Marc Cooper |
| Photo by Michael Hyatt |
ALTAR, Mexico — As soon as he spots me taking pictures on the steps of the 3-century-old avocado-and-lemon-colored Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe church, Manuelito makes a beeline my way. A pudgy 30-year-old Tzotzil Indian from the impoverished southern state of Chiapas, standing barely 4 and a half feet tall, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, sporting a Marine-like buzzcut, he smiles broadly, opens a mouth full of front teeth capped with shiny gold stars, and, in very fluent and buoyant English, says, “Hey, friend, come and talk to me. I want to talk to you.”
After explaining that he’s a father of four who can no longer live off his small patch of land, he excitedly hugs me and says victoriously, “I’m going to the Big Apple, to New York City, baby!” That’s one reason, he says, why he’s spent all of his free time for five years studying English. And he can hardly contain his joy trying it out on me.
When I ask who he knows in New York and what he plans to do when he gets there, he just shrugs. “No matter, man. I know when I get to the border, I just have to walk between the mountain and the red lights on the antenna. That’s the way in. From there I will get to New York.”
And if you get caught by the Migra? I ask.
Again, another laugh. “No matter. They can catch me 10 times, 20 times. It’s okay. I keep trying. I’m going anyway.”
While Manuelito might be among the more eccentric, and one of the very few among them who speak functional English, his predicament, his story and his hopes neatly sum up what’s in the heads and hearts of hundreds of other Mexican men standing around the town square this recent Saturday morning.
This alternately dusty and muddy, hellish hamlet of Altar, permanent home to barely 7,000, situated an hour and a half south of the Arizona border and bathed in a cloud of diesel fumes, has become the single most important staging area and launching pad for undocumented immigration into the U.S.
Though the Bush administration spent an additional $30 million last year trying to plug the porous southern Arizona border, the illegal exodus has reached a five-year high. Hundreds of new Border Patrol agents were deployed against the human tide, as were Apache helicopters and even unmanned aerial drones. A controversial program that returned home thousands of Mexican migrants caught at the border ran the length of last summer. In the fall, Arizona voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 200, which demands that state public services be provided only upon proof of legal residence.
None of these measures put as much as a crimp in the immigration crunch, and last year more than 1 million apprehensions were made along America’s southern border — the same number as in 2000. But, for the first time ever, the detentions in Arizona totaled more than in all the other border states combined. The bulk of migrant deaths also occurred in the Tucson sector, north of Altar: about 220 — or maybe 250, depending on who’s doing the counting — out of an estimated 350 total.
Since the mid-1990s, U.S. border enforcement policy has increasingly squeezed the flow of migrants into the rural and relatively uninhabited — and unforgiving — central Arizona desert. As the Clinton administration imposed draconian lockdowns on traditional border-crossing points near San Diego and El Paso, American immigration officials believed the brutal desert in between would be a formidable and effective deterrent. That theory has been proved irrefutably wrong. The only thing that has changed is a skyrocketing number of migrant deaths. As the daily stream of migrants redirected itself through Arizona, this tiny town of Altar — still invisible on many maps — became the capital of illegal immigration. Indeed, after President Bush — twice in the past year — has issued high-profile statements supporting the enactment of a “guest worker” program, there’s been a noticeable spike in the rush to get across the border. With Congress currently considering several pieces of immigration-reform legislation that might “legalize” a certain number of the undocumented, many Mexican would-be immigrants have concluded that now is the right time to get into the U.S. and be in position to benefit from any new federal legislation.
A kidney-crunching 60-mile-long dirt road runs north from Altar to the border village of Sasabe. Maintained only by a local rancher, who charges a toll of $3 per car, the dirt highway is the central pipeline whose tributaries eventually empty into the gardens and nurseries of Brentwood, the orchards of the Central Valley, or the chicken-plucking plants of the Carolinas.
