Authors: Oscar Martinez
For the first time, now after midnight, we prodded Marroquín. We’d been making rounds for nine hours without undertaking a single migrant detention operation. We wanted a border agent to report a migrant group crossing. Then we’d be able to see just how unrelenting the Border Patrol is in this daily game. Then we’d be able to see just how a group of undocumented migrants with no water, little food, and such bodily exhaustion confront a group of agents in this sector who can’t complain of a lack of equipment: twenty-eight helicopters, including three AStar B3s, considered the most capable machines at ground-level flights and landings in inhospitable areas; nine Cessna planes; 140 horses; 1,800 motor vehicles; and a slew of cameras, radars, and land sensors that can’t be named due to security reasons.
Marroquín said she’d fulfilled her promise, but couldn’t do much more. We’d seen the daily routine. The minute by minute that is sometimes exciting and sometimes silent.
We all piled back into her SUV. Marroquín was determined to join a “tracking” squad, following the trail of a group of migrants walking in the desert.
“Let’s go to Bear Valley,” she said. “If someone’s moving there at this hour, they’re up to something illegal.”
We drove toward Montana Camp, which is in the middle of Bear Valley, a landscape of trees and dirt roads. When we arrived at the mobile base, there was nothing to report. The agent had lost sight of a group a little less than an hour ago. “I didn’t see them
again,” he said. And at this juncture, they’d probably already slipped into the valley or disappeared into the open desert.
“Let’s go down again.” Marroquín was stuck on finding someone tracking.
It was then, driving down those irregular paths, bordering a gorge, that we heard a transmission coming from Arivaca. It was one twenty in the morning when agents launched a chase between Diablito Peak and Diablo Mountain. We’d started tracking.
The ground surveillance radar had flashed its signal. But then they lost the dots. Minutes later they saw them again, meeting up with another four dots in the desert. The agents climbed up Mount Amado, took out their infrared binoculars, and sent three agents to scope out the area on foot. The dots changed direction. “They’re going south.” “Now north.” And then, in the middle of the chase, fifteen against eight, the game was over.
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”
The agent with the binoculars got off the roof of his car. He stopped looking for them. It ended. Here we are.
TO WIN OR LOSE, A QUESTION OF LOCATION
“This is the way it is, all day and all night,” Marroquín says as she gets back in her SUV to seek out another incident.
Here in Arivaca, the shadows have won. Another 240 pounds of marijuana will hit the US markets. Or, if they were migrants instead of drug mules, eight men or women will cross and start looking for jobs, opportunities to send money back to Mexico or Central America. They’re still somewhere out there in the desert, not yet knowing that they’ve won, that they can stop hiding, that the border agents, for now, have gone away and let them be.
This is the pattern the Border Patrol has to accept, in Marroquín’s words: “learning to lose.” “What we want,” she explains, “is to have operational control along the border.” It’s all that’s possible. To seal the border is a pipe dream that politicians sell from their offices. Here, maintaining control, ceding space and
clamping space, is all that can be done. And they’re doing what they can.
You don’t need to witness an entire night of tracking to understand how the cat wins and the mouse loses, or vice versa. Those who lose are the ones who take a single false step, who enter into the field of vision of a pair of binoculars, or light a cigarette at the wrong time. If the mice avoid these mistakes, then they win.
Marroquín keeps on. “We’re going back to I-19. Around this time at night, groups are looking to catch their pickups.”
It’s fourthirty in the morning when we arrive again at the highway checkpoint and see the other side of the coin.
At least for these two migrants, the game is over. They couldn’t avoid the traps. They took a false step. Now they’re loaded into the back of a truck, the small paddy wagon of one of the Border Patrol SUVs.
Two Hondurans. I can’t make out their faces behind the green blankets they’ve been given. They sound like youngsters when they respond that they don’t want to talk to us. They sound, unsurprisingly, let down. They thought they were about to make it. But they became separated from their group. They ran to the highway to try to thumb a car, the agents explain to us. On seeing the SUV with emergency lights on the roof, they ran back into the desert but were quickly caught.
