The Beast (33 page)

Two people are riding in a Grupo Beta truck (
mueble
, or piece of furniture, they call it in these parts). They’re both young. We
make signs for them to stop, but they accelerate. Then, some fifty feet ahead, after eyeing us and deciding that neither Edu nor I are drug traffickers, they slam on the brakes. Our conversation is short. They can’t talk, they assure us, not without prior authorization. And there’s nothing to talk about anyway, they say, there are no migrants and nothing else worth mentioning in Las Chepas, the ghost town.

These Grupo Beta agents are in charge of walking the area, looking for any disoriented migrants and, if they find them, handing out water and pointing out north from south. They don’t do much else. To let us shadow them to Las Chepas we’d have to go through a mess of calls, letters, and signatures sent to the National Migration Institute headquarters, located 1,000 miles from this wall. “But nothing goes on here anyway,” one of the agents repeats.

The road that takes us to where nothing goes on is a bumpy strip of dirt and rocks surrounded by desert on the Mexican and the US side, with the exception that on the latter grow small patches of peppers that can withstand the hard winters thanks to the laborers, fertilizers, and machinery of the Johnson family, who own a big farm here.

The road is a washboard, and a city car like this one would fall to pieces if we drove faster than fifteen miles per hour. Ten miles turns into a forty-five-minute drive. We get used to the idea that we’re traveling parallel to a wall we could easily hop over and be in the States. For migrants, of course, the difficulty lies in getting deep into the country, not just nudging it with a toe.

We see signs of life.

The official name of this ranch town is Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez. Josefa was a Mexican heroine who fought on the side of the Creoles against the Spanish. But everybody here calls it Las Chepas, The Humps. Of the fifty houses, only about fifteen are still completely standing. We knock on three doors before one opens.

A woman of about sixty answers. On the doorframe is a Coca-Cola sign and a small bell. Evelia Ruiz looks us up and down and asks what we want. It’s a hard question to answer. How do we start: by asking if everyone else in town is dead, if she’s the last one left, if even the migrants and narcos have jumped ship? The rare visitors to town have a reason to be there. So, unable to think of anything else, we ask if she still sells Cokes.

“I think I got a few,” Evelia responds, inviting us into her small front room and closing the door. She ends up having five Cokes left, plus three bottles of water and a few dozen little candies.

Evelia tells us her basic story. She’s lived here for thirty-two years. That is, she came five years before the Mexican government offered, in 1971, eight hectares to any family willing to take a shot farming this unforgiving land. Evelia explains, in few words, that back in 2007 there were seven stores in town. Now there are two stores, both of which sell “about one or two things a week” to either Grupo Beta workers, or soldiers who appear out of nowhere hunting narcos among the rubble.

She tells us that when the migrants were passing more regularly through town, in 2005 through early 2007, she would sell more in a day than she sells now in a month. And, she says, when she sells the last of her stock she’s going to close up shop.

As we’re speaking, her older sister, who also lives in the house, watches us from a back table. It seems obvious that Evelia doesn’t trust us.

Besides Coke, the other name brand flashing around town, though with an antiquated logo, is Fanta. We decide to go to the Fanta store, which is next to the derelict, roofless school and about four blocks from Evelia’s house. After we ring about twenty times, an old, lonely looking man opens the door. This time we ask to buy a bottle of water.

When seventy-five-year-old José Ortiz returns through the wooden door with the water, he asks, rather shyly, “What are you looking for here?” We explain ourselves.

“Migrants?” he responds. “No. They’re none left. They
moved on. Sometimes one passes through, but not often.” We ask how much longer he’s going to run his store, but he interrupts. “This isn’t a store. It used to be. Now I just live on my pension. Sometimes I’ll sell a lamb in Palomas, but I’m just selling off the little I have left.”

It seems hard to believe that he’s still getting rid of what’s been stocked up for two years.

“Well,” he explains, “back in June about forty-five soldiers set up in the old school to make sure drugs weren’t passing through. Business surged a bit when they were here.”

He’s referring to the federal program known as Operation Chihuahua, which sends the army to drug-trafficking hot zones. It started in 2005 when the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, complained to the governor of Chihuahua, José Reyes Baeza, that narcos and their drugs, as well as
polleros
and their undocumented migrants, were launching crossing expeditions from shacks on the Chihuahua side of the border.