Altar, only an anonymous bus stop along Mexican Route 2 until the last handful of years, is now the system’s perpetually whirring pump. Sucking up thousands upon thousands from the poorer Mexican states to the south, it compresses them within its crowded 10-block center and then, at a rate of 10,000 or 20,000 per week, forcefully shoots them back out and northward — with more than enough power to overcome the sensors, cameras, fences and agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.
I’ve come here accompanied by the tough-talking, Texas-born Robin Hoover, pastor of Tucson’s First Christian Church, and by Steve Laffey, mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island. Hoover is the founder of Humane Borders, a nonprofit volunteer group whose 70 watering stations on the U.S. side of the desert dispense more than 50,000 gallons of water to desperate border crossers.
Mayor Laffey is a 43-year-old former Wall Street investment banker — now a self-described “populist” Republican — who’s come all the way from home with a couple of his own local Latino activists to get a firsthand look at the border and what lies below. “I’m very lucky,” Laffey says as we walk across Altar’s central plaza. “I lost one brother to AIDS. One is in a locked psych ward. A lot of politicians are just talk, they don’t come up with solutions. This border is just too far away from people’s lives. They have all these people who clean for them and take care of their yards and their kids, but don’t know who they are or care. My whole thing is that everybody has to have the opportunity to live the American Dream.”
Fair enough. But what we see here is still the Mexican Nightmare. Dozens of clumps of mostly young men, mostly dressed in dark clothes, some with their families, but most with cousins and uncles and friends from their various hometowns, stand or sit listlessly in the square and wait. Wait for word from their own “coyote” or “pollero” — their own smuggler — that it’s now time to make the perilous journey north. Wait for some word from home that more money is on the way. Or wait, as they do today, for one of the recent storms to subside. It’s hard enough to cross the desert as it is — without monsoon rains and flash floods.
“There’s no such thing as a typical migrant,” says Hoover. “You’ve got doctors, lawyers and dentists,” he says, citing statistics that say about 10 percent of those nabbed by the Border Patrol are college graduates. “You’ve also got the poorest of the poor. Some who send two children ahead. Some who are coming to stay. Some who will stay only three, four years. Some babies and women. Some really bad guys. Some from Michoacán who have paid $4,500 for an entire package. Some from Chiapas who have no plan and 300 bucks for a ride.”
On one side of the plaza sits an endless row of large and battered vans. Almost all bear the simple logo “Altar-Sasabe.” They sit idle, waiting for the drizzle to abate. When conditions permit, each will be crammed with 20 or more passengers. (Their seats have been removed and replaced with three rows of benches running the length of the interior cabin.) For 10 bucks a head, they’ll rumble up the dirt road and discharge the cargo in the village of Sasabe — a place so grim it seems teletransported from Afghanistan.
Once in Sasabe, the migrants will break up into smaller groups and head out with their coyotes along the many smuggler trails. It’s usually a two- or three- or four-day walk to an Arizona highway where — if they are lucky — they’ll be picked up by another vehicle from the smugglers’ networks and taken to a safe house. Or they will be chased down by a Border Patrol unit. Or left to die in the desert by crooked or desperate smugglers.
The business of the entire town of Altar is given over to supporting and profiting from the wholesale border jumping. Rampaging gangs occasionally rip through town — there are few places in Mexico that congregate so many people with so much folding money in their pockets. Altar’s few streets are lined with booths and stalls set up by yet other migrants, mostly from Oaxaca, selling everything needed to make the crossing: black jackets, black gloves, sturdy jeans, running shoes, backpacks, wool sweaters, black ski masks, 1-gallon plastic jugs of water, small plastic bags of combs, toothbrushes, nail clippers, aspirins and lip balm, even $3 plastic trash bags cynically hawked as effective foilers of the Border Patrol heat sensors that riddle the U.S. side of the line.
Currency-exchange shops are ready to sell dollars at a premium. Other shops specialize in selling long-distance phone cards. Flophouses charge $9 a head and crowd four or five people in a room.
