The Coyote's Bicycle (9 page)

In 1979, Roberto's uncle paid a bar patron, a known coyote, $1,800 cash—a first-class ticket—to pass his hick nephew into the United States.

“I was crossed at Otay,” Roberto recalled. “There, you just jumped the fence, ran a little, and you were at the factories where the ride was waiting.”

Months passed and Roberto was washing dishes in Los Angeles. He started to wonder how many times he'd washed the same dish. In
his stained apron, amid the vapors and steam of the machines and the force of the industrial spray nozzle, he began to rehearse his obstacle run, the jump, the climb, the fall, the sprint, and the skip into the United States. He saw a
camarada
's face every time, another migrant waiting in the pickup car who'd slapped his leg and said, “Man, that shit is like drugs. I get a high every time.”

After a year in Los Angeles Roberto was back in Tijuana, knocking on his uncle's door.

“What are you doing here,
mijo
? Are you okay? Did you get deported?”

“No, uncle,” Roberto said, “I'm fine. Everything is good. It's just that I was in Los Angeles and I was washing all of those spoons and forks in a kitchen that was like a hot, white dream and I kept thinking back to the last time I felt good. I mean really good. And the only moment I could find was here on the border—when I was crossed by
el coyote
into Otay.”

“What are you saying, son?”

“Well, I want to do that work.”

“With the migrants?”

“Yes.”

“Dumb kid! I hand over my savings to put you into a new life, and you want to be
el coyote
?”

“Let me tell you,” Roberto said, “I had a really hard time finding people who would help do the work. You could almost count all the
polleros
on your fingers. And it was a difficult time. We had to watch out for the police here more than anything. During the shifts of certain cops, you couldn't even walk near the edge of the border. You'd end up in the ‘70-76' under investigation, which was not pleasant. It'd start with a bag over your head, electric shocks to your testicles—all to see what they could get out of you.”

Roberto's critical first associate was a young woman he called La Señora Diana. She was a beautiful, straight-backed Mexican American
girl just a few years out of high school, with high cheekbones and feathered hair. Her gender, looks, and citizenship status were all serious bona fides in her role as
levantón
. As with most pickup drivers, La Señora had family and contacts on both sides. She was culturally bilingual, and understood that minutiae like a blown headlight or taillight just screamed for a pull-over. And if she were stopped and couldn't flirt her way out of further inquiries, she could always claim Mexican citizenship, offer an assumed name, get deported with the
pollos
, and, later, saunter right back into the United States.

“Soon, I got ahold of Carlos and Juan, who helped recruit
pollos
. And with me as guide, from 1980 to '83, we crossed about twenty a week in the usual ways, at Otay and San Ysidro. La Señora was always there and waiting. I couldn't complain. Things were going well for me. But then, from about 1984 to '87, my luck changed. To be honest, I don't know how, but people from Central and South America started to come to me in droves—very good, very grateful people.”

The coyote from Sinaloa's change of luck was actually a consequence of disastrous geopolitics. Simultaneous civil wars in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador—instigated and supported by Cold War powers—had reached a zenith. Death squads and militias plagued Honduras and Colombia. Some countries like Ecuador and Peru were just flat-out destitute. And by the early 1980s, people began streaming north in methods reminiscent of the Underground Railroad.

“Nicaraguans were some of the first,” Roberto said, “and later I crossed people from El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. Without a doubt, they made a difference in my work. In my family, we were always taught to help our fellow man. And I was much more careful with these migrants. They would come to my house and I wouldn't take them out until everything was in order.”

The custom was that a migrant's contact in the United States paid the fare. So if a crossing failed,
el coyote
was obligated to offer second
and third chances. The arrangement required
el coyote
to be contactable by both migrants and their families.

“I gave my phone number to the people I took across,” Roberto said. “Later, the uncle would call me, the sister, the niece, the daughter, the godfather, the godmother—you know, I put whole families over there on the inside.”

In a short time, Roberto built a substantial organization of
guías
,
ganchos
,
comunicadores
,
checadores
, and
levantones
. His tentacles ran as far south as Mexico City, where international migrants were often met at the airport by drivers, taken to a local safe house, and then whisked north. With an organization reaching into the United States, he could guarantee arrival in any American city—from New York to LA.

The original coyotes played a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with Tijuana's city police. Roberto was jailed a number of times. A conviction carried a stiff prison sentence, but trafficking was a tough charge to prove unless a
pollero
was caught in the act, by which time, he'd be on the inside. And migrants, who relied on their
pollero
for second and third attempts, should their crossing be thwarted, had no interest in squealing on the operation. Among the discomforts of jail, Roberto explained, was an enhanced interrogation technique called a
tehuacan
, something like waterboarding. The victim was gagged and inverted, and a well-shaken Coca-Cola was forced up his nose—a fizzy, painful, drowning experience that Roberto recalled as “not at all pleasant.”

The worst part for the smugglers doing jail time was the loss of business and relevance in the fast-changing field. On top of Central America's problems, a 1982 debt crisis in Mexico led to a period of economic collapse some describe as the “lost decade.” Things looked bright for a short time in the early 1990s, but just months after
NAFTA
was signed in 1994, Mexico was forced to devalue the peso by half, sending the country into another deep recession. Factory
work drew thousands to the border towns, but the poor wages and conditions promised a shortened life span. While Tijuana factories made 80 percent of the TVs sold in the United States, few of their builders could afford to buy one. From the hilltop shanties along the boundary, the decision to cross was an obvious one. Globalization had presented
el coyote
with a motivated clientele.

“We got together, the
polleros
of the area. We all needed to do something about the police—simply in order to work,” Roberto said. There was a council of eleven veteran
polleros
who sometimes made joint decisions. In this case, those who had a cop in their pocket were asked to share their contact and widen the net. “It was necessary to explain [to the police] that this business would continue with or without their help. Financially speaking, some of the police had already demonstrated the way in which we might be able to work together. And I can say, proudly, that we in Tijuana were the first to convince the police of that fact.”