When dawn finally comes we find ourselves on the highway between Tucson and Phoenix, a destination city for a lot of the migrants still wandering this desert. On each side of the highway you can see nothing but cold, endless, December desert. It’s been fourteen hours since we first got in the SUV with Marroquín.
The two Hondurans are uncommunicative. They tell Edu that they don’t want photographs taken either, at least not of their faces. They just want to be left in peace. I’m not surprised. We’re standing right at the checkpoint manned by Border Patrol agents whose job it is to stop people exactly like these two men. This checkpoint is the last on I-19. Everybody knows that if you can get past this point, you’ve probably won the game. It’s this
checkpoint, and ones just like it, that sharpens creativity: trucks with false bottoms, migrants hidden in the most unlikely spaces in a car, like inside the dashboard, drugs riding in the tires, in false ceilings, or deep inside the driver’s clothes.
Marroquín is yawning after her marathon shift. She has some sympathy with the Hondurans’ silence, knowing that this stage is a low point for those who lose. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes, saying, “What a pity. If only they hadn’t come out on the highway, we never would have got them. It’s supposed to be a rule: don’t stick your neck out on the highways!”
This isn’t pursuit unto death. Marroquín already admitted that most of the migrants are just looking for jobs. Yet the agents are just doing their job as well. And their job is to apprehend, not to play a game. Because of this, because we’re not dealing with friends or enemies here, but rather with roles, she can drop a line like: “If only they hadn’t come out to the highway.”
But they did come out, they made a mistake, and the agents had to act on it. And now three other agents are out in the desert looking for the rest of their group. “It’s how the game plays,” Marroquín repeats. “The same, day in and day out.”
1
As of 2012, Obama’s administration has deported 1.4 million undocumented migrants.
PolitiFact.com
, “Has Barack Obama deported more people than any other president in U.S. History?” August 10, 2012,
politifact.com/truth-o-mter/statements/2012/aug/10/american-principles-action/has-barack-obama-deported-more-people-any-other-pr/
12
Ghost Town: Chihuahua
Even the poorest of migrants have to pay for the journey, which means that where there are migrants there are jobs. We learned this in the spectral border town of Las Chepas, which sits in an old crossing zone in the middle of nowhere. The few remaining residents we found were hesitant to speak to us, worried that they would be seen as delinquents. But after getting a little used to our presence, and with the help of a bottle of tequila, the stories of how everything used to be better, and then how the narcos ruined everything, started spilling out, one after another, onto the table
.
It’s like they’ve stopped existing. The people talk about these empty desert borderlands as though they were nothing but barren fields. Like there was nothing here at all, not even a reason to come. Like they were ghost towns.
And one’s first impression is that they’re right, that there’s nothing here and no reason to be here.
There’s a half-mile of border wall to go before we reach Las Chepas, the biggest of these tiny towns. Up ahead I start to make out what appear to be white stains in the desert. They look like walls, and it seems unlikely that they would be houses. There’s not a soul in sight. Desert to the left, desert to the right, a thin wall of metal separating Chihuahua and New Mexico. The only sound is the wingbeat of the occasional swallow and the slight rustling of the breeze.
If it weren’t that the hill blocked the road from continuing straight, it would be easy to pass by Las Chepas without even noticing. But soon we realize that those few white walls must be our ghost town.
Edu and I stroll up one of the sidewalks. Dirt roads lie in front of the fifty or so crumbling houses, the wind flapping the steel sheets on their roofs. A brown horse, grazing behind one of the walls, spooks as we walk past. The door of one of the houses swings open, blows closed. Peering inside, we see a thin layer of dust kick into the air. There’s a large broken window, an abandoned church, a school pavilion under which grows a thick tangle of weeds. The only sound is the wind. Not imagining that we’ll discover anything here, we decide to go to Ascensión, the municipal center, and see what we can learn.
After another two hours on the road we arrive at Ascensión. What’s nice about towns this size is that there’s less bureaucratic runaround than in state capitals. Formal records requests are replaced by simple telephone calls. In just a half an hour we already have a meeting set up with the municipal secretary, Alejandro Ulises Vizcarra.