With no permanent medical facility in town, the Red Cross brought in a trailer clinic. A border-area map on its wall has little red dots showing where migrants died last year. Red Cross workers have given Hoover a handwritten wish list of badly needed supplies: ear drops, ampicillin and other antibiotics.
In the main plaza itself, the clusters of migrants seem to have segregated themselves into informal affinity groups based on hometown origin.
A young Oaxacan couple in their early 20s — Filipe Cruz and Margarita Lopez — sit forlornly on a bench waiting for God-knows-what as they stare downward. Filipe says he’s already spent a year working in the U.S. — he won’t say where. But living alone was too hard on everybody, and now, after picking up his family, he will cross again with his wife and his 3- and 5-year-old children. When I ask if he is afraid, he answers quietly, “We are always afraid,” and shifts his gaze back to the ground.
Another group of Oaxacans — six young men, all Zapotec Indians — say they have jobs waiting for them, picking grapes in California. They laugh at the possibility of getting caught on the way. “We will cross as many times as we have to,” says one. “What do we have to lose?” laughs another. “Only these clothes on our back.”
One group of decidedly Guatemalan young men answer my questions curtly, poorly disguising their accents and claiming to be southern Mexicans. If snared by the Border Patrol, they will be classified as “OTMs” — Other Than Mexicans. Instead of simply being put on the other side of the border and in position to quickly attempt another crossing, OTMs are now subject to summary deportation to their country of origin. These fellows have some work cut out for them. Their insistence that they are from Chiapas is about as convincing as the Coneheads saying, “We are from France.”
Some of the men in the square say they have paid smugglers $1,200 to $1,300 each to board the underground railway. Many say they haven’t paid anything yet, but will have the money taken out of the pay they will get from their promised jobs.
Some say they have no idea where they are going once they cross the border. “I will just look for lights,” says a 28-year-old from a Veracruz village renowned for its pineapple production. “Light means a city. And in a city there is always jobs. That’s right, isn’t it?” Others say they have agricultural jobs waiting near Fresno. Still others are headed for tomato fields in Florida. One has a cousin ready to give him a job in a Van Nuys body shop. He has scrawled the address and phone number on a piece of paper he has hidden in his hatband. “My cousin said if I can get to Phoenix, he can get me to his shop. He has a job for me and for them,” he says, nodding his head toward two traveling companions.
A number of those gathered here this morning have already been caught once and are back for a second try. “They grabbed us 15 days ago,” says one of five men, all in their early 20s, from Veracruz. “We got about five minutes across the border, and that was it,” he laughs. “Handcuffs and two hours later, we’re all back in Mexico.” The group has spent the last two weeks reorganizing itself. Four of them want to try again. One has had it and wants to go back home. “I don’t know where to get the 500 pesos I need to buy a bus ticket,” he says.
The group has completely run out of money and had to leave its flop this morning. Now the self-appointed leader of the group is trying to hustle up a mere $5. With that, he says, he can buy a phone card to call his family back home. He’s hoping they can wire him an immediate $400 — maybe even this afternoon. “With that, we will have enough for the ride,” he says, using the English word. El Ride is the pickup from an Arizona highway toward a safe house or job. “Jobs aren’t the problem,” he adds. “We have jobs waiting for us in a stable in Chino. We just have to get there.”
Inside the town church, the young priest, Rene Castaneda, dressed in jeans and a baseball cap, says that while it’s true some of the migrants have no idea what they will do once they cross the border, most, in fact, have a promised job waiting. “They are understandably reluctant to share the information with you — or anybody else,” he tells me. “Most of them have contacts, and most of them are in a pipeline — the demand for their cheap labor has no limits.”