Afterward, Roberto said, the beat cops would “happily” come get their commissions. And the
polleros
started working with less stress. “Of course,” he admitted, “we'd never tell the cops the truth about the number we were crossing, and we definitely never told them the exact amount we were charging.”

In 1995, Roberto crossed another Central American and put him on to a gardening job in Los Angeles—a contact he'd used a number of times. The business, as it turned out, had been sold to some people from the Philippines. In time, the new employers mentioned to Roberto's migrant that they wanted to bring their siblings over as well, but that they couldn't find the
pollero
who'd crossed them. “So my guy told the Filipinos about me. How he was able to convince them—because those people are extremely untrusting and good hagglers—I don't know. They called by phone. I had a hard time understanding. Can you believe that as soon as I had their siblings at my house they asked how much I wanted for my cat? ‘What do you
want it for?' I asked. ‘Well . . . to eat,' they told me. ‘Leave my cat alone,' I said. ‘I'll bring you another.'

“So I walked a few houses down where there's a lady with a load of cats and I took three. Then I went to the store with their grocery list and I bought everything they needed in order to cook their cats. And, believe me, they made a delicious meal. Seriously, I thought, ‘I have to take the Filipinos over right away or they're going to finish off my neighbors' cats—and mine too.' But listen, because of the gracious way I handled them, I still have work with the Filipinos to this day. I've also crossed Koreans—humble, friendly; Chinese—they're kind of fussy and obtrusive; and Cambodians—good people but they don't speak Spanish at all. I have to pay a translator in order to communicate with them.”

In short, Roberto became one of the
polleros viejos
, the old guard, who rose above the fray with their connections and mutual cooperation. Over the years, Roberto crossed a Disney's small world of clients over the fence, through tunnels, past customs stalls, and into airports with, albeit false, documentation. “You can't imagine how much I've enjoyed this,” he said. “It is work I love doing—the satisfaction I've given to thousands of families in the United States.”

Rooms were added to his house to accommodate international migrants in transit, and as his home literally grew, he brought family members from Sinaloa to stay with him in Tijuana. When the ranch was no longer as viable as it once had been, even Roberto's mother and father moved north. And eventually the youngest and most treasured sibling, his twenty-two-year-old sister Marta, joined the household. On the ranch, she'd been bookish, but in the city she took to wearing miniskirts and short blouses and quickly developed a reputation as a woman afraid of nothing. Roberto noted traces of the La Señora Diana. From the first day Marta arrived, he and his sister were inseparable. She went with
el coyote
everywhere—to the canyons, the slums, the bars. And in doing so, Marta learned the trade.

Roberto had the best recruiters and his work was bustling. “There were nights when I couldn't get through it all and she started to help out—organizing the people, transporting
pollos
, making crucial calls to
el levantón
, et cetera,” he said. “Marta had a knack for calming the nervous. And people paid very close attention when she gave instructions. The girl was tough.”

6

“I never saw a beat that was more interesting,” said reporter Janine Zúñiga.

On January 30, 2009, I came across a photo on the cover of the city daily that showed a man pushing two bikes down a dirt road. Another pictured a man inspecting a pile of them. From the sage and cobbles on the path, the terrain couldn't have been more distinct. My gaze flashed on two words in the subhead—“dumped bikes”—and I experienced a combustible, buzzing sensation brought on by both an instinctive rivalry with this newspaper writer and a grudging companionship in the pursuit:
there was another seeker in the valley
. And indeed, when I'd located Zúñiga through a mutual reporter friend, the river valley loomed in our conversation like a silent monument. Not only did I want to know what secrets she had coaxed from the valley, I wanted to know why she'd been looking at all.

An intrepid journalist, she'd worked for the Associated Press news agency in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas. But over the most significant decade of her career, Zúñiga covered South San Diego for the city's largest newspaper, the
Union-Tribune
. If not the focus of the metropolitan paper, the south county did offer considerable variety. It was by turns coastal, rural, international, and big city. Mountains crumbled into foothills. Desert wasteland gave way to
swamp. It included both the massive border complex at the intersection of two freeways and the tiny hamlet of San Ysidro caught in its shadows. There were a handful of small municipal governments to contend with. And then there was that great rambling valley, that little-known world rife with the remnants of the past.

In July, Zúñiga reported on the annual sandcastle contest—the US Open. She dutifully sat in on city council meetings and redevelopment schemes. She never slouched from menial civic matters but the predictable stories were often punctuated by curious events—the case of the strange tar balls that washed up on the Strand, for example, or the toddlers found wandering the streets of Chula Vista. One of her favorite reporting discoveries was a clutch of rare green turtles found basking in the warm water discharged by a South Bay power plant. There was petty larceny, like the robbery of a pizza deliveryman and, later, a gas station clerk. But when the drug wars began to heat up just across the border, Zúñiga's lens broadened. She cowrote a lengthy series about a fourteen-year-old cartel hit man who'd become infamous for beheading his victims. He was called El Ponchis, or Pudgy. He helped slay a cook, a gas station attendant, a student, and a small-businessman. And then the teen, Edgar Jimenez Lugo, was arrested as he attempted to flee Mexico and reunite with his mother in San Diego. What did this US-born kid's career reveal about Mexico, Zúñiga asked, or America? How many other boys and girls were caught between these two worlds?

In January of 2009, Zúñiga decided to drop by the Gomez place off Monument Road. She wanted to follow up on the flooding story she'd recently covered, and wondered how the cleanup was going. Plus, Zúñiga believed it was just good practice to keep in touch with her contacts. This visit served both purposes.