the problem. And there are four billion other people in the world, most of them with even worse problems than the Mexicans have. Where are they going to go?

  The Holyland - God 'd Monkey

  House

  JANUARY 1988

  You haven't really seen the Old City of Jerusalem until you've seen it at dawn on a Moslem sabbath while you're disguised as an Arab and accompanied by a guy who's probably with the PLO, plus two hulking press photographers in unlikely-looking Bed
ouin headdresses, and all four of you are following the footsteps of Christ down the Via Dolorosa at a jog trot, running in and out of doorways dodging Israeli army patrols.

  Old Jerusalem is a medieval city, not an adorably restored medieval city like Heidelberg, but a real one where you can smell the medieval sanitation and smack your head on the dirty, low medieval ceilings. The fortress-fronted, time-soiled limestone houses are built all over each other. The boulevards are steep, twisting, littered and as wide as a donkey. Some streets are roofed in stone; most have steps cut in the pavement, and they seem more like staircases in a crypt than city avenues. Lamps are few. Signposts date from the Ottoman Empire. Each shadow holds some sinister passage or dwarfish portcullis. The place is the original for every game of Dungeons and Dragons. At dawn in Jerusalem, you could be in any century of human civilization.

  The guy who was probably with the PLO, whom I'll call Ahmed, was smuggling me and my photographer friends Tony Suau and John Reardon into the forbidden precincts of the Haram esh"Sherif, the Noble Sanctuary" enclosing the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aksa Mosque. Except for Mecca and Medina, these are Mohammedanism's most sacred shrines. Infidels are banned from the Haram's thirty-five acres on Friday, the Moslem sabbath, and this Friday the sanctuary was also being sealed by Israeli soldiers and Jerusalem police. There had been an ugly incident the week before. After midday prayers, some kids displayed the illegal Palestinian flag, burned the flag of Israel (and, of course, the U. S. flag, too) and threw stones. The Israelis responded with clubs and tear gas, and, at one point, actually tossed a gas grenade inside the al-Aksa Mosque. The result was some coughing and sneezing and lots of international indignation. Today the Israelis would be checking identity cards at the sanctuary's eight gates and letting in only respectable believers.