After nearly six years working in Altar, it is with some sadness that Castaneda has learned he is now being transferred to another mission. He’s gained regional recognition and respect for his tireless work on behalf of the migrants, and getting transferred out isn’t much of a payoff. “When I arrived here in 1999, maybe 200 migrants a day came through Altar,” he says. Since the end of last year, that figure sometimes peaks at 10 times that amount. Or more. “The increase in migrants goes hand in hand with the increase in poverty and unemployment,” he adds.
Castaneda arrived in Altar just as last decade’s tectonic shift in immigration patterns was maturing and funneling the flow through the Sonoran Desert into southern central Arizona. Now, he argues, it matters little, if at all, what administrative or enforcement measures are taken on the northern side of the border. “Only the route of immigration changes, but nothing else,” says the young priest as he sorts through his archives. “It’s just like pushing a fully inflated basketball underwater. You can only hold it down so long and then the pressure builds up and it pops up and bursts through somewhere else. If you don’t do anything to change the root causes, the problem doesn’t change.”
Noontime brings a clearing of the skies and a filling of the vans parked alongside the plaza. The daily cat-and-mouse game along the U.S.-Mexican border will now repeat itself for the umpteenth time. And in case anyone has forgotten the stakes, Father Castaneda has posted some stark reminders. On the northern road out of town, he has placed white memorial crosses on the utility poles, commemorating those who couldn’t complete the journey.
A good hour north of Altar, and about 20 miles south of the border, one of the more surreal scenes of this drama plays itself out. Under U.S. pressure during the last decade, the Mexican government created its own elite version of the Border Patrol — called Grupo Beta. The Mexican force failed miserably in living up to the professional standards that had been hoped for. Soon there was a stack of stories of Grupo Beta officers organizing their own rackets, shaking down and robbing the hapless migrants.
The Mexican government, under President Vicente Fox, then disarmed the group and retooled its mission. Now, in its distinctive orange trucks and matching jackets, Grupo Beta has no enforcement duties and claims to be a sort of migrant-protection force. There are still some reports of abuse, but not nearly as many.
At a dusty spot in the Altar-Sasabe road, best described as situated in the middle of nowhere and known by locals as El Tortugo, Grupo Beta has erected a small, bright-orange, steel pavilion, much like a carport. Every afternoon, a Beta patrol unit parks in the small patch of shade, and two uniformed officers stand by the side of the road, armed only with clipboards and a box full of pocket-size illustrated pamphlets. Their job is to stop each van, count the number of occupants, note their state of origin, and give the migrants a Boy Scout–ish lecture on the dangers that await them — perils outlined in the illustrated booklet they pass out.
When Hoover, Laffey and I get to Tortugo, at about 3 in the afternoon, it’s a veritable rush hour. A half-dozen brimming vans are lined up on the side of the road as the two Beta officers go to them one by one. Officers Manuel Roldan and Julio Cesar Cancino seem to have been chosen for this task by sheer force of their outgoing, expansive personalities. Both men are extremely friendly, courteous, respectful and warm.
But when they open the back door of each van, and peer into the sardine-packed interior, they are met by decades of accumulated mistrust, suspicion, diffidence and fear. In Mexico, the safe assumption, no matter what you’re told, is that uniformed figures of authority are not your friends.
Roldan and Cancino, however, are experienced hands in breaking the ice and seem to patiently enjoy the dance of confidence that they must redo with each and every load of passengers.
Roldan opens up the back of one van, and as the daylight floods in, everyone, including those sitting closest to him, looks downward. Over his shoulder I quickly count 27 people in the vehicle. “This is not an inspection station,” Roldan says. “You are not breaking the law. It is your human right to migrate. We are only here to help you,” he says. A few people now raise their heads — no doubt intrigued by a disarmed cop with such a disarming tone.
The two Beta agents ask the passengers to step out of the van. After asking where their hometowns are, Cancino smiles as he asks the next question. Smiles, because no matter how often he asks, he knows he’s going to get the same amusing answer. “Sasabe,” a few men answer quietly.
“Sasabe?” repeats Agent Cancino, as if he’s saying, really? “Sasabe? Or Sasabe Beach?”
