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was by
housing
them. Therefore they slept in the brush, under trees, in cardboard boxes. The nights in San Diego County can get cold.

And it came to pass that labor organizers and farmers did much shouting into the wind. The farmers said that if they must pay and house American workers (assuming they would
do
stoop labor) a strawberry would cost what you now pay for an avocado. An avocado would cost what you now pay for a Mercedes. And so forth. And Chicano activists entered the picture and argued that the American government could not separate a Chicano from a Mexican (with which most native Mexicans would disagree) and called the frontier "The Vietnam of the Southwest." The director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had, by 1976, publicly commented that the alien situation appeared almost hopeless, far beyond the control of his uniformed force, the U.S. Border Patrol.

In the summer of 1976 Dick Snider was forty-five years old, too old to be lurking around the boonies, they said. Pretty dopey, they said, to be taking the department's four-wheeldrive Ford Bronco to clatter up into those godforsaken canyons, one mile and one century away from the Southern Division substation of the San Diego Police Department. But he did it with ever more frequency, usually alone, and pondered the fate of those pollos being brutalized out there in the darkness as he lay concealed in foxtail grass and cactus and tumbleweeds.

Sometimes in the late afternoons, while he watched the multitude of aliens gathering on the mesas and plateaus waiting for sunset, he would see groups of Mexican schoolchildren being led across the invisible line by teachers conducting excursions into the canyons for flora and fauna. Oil-rich jojoba beans grew wild. Wild anise flourished, and scrub oak, stunted and tough, relentlessly surviving. And everywhere the threat of cholla cactus. Dick Snider watched through binoculars the throngs who played soccer and baseball and bought tamales and soda pop from the Tijuana "roach wagons" which also came to take a buck or two from the pollos before the canyon crossing.

He watched children with empty jars, and milk cartons full of water, flooding the burrows of tarantulas and scorpions, capturing the wretched creatures alive to peddle to Americans in the bars or to Mexican entrepreneurs who ensconced them in plastic molds to sell to tourists as paperweights.
Everything
was for sale to Americans in the border city. It was not more than a short walk from a low-rent hotel where a young border patrolman once occupied the bridal suite. And in essence, he was still contemplating the same dilemma: the aliens.

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It occurred to him that almost nothing had changed in all those years. It was as though, well, something as uncoplike as
destiny
had marked him, linking him to this place, near that imaginary line. But there had been
one
change in recent years: the bandit gangs. And it was insupportable to him that some pollos were actually attacked within screaming distance of his substation. Even Deadman's Canyon was barely one mile (and one century) away.

It didn't seem to trouble very many other people. After all, they were
illegal
aliens, criminals by definition. But some of the criminals were only three years old, and some were younger. And the bandits were not sentimental about mothers and babes. Finally he became obsessed with the incongruity of it. This was the prosperous, beautiful, touristfilled city of San Diego, U.S.A. His city. His outrage agitated the cerebral cortex where ideas live. And one came to him.

The best way to convince bureaucrats of anything is to quote statistics. Police administrators can toss around more numbers than baseball managers. And like baseball managers, pollsters, politicians, or Pentagon generals, they can make statistics do just about whatever they wish. But there are certain statistics which even the most resourceful police pencil pusher would have trouble explaining away. One is homicide. There
is
a dead body on your beat or there
isn't
. And too many of them were turning up around an imaginary line which Dick Snider had long believed was used to divide two economies. No one knew for sure how many murders actually occurred on American soil, because there were verified episodes of bereaved pollos carrying their slain husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children, back over to the Mexican side for burial. And every cop who has ever worked among illegal aliens knows that pollos assaulted in the night would not routinely report the crime to the U.S. authorities, since these people generally feared the authorities of both countries, not to mention deportation. Therefore, the San Diego police statisticians only got wind of the Crimes where the Border Patrol or police stumbled upon some victim who had been gutted like a fish, or hamstrung by the bandit wolf packs, sometimes making bloody circles in the dust before bleeding to death. Sometimes raped so brutally that hospitalization was required prior to deportation. The
real
body count was anybody's guess.

Dick Snider finally tired of crawling around those canyons at midnight, listening to gunshots and cries in the darkness. He remembered the old Border Patrol days when they used to track one alien ten miles because illegal entry was then considered a big deal. He wondered if nowadays any overworked, frustrated, dung-shoveling border patrolmen unconsciously approved of the Tijuana bandits for culling the migrants in no-man's-land. In fact, he wondered how many ordinary compassionate citizens would tolerate the bandit gangs, who probably scared away a fair number that might otherwise have joined the ragtag migratory battalions of the night.

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That year the U.S. Border Patrol was estimating that they would arrest more than 250,000

aliens. The wishful statistic they always gave to the press was that they probably caught one third. Which the cops called "a hallelujah batting average." Prosecuting aliens for illegal entry was a nightmare. After three or four arrests it was possible to get a conviction for a misdemeanor, which
might
mean five days in jail. Reentry after formal deportation was technically a felony, but very hard to prove. The Border Patrol investigator would have to get certification of the existence or nonexistence of records in Washington. Aliens are rarely fingerprinted, don't carry identification, and often change their names on later tries, so it was nearly impossible to prove identities. If the Border Patrol caught 10 percent of all pollos, they were doing remarkably well, the cops figured. Border patrolmen talked wistfully of
La Ley de Fuga
, The Law of Flight. If you flee you are shot. The law of Mexico. The law of
many
"developed" countries. But alien smugglers have been known to make a million dollars a year.

