The Beast (34 page)

“We’re good people here,” she says, “living off cattle and whatever we get sent. We all have family on the other side—thanks to that law they passed in the eighties. The papers have made me out to be a
pollera
. But that’s nonsense! Migrants make me anxious, they leave so much trash everywhere, and sometimes the cattle eat it and get poisoned.”

Arturo, her husband, quietly observes and smokes one cigarette after another as Margarita chatters on. He has US papers, and works as a welder and bricklayer on the other side every time his union finds him a temporary job with a US company. When he chips in he’s an outspoken northern-style man, who always sounds as if he’s scolding you.

“What happened here,” he grumbles, “is that they put too much pepper on the beans, that’s what. They put the military just the other side of the wall, only paying attention to Las Chepas, even though there are so many other little towns around here.”

Sure, there are more towns: like the community of Los Lamentos, where last we heard only Don Pascual was left. Or Sierra Rica and Manuel Gutiérrez, other tiny places farther out, of which no one here has any news. More ghost towns. With roads snaking up the mountains, where it’s impossible to travel without a four-wheel drive. And as it’s mafia turf, chepenses don’t recommend the trip. Margarita warns: “That little car you guys have would be easily flagged by the mafia lookouts.”

When George Bush approved operation Jump Start in 2006 (which ended in 2008) 6,000 National Guard forces were sent to the border. Since then, and up until a few months ago, soldiers entrenched on the nearby mountain were the nearest neighbors of Las Chepas.

Arturo, Margarita, José Ortiz, and the young José do not look like coyotes to us, and we say so. It’s hard to imagine that Arturo at his age could stand the long walks a coyote signs up for. And José, who’s young but overweight, works at the customs office in Palomas, and seems too good-natured to fit the profile. After reassuring them with these impressions, the Quintana family pulls out more stories.

“Well, people would come, money in hand,” Margarita recalls, “so some of us worked driving buses, others had fast-food carts. Up to 300 migrants came every day.”

But when I ask if they wish the migrant flow would come back, Arthur takes the floor: “No, no. You couldn’t live in peace.” And his wife chimes in: “Gringos used to come over here to pick on migrants, they’d jump over the wall to chase after them, and there’s no justice to that.” With the migrant flow came unrest: migrants died, and so did a resident of Las Chepas.

“It was Don Apolinar,” Margarita says. “We rented him that small house across the street.” I look across the street but see only rubble—four crooked walls surrounding heaps of trash and bed fixings left over from passing squatters.

“On their way to the US all the way from Honduras!” she says about the squatters. She adds, “Don Apolinar warned us about a gringo who would jump over the wall and threaten him. Don Apolinar was crossing migrants then. That was his job. One day in 2006 as he was crossing a group he stopped by my food cart for a bite to eat. A little later, three of the young men he was guiding from Honduras came by again, and told me a big white guy with blue eyes had killed Don Apolinar.”

All that’s left of him, this dead man, is a cross on the hill, marking the spot where he fell.

New Mexico and Arizona are the two states with the most civilian-run border militias hunting migrants. The Minutemen, describing themselves as patriots, are the ones who gave new currency to the idea of civilian vigilantes.

~

We finish our coffee, and José, the youngest Quintana, decides to go with us to the cemetery, where we want to photograph Apodaca’s grave while it’s still light. The back road we take is in even worse shape than the washboard of a path we’d traveled on earlier, and the cemetery we find is little more than a handful of crosses in the middle of the desert hills. It’s already getting dark when, as we’re about to start heading back, we notice the puddle of transmission fluid under the car. There’s no other option but to hoof it. Hiking through the brush and the burs on the way back to Las Chepas, we chat with José.

He’s warmed up to us by now, and gives us his view of the ghost towns. “I want to get out of here,” he says, “but my pop says I need to stay, because he needs help with the house. My brother already lives in Palomas. They let him leave when he got married. But I’m young still, and there’s nobody but old folks here. And nothing happens. I need to go out for drinks once in a while, go to bars, have a life.”