With that, the ice cracks and a few smiles begin to sprout. If only desert-bound Sasabe, about as alluring as San Quentin, had as much as a park, let alone a beach or, for that matter, any reason whatsoever to be a destination for such a throng of would-be tourists.
“Come on,” says Cancino, now laughing out loud. “We know you’re all going to the U.S. You are all going to the U.S., aren’t you?” Finally, some heads nod, and the more courageous step forward to confirm the obvious. “Yes, we’re going to the North,” says one man, in cowboy boots and tight jeans. “As much as we hate to leave this paradise behind,” he says, sweeping his hands toward the barren desert around us.
“Good,” says Cancino. “You have full rights while in Mexico. It’s in the U.S. where you will be breaking the law. We just want to tell you a few things for your own protection. If the Border Patrol begins to chase you, do not run. I repeat, do not run! Do not hide! Whatever you do, don’t put your hands in your pockets.”
Now Cancino has his audience rapt. “If you get scattered and lost during the day, look for tall blue flags. That’s where you can find water,” he says, referring to the emergency stations that Hoover has set up. “If you get lost at night, then look for the red lights on the radio antenna. They’re in Sasabe, in Mexico. Walk back to the red lights and look for one of our trucks — the orange trucks. We will be there to offer you emergency help, first aid and whatever else you need.”
The migrants look genuinely grateful. It’s probably the first time in their lives that someone in uniform has sounded so concerned about their welfare. In any case, they all know they are only hours away from running a merciless gauntlet, and any advice and compassion are welcome.
Agent Roldan then hands everyone one of the pamphlets — falsely characterized by right-wing talk radio as comic book guides to crossing the border. If anything, they’re the opposite: a minicatalog of all the dangers that await the migrants, with only common-sense advice to avoid excessive heat and thirst. As well as urging the crossers to obey the orders of any U.S. authorities.
The passengers settle back into the van. Cancino has some final words for them: “Remember that it’s now going to be some very hard days and some very long nights. You are going to have to walk three or four days. Be careful, and buena suerte.”
Twenty-seven more migrants are on their way to cross the border. During the hour we spend at El Tortugo, about 15 vans have been registered — about 350 people. Agent Roldan says he and Cancino are currently counting about 1,800 a day. But he admits they have no idea of the total number, as they always leave before sundown. “When it gets dark,” he says, “it just gets too dangerous.” The enforcement squeeze on Arizona has proved a financial bonanza for the professional smugglers, who increasingly mix the human traffic with the drug trade. Big profits have turned some of the smuggling operations into heavily armed and violent gangs. When the Grupo Beta agents retreat at night, the road becomes fit only for the most daring.
As dusk falls, some of the same men we saw earlier in the day milling around Altar’s main plaza now huddle in small groups in the desolate, dilapidated border hamlet of Sasabe. They stand along the rutted roads, chatting and smoking, or picking through their backpacks. There’s nowhere to stay here and no reason to be here except to make the jump. When darkness sets in, these groups will fan out and, led by their “polleros” — or guides — will brave the sensors, infrared cameras and Border Patrol agents on the other side of the line. It’s the same game every night of the calendar — especially this time of year.
A majority will probably get nabbed and, through an absurd revolving-door policy, will be dumped back into Mexico, all within a few hours. Then they will re-form, regroup, and will try and try again to cross. Only after being detained (and photographed and fingerprinted) and “voluntarily deported” 10 times do they face possible formal arrest and prosecution.
An unlucky few of these people gathered here tonight might be among those who — invisible and unnoticed — will be consumed by the desert in the next handful of days. Those who do make it through, as if passing through a magical membrane, will re-appear on the other side as our nannies, maids, gardeners and dishwashers. “If you had a hundred U.S. senators come down here and spend only a day in one of the flophouses or a morning talking to these people, you’d have this immigration issue solved in less than a week,” says Cranston’s Mayor Laffey as we roll out of Sasabe. “But it isn’t gonna happen. Not yet.”
