The Beast (22 page)

“But what if they keep following you?”

“That’s why I’m splitting. There are at least three Zeta spies hanging around the shelter. And I know they know I’m somewhere here. Now they’re looking for me.”

“And the Hondurans?”

“They’re coming with.”

“But you’re putting them in danger.”

“Gotta run, man, before I lose the signal. I’ll call you from Medias Aguas to see if we can arrange you know what. They’re following me. And you know who they are.”

I can see it clearly: I’ve just spoken to a man with a death wish. El Chilango has written his own epitaph: here lies a coyote who was killed by coyotes.

At dawn the shelter is empty. No trains arrive in the night. I don’t expect a call from El Chilango. If he really wanted even the slimmest chance for witness protection, he wouldn’t have left. But maybe he does have a chance. Maybe he can make it to the United States with the Hondurans, get paid, and then stay put a while up north.

Around noon my phone rings. I answer and hear the din of a market. Voices, the sound of something dragging along the ground, white noise.

“Heeey …” I hear. It’s just a whisper.

“Chilango?” I say. “Chilango?”

“Heeey … Help. They got me. We’re here in … Hey. Help …”

The call ends. I dial the number. It rings but nobody picks up. I try again. Try ten more times, then finally get a recording telling me that there’s no signal, that the number I’ve called is out of service.

For the next year after that encounter I ask my contacts about El Chilango. I ask about him in each of the shelters, all along the trail, asking coyotes, migrants, prostitutes. I describe him, his huge jaw, his thinning gray hair. But nobody has answers.

In November 2009 I make my last trip along the migrant routes. I travel to Ixtepec on top of a train from Medias Aguas, to see if the shelter and the surrounding area are still hot. I ask again about El Chilango. Nobody has seen him. I try his number again, just in case. It doesn’t even ring. There isn’t even a voice to tell me it’s out of service. There’s nothing but silence.

8
You Are Not Welcome in Tijuana: Baja California

Finally, far from Tijuana, after searching for the once classic northward passage, we come upon a place where we can cross without paying a narco tax, without confronting desert bandits, and without being surrounded by the Border Patrol. And yet what we find in this desolate place frightens us. We left walled Tijuana behind, we passed by Tecate, Tijuana’s wayward child, and then we stumbled upon the deadly trails of the undocumented. And we began to understand that even a border this long doesn’t have space enough for everyone, much less for those who are last in line
.

“I come here at least twice a week,” Epifanio tells me, not breaking his melancholic gaze away from the tops of the tall San Diego buildings, which he can see through the bars. We’re on the beach in Tijuana and Epifanio, a migrant originally from Oaxaca, has spent the last three months trying to get out of here. He wants to get over there, to the base of those San Diego buildings he can see in the distance. He wants to get with his family. Hugging the salt-corroded bars, he hardly has anything left to do but look. For to cross over, to walk a few hours up the beach … and give a hug to his brothers, Epifanio has come about twelve years too late.

The changes began back in 1997, when they started building this wall. Epifanio, still skinny even in his thirty-third year, could easily slip through these bars. Yet he doesn’t risk it. While we silently watch the horizon, a child crosses over to retrieve a ball that was kicked over the wall. On the other side of the bars
there are train rails buried vertically in the sand, the milky-coffee-colored surf of the ocean, and then the distant view of the city. It’s a beautiful view. A view that Epifanio has come to see at least once a week since he’s come north in his attempt to cross.

He’s imagined it dozens of ways. Some are simple: slip through the bars and race all the way to San Diego. Others are more complicated: take a deep breath, jump in the water, and swim for it. Or jump on a horse and gallop. Or ride a scooter over the bumpy desert and look to meet up with the hordes of other migrants on their way north. But he never works up enough courage. And he never will. Not here.

On the top of the nearby hillock, from what used to be called Friendship Park, at least two US Border Patrol agents keep an eye on the beach around the clock. There are also cameras, aquatic sensors, and horseback agents with binoculars. A child can slip over and get a ball, no problem. But to walk even fifty feet into their country, not a chance.