Vizcarra is a stereotypical Chihuahuan desert dweller: thick mustache, cowboy boots, jeans, and a belt with an enormous silver buckle. He’s an expert horseman and each summer he participates in an annual desert roundup. In the last decade he himself was a migrant (with papers) in the United States. Living in Palomas and commuting to New Mexico every day, he was a supervisor at a shipping company that exported products to Mexico. For the past year now, back in Mexico, he’s been municipal secretary of Palomas.
“I know migration because I was a migrant,” he explains, following this pronouncement with a few rather trite statements: “These days migrating is difficult,” and “It’s risky to cross the border in these deserts.” What we want to talk about, however, are the ghost towns.
“Ah, yes,” Vizcarra exclaims, “the phenomenon of the ghost
towns. Well, speaking again about migration, most of the towns’ residents have left for the United States. Only some older folks stayed around to forge a living by helping out the crossers. They weren’t
polleros
, though. There was a lot of flow through here for a while. Good opportunities for business. Some folks were selling soda, others food, some were renting rooms, some even selling medicine. Migrants were a boost for the local economy. But then when the flow stopped, communities like Las Chepas were almost completely deserted. The few who remained did so only because it was their only property. Now if people don’t start coming back around, those towns are going to be history.”
So, we realize, there still are some people in Las Chepas. It seemed, in the short time we were there, completely abandoned, and yet inside a few of the buildings there was life.
Vizcarra doesn’t think anybody is going to get back into agriculture in Las Chepas; it’s only a matter of time before the outlying ranches die out for good. “Winters are hard,” he says. The freezing desert winds destroy anything that’s not a bush, a cactus, or well protected.
But even Vizcarra admits that the departure of the migrants wasn’t the first step in the towns’ decline. Nor was winter solely responsible. “The extreme vigilance of the US government after the September 11 attacks made crossing here very difficult,” he says. “Up until 2007 the US Army with all their high-tech equipment started patrolling around here. Compared to all the migrants you used to see, now there’s nobody.”
But something seems to be off with his logic. Neither 9/11 nor Al Qaeda had much to do with the upsurge in border vigilance in 2006. He was hesitant to talk about it, but finally he went there. “Another aspect that influenced this part of the desert was the arrival of the drug fighting. The cartels came to wage war over control of the drug routes. That set off a red light for the US government, who responded by reinforcing vigilance.”
And then, which is rare considering the topic, Vizcarra continues: “It’s a fight for territory, a fight for the whole package,
the passage of drugs and the undocumented, which together bring in a flood of money. We’ve been in the midst of this war for a few months now, which is why all the migrants left, leaving the place deserted. Nobody wants to cross here anymore and it’s nearly impossible, in the midst of the war, to find a
pollero
. We don’t think a group has yet established definitive control, so the fight probably isn’t over. Las Chepas,” he concludes, “is about to die.”
And then he excuses himself, in case his words come back around to haunt him. “But I don’t like to talk about it. My own safety is at stake. I don’t really know anyway. I don’t know who’s on one side and who’s on the other. Our task at the Municipality is not to do intelligence work. We only know what we know because our residents tell us. The narcos don’t show their faces … They could be my neighbors … I really don’t know.”
Las Chepas, we learn, is in the middle of a Bermuda Triangle: the cartel war, the lockdown of the border, and the fleeing of the migrants.
There’s not much chance of getting lost en route to the ghost town. With a bewildered look, any Palomas local will say: “Just follow the wall along the dirt road until you get to the hill.” And then most add: “But there’s nothing to see over there.” We would find out, however, that there is something to see, for people still live there.
The wall that guides us to Las Chepas starts in Palomas. For the first mile it’s made up of thick bars, three yards high, between which not even a child’s head could fit. Then, for the following few dozen miles it’s a steel fence, a yard high, that works to deter vehicles. The word
wall
is a mere four letters that signify much more: the constant presence of agents, cars, helicopters, motion sensors, surveillance cameras, horses, all-terrain vehicles, reflectors, and then, of course, the actual physical wall itself.