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Border Vigilantes Mobilize for April
From his self-styled command post in the
upscale Orange County settlement of Aliso Viejo, James Gilchrist claims his
plan to deploy 1,000 volunteers to block the border next week has now reached
waiting-list proportions. His Minuteman Project will send the volunteers to
a 20-mile stretch of the Arizona border — including the area just north of Altar
— to carry out the job he says the feds won’t do: sealing off the border.
His critics and opponents — some of whom are planning counterdemonstrations
— call Gilchrist and his Minutemen nothing but vigilantes. Gilchrist, a 56-year-old
retired CPA and former Vietnam vet, fancies his movement in much more gentle
terms. “We are using something similar to the Martin Luther King philosophy,
where you bring your case to the public peacefully,” Gilchrist said. “You don’t
go around wrecking people’s property . . . You do it peacefully and consistently.”
Some of Gilchrist’s volunteers, however, say they will be carrying firearms
(albeit legally), and certainly the group styles itself as a civilian militia.
For months now, Gilchrist has been using the right side of the blogosphere to
solicit applications from those who wish to participate in his monthlong exercise
of frontier justice. He originally called for a force of 500, and now says more
than 900 are ready to go.
Humanitarian activists originally scoffed at Gilchrist’s projected numbers,
noting that in the past handful of years, similar calls to mobilize militia
types along the border have failed. But the political atmosphere surrounding
the border issue in the Southwest, particularly in Arizona, may be playing in
the Minutemen’s favor. As undocumented immigrants place huge financial pressure
on public institutions from hospitals to schools, and with the federal government
refusing to fully rebate the costs, xenophobic attitudes are once again on the
rise. Last November, Arizona voters passed, by an overwhelming margin, Proposition
200, which requires that state agencies demand proof of legal residence before
providing services. Some analysts were surprised to find that nearly 45 percent
of Latino voters approved the measure, a sign of just how deep the anti-immigrant
current runs.
Several states are now considering copycat measures.
The Arizona courts have very narrowly interpreted the new law, and its application
has had little real effect. This has only further spurred the vigilante mobilization.
“We are American citizens who want to freely assemble under the First Amendment
to express our displeasure with federal, state and local appointees who have
been charged with enforcing U.S. immigration laws and have left us wide-open
for another terrorist attack,” Gilchrist says.
For the last decade, southern Arizona has been an incubator of several Minuteman-like
militias. In the late ’90s, local ranchers Douglas and Roger Barnett drew national
publicity when they armed themselves and started detaining illegal border crossers.
The picturesque town of Tombstone has become the staging area for much of this
activity. Its local paper, the Tombstone Tumbleweed, is run by
Chris Simcox, another one of the principal organizers of the Minuteman Project.
While the Arizona border has become the ground-level flashpoint, much of the
anti-immigrant militia’s leadership curiously has come from Southern California.
Not only Gilchrist, but also Simcox — a former teacher — is a refugee from Orange
County. Glenn Spencer, another leader of the movement (who has been deploying
his own unmanned aerial-surveillance drone along the border), was a loud Los
Angeles voice in last decade’s fight over Proposition 187.
Mexican government authorities, including President Vicente Fox, have forcefully
let the Bush administration know of their displeasure around next week’s coming
border demonstration. And the U.S. Border Patrol, which has shown a relatively
lax position on the militias, is now voicing its own set of concerns. Michael
Nicely, the head of the patrol’s Tucson sector, calls the militia mobilization
a “recipe for a tragedy.”
“They were recruiting by saying, ‘Let’s go help the Border Patrol,’ and I think
some people could be sucked in, not knowing that that’s not the kind of help
the Border Patrol is asking for,” he added.
Gilchrist is not deterred. He says that even those late applicants he’s putting
on his registration “waiting list” should still feel free to come down to Tombstone
and stand for America.
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