Places to hop over, like Epifanio had been expecting, don’t exist in Tijuana. They used to exist, but not anymore. There are photographs from the 1980s in which migrants scaling the fence are received by Border Patrol agents in Santa Claus outfits. The Santas were handing out gifts to the kids, letting the migrants pass. In one photograph you can see migrants in what was then known as Zapata Canyon. There was another photo of migrants on the US side, eating chicken’s feet in the dining hall known as “The Illegal.” They filled their bellies and then moved on, another forty-five minutes or so to San Diego. There was simply no wall back then. In the pictures, it seemed, everybody was smiling.

According to a photo study done at Tijuana’s Colegio de la Frontera Norte, in which borderline mounted cameras snapped pictures every few minutes, around eighty persons an hour would pass through this area back in the 1980s.

“I’m going over tonight,” Epifanio says, snapping back from his daydream. “I’m going to give it a shot outside of Tecate.”

Epifanio has been here for three months, day-working as a bricklayer to make money and constantly on the hunt for the best spot to cross, asking around. Where is it safest? Where can you steer clear of bandits? Where do the drugs go over? Where can you avoid getting kidnapped by the narcos? Where is there a spot left with no wall, no robbers, and no narcos?

Nobody has been able to answer this last question. So tonight Epifanio is going to try to cross outside of Tecate, where there is indeed a wall, where there are indeed robbers, and where there are definitely narcos.

He’s going to risk it because after having been gone from Oaxaca for three months, he’s starting to understand frontier reality. How the wall and new security technologies have enveloped and overtaken this border in the past twelve years. How everybody who wants to cross or get something across (migrants, narcos, and bandits) have been funneled to the few areas left where there are no walls and it’s not too far to run to a city or a highway on the US side. This means that many (migrants, narcos, and bandits) are crossing at the same points. It’s a game of chance, this border. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t.

Tijuana is where the wall starts its 1,800-mile trip. This wall is crossed by Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, and even Chinese. From here to Ciudad Juárez there are nearly 400 miles of walls, bars, or vehicle barriers, that funnel these people into the deserts. In Tijuana is where the routes that lead to some of the most violent cities in the world begin. And everybody (at least every migrant) is asking this one question: where is it safe to cross? And the answer is: nowhere. The US government has made sure of that.

Epifanio, without a word, turns again to stare at the gray buildings in the distance. Then he exhales and pushes himself away from the bars.

“Yeah,” he says. “Tonight. I got to get moving.”

It’s his farewell.

He goes up the ramp to the sidewalk that runs along the beach, but there he stops. As I start walking away, I see him sit down on a bench and turn to look back again over the wall. He doesn’t seem to notice the hubbub of the family picnicking beside him. Maybe he just wanted to get away from me, calm his thoughts, think of another way to get over without having to cross outside of Tecate. It’s a nice thought, but it’s an illusion.

TIJUANA—THE WALLED CITY

With the wall always in view, always snaking alongside the highway and climbing up the hills and flashing out between buildings, you have the feeling like somebody is turning their back on you. That somebody doesn’t want you around. The wall in these parts has two variants: a flat metallic fence, and a tall prison-like parade of parallel bars.

The shorter sections of the fence were constructed in late 1994 with scrap metal left over from the Gulf War. Broken tanks, downed helicopters, pieces of whatever material was blown to shreds while US missiles rained down on Saddam and his troops. It was in the new spirit of recycling: converting war trash into something useful, like a border fence.

These short fences are only about six feet tall, which means they’re pretty easy to jump. The barrier was installed to mark the sea change of border politics, stating that this is where one country ends and the next begins. And we, the fence also says, are those who control what and who crosses over. It was meant to slow, not stop, the crossing of migrants and drug mules, and to signal a permanent end to the era of Santa Claus Border Patrol agents.

But by 1997 politicians started realizing that a merely symbolic fence wasn’t effective: the symbol needed to be reinforced with reality and technology. That was when the modern wall was born. Fourteen miles of twelve-foot-high bars, between which not even the head of a child could slip. It was an actual obstacle this time,
not just a symbol. They also built a concrete canal for the Border Patrol trucks to drive through, plus stadium lights and cameras that are always on the watch. And still—the symbol intact—they left the old Gulf War fence in place.