Speaking in Las Chepas in 2006, Governor Baeza qualified it as “a problem of public security,” and Richardson approved. That year, detention of undocumented crossers shot up 36 percent in the hitherto little-patrolled New Mexico sector. Seizures of marijuana reached an all-time high: more than fifty-six tons.

“Now there are only old folks here,” José Ortiz says. “Sixteen seniors left in Las Chepas,” he specifies. “There was life here before, though. It used to be good business selling to the migrants passing through.”

In 1986 Las Chepas had its highest historical population, a total 486 inhabitants. Taking advantage of governmental agriculture incentives, residents started cultivating sorghum, corn, alfalfa, and wheat. The US government even offered to legalize everyone in town. That was the first big migration. The younger residents were especially content to be legalized, and many of them worked on the large Johnson farm on the other side. But half of the residents, mostly older, stayed behind. Then in the 1990s government assistance waned, eventually petering to nothing, and at the start
of the new century there were only seventy-five people left in Las Chepas, most of them finding ways to continue to farm.

But the
before
referred to by José Ortiz, as he was leaning against his doorframe, was before 2005 when the flux of migrants, Central American and Mexican, found a nearby crossing route and started coming by the hundreds. With this bonanza the stores reopened, farmers had money for fertilizers, and the harvest came back to town. The townsfolk even held a celebration meal.

“Now they say that this is a ghost town,” José tells us. “We who are left have roots in this ground. Nobody is going to buy us out, either. We don’t want to give away or leave behind for the wind to blow away what we worked so hard to put together. Now nobody comes through here. Just take a look at the shape of the road from Palomas.”

Two years ago, that same road looked very different. A neighbor of José, a man originally from Michoacán, would charge a tax to the buses full of migrants on their way into town. At least ten buses came every day, each of them carrying about sixty migrants. The man from Michoacán ran his thriving business from a sidewalk. Now he lies below one of the fifty crosses in the town cemetery, which lies a half a mile straight into the desert.

“They killed him a year ago. The mafia came and machine-gunned him in his own house. It seemed like he had some business with them,” José remembers. “Now nobody pays this street any mind at all.”

We ask José where we can find more people. He points us to the house of Erlinda Juárez and we say goodbye to José, promising to return.

This house is the tidiest in town. We don’t even have to knock more than once. Erlinda, who is sixty-eight, had already spotted us through her window, where she commonly spies for prowlers. We explain ourselves and, under her suspicious gaze, chat for a minute on her doorstep. Then she decides to invite us in for a coffee.

Her dining table, built into the wall up against the window, as well as the pastel curtains pulled aside to let in the afternoon light, give the room the air of a dollhouse. The interior of her house contrasts sharply with the rubbled exterior. Halfway through our coffee, Ignacio, Erlinda’s seventy-year-old husband, returns from the fields. He is still sweating from a day of baling hay, which he’ll later try to sell in Palomas.

Hesitant to talk about migrants, Erlinda does admit that
los chepenses
, the locals, have been accused of trafficking both people and drugs. To a Salvadoran man who came into town with bloodied feet a year and a half ago, a few chepenses gave a pair of shoes. And to a Honduran woman who witnessed her traveling companion die of dehydration on a day when the temperature overshot a hundred degrees, a few chepenses gave food and assistance. That’s all, or that’s all that people say.

“This isn’t even a good place to cross,” Erlinda reasons. “With sandstorms in the winter and the infernal heat of the summer, there’s no easy season. Plus the Border Patrol is always on the alert now. They have a balloon in the air that they use to watch over the hills. Plus they have horses, ATVs, helicopters, and highway checkpoints.”

The checkpoint is on Interstate 10, the US highway that runs from Las Cruces to Tucson. For a migrant to even reach the highway from Las Chepas, he or she needs to trudge over forty miles across the desert. And despite Erlinda’s claims, this is without doubt one of the main routes for the undocumented to reach pickup points from where they will be ferried to Los Angeles, Houston, or San Francisco. But it’s more than a question of distance these days. Since Governor Richardson complained about Las Chepas and the Mexican army moved in, migrants have more than just the desert to contend with.