It's lucrative, and everyone knew that if the aliens were somehow miraculously all rounded up, half the restaurants from San Diego to the Oregon border would have to serve buffet style on paper plates. And wealthy Californians would suddenly be washing their own cars and cutting their own grass and cleaning their own houses and tending their own children. And who in the hell would pick the crops? And what of the small factories? And what would happen to the garment industry? And so forth.

So with this incredibly complicated headache, only too familiar to the people of San Diego living just north of that imaginary line, it wouldn't do for Dick Snider to approach the police administration with do-gooder talk about the tragedies inflicted by bandit gangs. The way to approach it was to present cold, incontrovertible
numbers
, and to tell the police administration how he could make those big numbers get smaller.

It wasn't easy, in that things move very slowly in a bureaucracy. At first the brass was not particularly troubled by the numbers. But the reported alien crimes, which Dick Snider had always estimated to be a tenth of the actual occurrences, were causing some damage to the overall portrait of "America's Finest City" whose tourist bureau touted the most temperate climate on earth. A city where tourism was huge. A great retirement community and an enormous military base. Very unlike the bigger city "up the road"— meaning Los Angeles—San Diego was advertised as being lovely and smog-free. And
safe
. But the San Diego Police Department daily occurrence sheets were telling another story:
Saturday, 2300 hours. Spring Canyon, alien robbery. Two males armed with a gun. Three
victims.

Saturday, 2100 hours, Deadman's Canyon, three suspects, two victims. Knives and machetes
used.

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Wednesday, 2000 hours. Alien robbery, E-2 Canyon. Clubs and rocks used. Ten victims. Five
suspects.

And the aliens were not only being robbed by bandit gangs, but
others
were finding the pollos too tempting to resist:

Wednesday, 1930 hours, alien robbery, Monument Road. Three victims. Armed Tijuana
police officer ambushed them.

Wednesday, 2245 hours, alien robbery. Three victims. Monument Road. Border Patrol
interrupted robbery. Tijuana auxiliary policeman (unarmed) in custody. Other uniformed
officer (armed) escaped into Mexico.

Friday, 0700 hours. Alien robbery. Suspects were two Tijuana police officers. Victim struck in
face, threatened with gun, maced in eyes.

Thursday, 2230 Hours, alien robbery. Three victims robbed in gully by two male suspects
dressed in tan Tijuana police uniforms.

Then the robberies began getting steadily more ferocious, the log entries more grim:
Wednesday, 0950 hours. Body found 1/2 mile east of Hollister, 200 feet north of border fence.
Male, Mexican, 30's, throat cut.

Friday, 1430 hours. Border Patrol found body on mesa near mouth of Spring Canyon. Badly
decomposed male.

Tuesday, second watch. Border Patrol says Tijuana Police Department notified them of
murder by soccer field in Spring Canyon, 0100 hours.

If the pollos were lucky enough to run the gauntlet in canyons, there awaited the MexicanAmerican youth of San Ysidro. Who could resist? The pollos were so timid.
So easy
:
Wednesday, 2300 hours, alien robbery, San Ysidro View Park. Victim struck from behind.
Face beaten in. Hospitalized.

Friday, alien robbery, 0100 hours, 8 male susps, 17-20 years. Armed with knives and clubs.
Two victims and their children robbed.

And if the pollos were lucky enough (and fit enough) to outrun the bandit gangs in the canyons, or the moonlighting Tijuana cops, or the Mexican-American youth gangs, or the helicopters and four-wheeled vehicles of
la migra
, they found other perils awaiting them in their crossing:

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Saturday, third watch, Interstate 5 under pedestrian bridge. Alien struck while running
across freeway.

Monday, third watch, Otay Mesa Road, vehicle ran over fleeing alien. Broken pelvis.
Saturday, third watch. Another alien hit by car on Highway 805, running across freeway.
Taken to Bay General. Not expected to live.

And if the male aliens managed to survive the bandits in the canyons and the moonlighting Mexican cops, and the Mexican-American youth gangs, and the speeding cars, there were additional perils for females between the ages of ten and seventy:
Sunday, 2300 hours, Border Patrol chopper interrupted gang rape. Five suspects. Spring
Canyon.

And so forth. There were some San Diego police administrators starting to get a very large headache from these statistical entries, and the last thing in the world I needed while they pondered the border phenomenon civilian pressure. But that's exactly what they got. Articles started appearing with regularity in the San Diego newspapers:

Sixteen-year-old has spinal cord cut

Seventh alien robbery this week

During the summer, investigative reporters interviewed a Mexican-American youth gang member in San Ysidro for his lurid account of alien robberies. In a short career he had beaten and robbed countless victims, and raped fifteen alien women, one for every year of his life.

By midsummer 1976 the Tijuana mayor was sweating out all the reports of his police officers ambushing aliens on American soil. A spokesman for Mayor Fernando Marquez Arce told U.S. reporters: "We are sure these are bandits impersonating Tijuana police and not members of our department. There are stores in Tijuana where uniforms resembling police uniforms can be bought and we are sure there are people buying these and posing as police."

Finally, by summer's end Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez addressed the U.S. government on the fate of pollos being robbed, beaten, raped and murdered at the American border.

He said: "They deserve the respect accorded to human beings by every civilized society," and he added that the "attitude of the Mexican government has been and will continue to be uncompromising" on the safety of these aliens. ( And while some U.S. citizens said who gives a shit what some boss beaner in Mexico City found "uncompromising," there were file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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those in Washington who listened to everything in Mexico City these days. The beaners at last had something the gringos
needed
at this point in history: oil. No one knew how much as yet, but it was there.
Oil
!

So, with ever more frequency the San Diego press and the national press began to pay attention to the reports of border bandits, and in virtually every local article and every television interview (sometimes three a week) there was some statement by one Southern Division lieutenant named Burl Richard Snider.