Palomas, though, isn’t much more than a small highway town either. It has two restaurants, five cantinas, and a few unpaved roads surrounding its small central plaza. Compared with Las Chepas, Palomas is a big city.

Back in town, the Quintana family offers to let us to stay the night in their house. Arturo has already towed our car with his pickup, and we plan on seeing if we can get it running again tomorrow. They serve us a dinner of beans and potatoes and tell us about life in rural northern Mexico. Their stories sound surreal to us, as if they’re from another century.

Trying to describe the feel of the region, Arturo reminisces about a murder in Los Lamentos. A cowboy, rounding up his cattle outside of town, approached a ranch house and asked the owner if he could use his stove to heat some water for his instant soup. The rancher showed him in just as another cowboy came to ask the same favor, to heat some soup. The second cowboy ended up using the first’s hot water. There was a discussion; the second cowboy suggested that the first cowboy merely heat more water;
but, his pride wounded, the first cowboy took out his gun and shot the second cowboy in the head.

“That’s desert people for you,” Arturo explains, opening a bottle of tequila. “Rough.”

After Arturo pours a round and Margarita leaves for bed, we ask him again if he’d like the migrants to come back to town. And maybe it’s the tequila, or because the family finally believes that we’re not coyotes ourselves, but he admits something we hadn’t heard before: that it was the departure of the migrants that turned this place into a ghost town.

Arturo tells us that up until the end of 2005 his son José didn’t work with customs, he drove a truck for migrants on their way from Palomas.

“There were sixty each trip,” José puts in. “Each migrant paid fifty pesos. That’s almost five dollars a head. And, only spending about one hundred pesos on diesel, I was taking home about a hundred dollars a day, plus what the owner of the bus gave me on top.”

Now José earns twenty-five dollars a day as a customs guard, sometimes having to work as long as forty-eight hour shifts.

Arturo serves another round of tequila. We wonder about Margarita.

“How was it for her?”

“Oh, it was gooood,” Arturo sings his northern-accented response. “I tell you, back in those years,” 2005–6, “we never had less than 300 people passing through every day. Sometimes there were as many as 600. Some of us would be renting out rooms, others, like José Ortiz and Evelia Ruiz, working their stores, then Erlinda and my wife selling lunches, and then some others who aren’t around anymore worked transporting people, taking them up into the hills. The whole place was a big market. Each migrant put fifteen or twenty pesos into the town. Sometimes my wife would make as much as 6,000 pesos a day.”

After such nostalgic musing, he pours the last round of the night.

“Yeah,” José chimes in, “my pop even bought himself a truck. Isn’t that right, Pop?”

“Yep, but that’s history now,” his pop responds.

When Arturo went to the States, we learn, to buy and legalize his truck for transporting migrants from Palomas to Las Chepas, it was almost 2007. Governor Richardson had already asked the governor of Chihuahua to put a stop to the migrants flowing out of Las Chepas. Bush’s Operation Jump Start had already sent National Guard troops to the border to assist the Border Patrol. The flow of migrants was already dwindling.

Arturo had taken a risk. He usually made about $1,000 for each job his union found him in the United States. His son convinced him that a new truck would be the best investment he could make with his savings. Back then José was forking over sometimes as much as 7,000 pesos a day (almost $700) to the owner of the truck he was driving.

“And then,” Arturo says, putting a cap on the night, “everything stopped. Las Chepas stopped existing. We’re not even on the maps of Chihuahua anymore.”

It was getting cold. The wind outside was whistling through the ruins of the town.

The next day, thanks to the family’s help, we fixed up the car—a few taps of the hammer and some soldering—enough to get us back to Palomas.

As we thanked the family for their hospitality, Arturo held out his large calloused hand to us, and said, in all sincerity: “If you see some migrants in those parts, tell them to come back.”