“Plus,” chimes Ignacio, “there’s the mafia.”

The mafia. It seems that everywhere on this border there’s the mafia, the narcos, organized crime. There’s no longer a crossing point along the border where you can avoid talking
about the mafia. And it is the mafia that brings our talk to an end.

“You should get going before the sun goes down,” Erlinda tells us. “At night here there’s no traffic. Nothing but crooks and robbers watching you from the hills. And they’ll definitely spot your unfamiliar car.”

We start on the road back to Palomas, pausing for Edu to take a photograph. We see a white Nissan Pathfinder halfway up on the shoulder, right against a guardrail. When we approach we find that both its doors are open, and the windshield is riddled with bullet holes. We later discover that it’s been there since last October 6, when an Army Humvee tried to stop it for a traffic check. The driver of the Pathfinder didn’t want to stop. He speeded up, but only made it as far as this ditch. The driver and single passenger, according to the newspaper
El Siglo de Torreón
, escaped on foot, leaving a cache of weapons in the vehicle: three Kalashnikovs with twenty-one cartridges, a grenade launcher, two shotguns with seventy-nine shotgun shells, two grenades, three pistols, two rifles, 4,168 pistol and rifle cartridges, eight bulletproof vests, ten military helmets, a gas mask, nine pistol holsters, plus a few AFI uniforms.

So the migrants may have gone, but the narcos have stuck around.

As we inspect the bullet-riddled Pathfinder, a Border Patrol agent in his SUV, parked just beyond the vehicle barriers, watches us from the US side. After a few minutes we take off.

The sun rose six hours ago. Again we’re driving over the rugged, washboard road on the way to Las Chepas. There’s nothing but the wall, the wind, the wall, a few swallows, and again the wind, and the wall, all the way until we arrive.

We knock on the first door we come to, the store that is no longer a store, owned by José Ortiz. No response. We try Erlinda and Ignacio’s house: same thing. It’s like on our first visit, when all we found was the whistling wind and a huffing horse. It seems we’re seeing Las Chepas on its deathbed.

But no. The only death that day was that of Gonzalo Apodaca Ruiz. He died of cirrhosis twenty-five days after his father, Francisco Apodaca Ruiz, expired in the same house. One more empty shack. Fifteen inhabitants left.

At forty-nine, Apodaca was one of the two young people in the community. His father died at seventy-nine. The younger Apodaca hadn’t been seen for a few days. They say he shut himself in, as he often did, to drink tequila. Only this time he never came out, not until José Ortiz found him dead.

Every single chepense went to the cemetery to see Apodaca buried, and they were now driving back through the desert in the vans of the Juárez and Quintana families. The Quintana family, with its three members, makes up one fifth of the population: Arturo, the sixty-three-year-old father, Margarita, the fifty-two-year-old mother, and their son José, who at twenty-two years old is now the only young person in the community that his grandad founded, along with Erlinda and Ignacio. José is a chubby, cheerful young man with a thin mustache. The Quintanas’ older son didn’t want to stick around. Now he lives in Palomas.

Yesterday, before we left town, José waved at us as he was coming out of his house and stopped by our car to chat. He soon became tense, looking sidelong at a green backpack sitting in the back seat. Not paying attention to anything we were saying, he stared at it as if trying to guess what it contained; he couldn’t know it only held photography equipment.

When we put his mind at rest he grinned and said, “You guys looked suspicious to me. I saw you in that tiny car and with that suitcase in back.” He laughed, then invited us to his house for coffee.

The Quintana family, Erlinda, Ignacio, and José Ortiz are seated at the table when we come in. They’ve owned the house (where a lamb is dozing in the corner) since 1971. Though José Ortiz hardly speaks, Margarita takes it upon herself to chatter away everyone’s stories.

Las Chepas appeared in some Mexican newspapers in 2006, when surveillance in the area started increasing and all the chepenses were described as coyotes or drug traffickers. Margarita is the most outspoken in defending Las Chepas. She was the one who, in 2006, stood before the tractors that the governor of Chihuahua had sent to demolish the community.