This is how the deadly funneling started. The number of migrants getting caught in the Tijuana–San Diego corridor plummeted: fewer migrants and fewer coyotes were crossing there. One look at that new wall, and everybody started heading east. In 1996 the Border Patrol apprehended almost half a million people in this corridor. In 1997 the figure halved, down to 283,889. A decade later the number dropped to 142,104.

And yet the wall which led to the plummeting number of apprehensions had a bit of irony mixed into its steel. In 2008 a US federal judge fined Golden State Fencing, the subcontracted company that built large parts of the fence, $4 million for employing undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans.

What was a wire fence in 1980 was a metal wall in 1994, and then in that same year, with the promulgation of Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, the US government added floodlights, high-visibility cameras, and underground sensors, and tripled the number of Border Patrol agents. In 1997 President Clinton ordered yet another stage of construction, adding more sophisticated technology and more miles to the urban segments in California, Arizona, and Texas. Operation Jump Start, signed by Bush in 2007, bumped the number of Border Patrol agents from 12,000 to 18,000. Now, in 2012, there are over 21,000.

The evening is starting to come on. A cool wind picks up. About thirty migrants enter the Scalabrini migrant shelter, wearing thick coats. They’ve all been working as day laborers: bricklayers, errand boys, general handymen. Most of them, now sitting and waiting for their bowl of food, are Mexican. Almost none of them are going to try to cross. They’ve all been recently deported from the United States. Many haven’t been in their birth country for decades. Some of them barely even speak Spanish.

Father Luis Kendzierski, who runs the shelter, has been receiving and sending off migrants in Tijuana for nine years now. He describes the new situation: “For years Tijuana has been a city of deportees. Before, they used to come here to cross. Now they’re trying to figure out how to get back to their homes in Mexico.”

By
before
he means “before the wall.” Now he’s dealing with a patio full of down-and-outs—Mexicans lost in their own country. It’s a sight familiar to many who work along the border.

“Those who are planning to cross,” Kendzierski says, “go up to the hills on the outside of town, toward Tecate. That’s where the bandits are, the
asaltapollos
[chicken-muggers]. Just last week they killed a migrant in the outskirts of Tecate. These are some of the areas where you simply can’t cross without carrying drugs over. It’s all that’s left of these corridors. Ten years ago, this zone was a lot less fortified. Now migrants get pushed into the most dangerous areas.”

The funneling has changed everything for the migrants.

“Before,” Kendzierski continues, “about 30 percent of the people in the shelter were deportees, and the rest were on their way to cross. Now, about 90 percent are deportees. A short walk to the United States doesn’t exist anymore. Because of the danger, and as Tijuana is farther from southern Mexico than other parts of the border, hardly any Central Americans still come this way.”

It’s partly an argument of distance. From the Suchiate River, which marks the southwesternmost stretch of the border between Mexico and Guatemala, it’s over 3,000 miles to Tijuana. But although Tijuana is farther than other crossing points in Texas or even Arizona, a lot of Central Americans have family in Los Angeles, just a few hours north of San Diego. And San Diego and Tijuana are divided by just a few feet—a few feet and a wall—the two cities sharing what is known as the “kiss on the border.”

The proximity of LA is why, despite the difficulties and danger, some migrants still insist on crossing in Tijuana. Of the nine border sectors designated by the Border Patrol, the San Diego sector is
the smallest, a mere sixty miles. Yet it has the third highest number of agents, around 2,500, and from October 2007 to February 2008 the Border Patrol apprehended 54,709 undocumented migrants on their hike north from Tijuana. Only in the Tucson sector of Arizona, which has the highest number of agents, were more migrants caught.

Receiving apprehended migrants from other border sectors as well, Tijuana has also become a city of deportees. The Mexican National Institute of Migration (INM) calculates that about 900 persons are deported to the city every day. The US Department of Homeland Security deports migrants to Tijuana (in what is called lateral deportation) because it supposedly deters them from reattempting to cross by separating them from their coyotes and support groups. But deportations don’t just break up
pollo
and
pollero
. Even families are divided: a mother sent to Nogales, a father to Tijuana, an uncle to Juárez. Central Americans are usually flown all the way back to their country, which often means they have to wait a lot longer (sometimes months) in detention centers to get flown out and eventually released.