13
Juárez, Forbidden City: Chihuahua

Why, we asked ourselves when we first arrived in Juárez, has such a long-standing crossing zone, so close to El Paso, died? Yet after just one day in this city known as the most violent city in the world, our question was simplified. What the hell is going on here? Thanks to anonymous testimonies we were able to sketch out an answer in the form of a travel journal. A day-to-day log marked by gunshots, the wall, the narcos, the dead, the deported, as well as the few and frightened Central Americans who still come to this deadly city
.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31

El Paso del Norte International Bridge, better known as the Santa Fe Bridge, spits out dozens of deported Mexicans. It’s a busy day. Every Friday at five o’clock in the afternoon, airplanes from all over the United States land in El Paso, Juárez’s sister city. Undocumented migrants are unloaded from these planes and driven down to the bridge that circumvents the border wall. They emerge disoriented, with a plastic bag in hand that holds a copy of the papers ordering them out of the country. Some hardly speak Spanish and use Spanglish to ask how to reach their hometown, which they may hardly remember. Some have no family in Mexico at all.

“Seventeen years over there,” says one young man, turning, stupefied, to look down Juárez Avenue.

There’s an immense difference between one side of the bridge and the other.

Grupo Beta agents offer the deported men and women transportation. A volunteer driver suggests going to a shelter run by Dominican friars. I can tell that for a few of them, it’s hard to take those first few steps away from the Santa Fe Bridge. They stare into the distance, into their home country. A few, however, dressed like
cholos
,
¹
plow forward with confidence, swaggering in their bright sneakers and loose pants, decked out with earrings and huge, swinging chains. The few sporting gray pants and a gray sweatshirt have just been let out of prison for serious felonies, such as attempted murder. Others are in field laborers’ garb, thick long-sleeved button-down shirts and cotton pants. These guys have been caught in the act of trying to cross, and it’s rare that they’re younger than forty. The minority group is made up of over-fifties who came to the United States in the 1980s or early 90s, when there wasn’t yet a wall. When Juárez wasn’t what it is.

Some 6,000 Mexicans are deported every month by the El Paso customs office. On Friday evenings it looks like a school parking lot at the end of the day, with people rushing out the doors or waiting for their ride.

Currency exchange dealers mob the freshly deported migrants, hollering their offers. They circle the migrants as if they were tourists at a market, knowing that any money they have left from
el otro lado
, the other side, needs to be changed into pesos. Rodrigo, one of these dealers, dresses in orange, just like the Grupo Beta agents, to try to confuse migrants who are looking for advice. The three young women who work for him, wearing tiny shorts and shirts that show off their dark legs and belly buttons, take migrants by the arm and walk them to the exchange house.

“We only charge you 3 percent, we do it to help more than anything else,” Rodrigo lies as he pockets 8 percent as tariff.

Still, on this street, options have to be measured by their degree of evil; the corner shop keeps thirty of every hundred dollars.
But the technique there is more sophisticated. The fat woman responsible for luring migrants in tries to convince them that it’s the only place to get pesos. “They’re all swindlers who bribe the authorities,” Rodrigo complains, suspiciously eyeing the shop. The owner, a tall skinny man with gray hair and an enormous, hawkish nose mounted on his gaunt face, films us with a small video camera.

“He always does that,” Rodrigo explains. “It’s to intimidate us so we won’t work this corner.” The giant’s threat has nothing to do with showing the video to authorities, at least not for legal purposes. Rodrigo has a license to do his work. The threat is more along the lines of,
I’m going to show your face to so-and-so and he’s going to smash it if you keep taking away my customers
. Rodrigo has already suffered two beatings: one from the police, who accused him of resisting arrest (though he asserts that they came up to him already intent on attack), and another from a group of gangsters who waited for him on a corner a couple of blocks away.

“Beware of the police,” Father Jose Barrios, director of the Juárez migrant shelter, warned Edu Ponce and me as we parted ways a few hours ago. “And beware of the thieves who roam around here. They’re in it together. They’re the ones robbing migrants.”

When people talk about the danger in these parts, they don’t mean a young man who tries to snatch a purse away from an unsuspecting passerby. The fear here is sown by the police and by the drug traffickers. No one can trust anyone. Three hundred city police positions were taken over by national military forces this past October. Only those few agents who passed some obscure test of trustworthiness are still working. And, according to Father Barrios, people should still be wary of them, even though most do nothing but act as chauffeurs for the military.