The Devil's Highway: A True Story Read online

  By the time they were finally rescued, they could have been in Miami.

  The ne’er-do-well fence jumpers that galloped into El Paso and San Diego on a quest for chocolate shakes and Michael Jackson cassettes are no more. The New-Jack Coyote is largely the inadvertent product of the Border Patrol’s extremely effective interdiction and prevention policies. Good old Operation Gatekeeper is the mother of invention. San Diego’s Border Patrol beefed up the border fence, then placed massive flood-lights along it, illuminating the no-man’s land between the United States and Mexico. Then, in a burst of creative thinking, it ceased the endless patrolling of the hills and river valleys of the region. Instead, the Border Patrol parked trucks at half-mile checkpoints all along the fence. Each agent is in sight of the next, and all of them are in constant contact as they observe the line. Helicopters still hover, and their versions of the Oscar sensors blip, and night-vision electric eyes scan. The fence in the west extends into the ocean. In the east, it terminates in the wasteland of deserts and mountains.

  Unimaginable developments followed. In the region of San Ysidro, the last small town before you get to the Mexican border, at the last U.S. exit off I-5, a big sparkling suburb has sprung up. In this area formerly notorious as a human hunting ground, a dangerous waste of crime and panic, junkies and gunfights, there are now soccer fields and two-story houses that look like they could be in a subdivision of Denver. At the end of all the cul-desacs in the development, there is a high wall, and football-stadium floodlights pointing south. Some of the new Latino middle class once crossed that very land in a mad scuttle; now, teens in the neighborhood climb up on their backyard sheds to watch the action in the Tijuana River floodplain.

  The hundreds of walkers who once ran this gauntlet are now forced to move east. They rarely try to swim around the western barrier, and if they do, they land in a state park where “fishermen” casting into the surf are often armed feds. The only way to go is out there, back of beyond, away from civilization. And if you go far enough, the fence devolves into a two-foot-high road barrier you can step over. Farther still, and you’re in territory much like Sasabe. There are approximately two thousand miles of this kind of terrain to enter.

  This new paradigm—walkers crossing Desolation in place of jumping urban fences—has made Altar the largest center of illegal immigration on the entire border. The central park plaza in town is full of Coyotes and walkers. A five-minute visit to the park will garner several offers to cross. Coyotes hawk destinations like crack dealers in the Bronx sell drugs: voices murmur options from a memorized menu, “Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida.”

  The backs of the Altar vans have plastic milk jugs of water for sale. On the front of each van is a sign made of masking tape, and it says “Sasabe,” or “Frontera.”

  “Carolina Norte. Carolina Sur. Nueva York.”

  The main grocery store in Sasabe, hardly a supermarket, is winkingly called “Super El Coyote.”

  The Mexican government’s border sign near Sasabe doesn’t actually say “Coyotes.” It uses the hipper slang of the border. It says, “Los Polleros.”

  A pollero would be a chicken-wrangler. The level of esteem the smugglers hold for their charges is stated plainly. They’re simply chickens.

  Of course, if you know Spanish, you know that the word for “chicken” is gallina. “Pollo” is usually reserved for something else. A pollo, as in arroz con pollo, has been cooked.

  Now, more than ever, walkers need a Coyote.

  In the new organized crime hierarchies of human smuggling, the actual Coyotes are middle-management thugs. The old Coyote, the scruffy punk leading a ragtag group of Guatemalans into San Diego via the bogs and industrial parks of Chula Vista, is rapidly becoming extinct. You will still encounter a dope fiend who will walk you into the infrared night-vision RoboCop scrub for fifty bucks, or the homeboy in the Impala who blusters you through the line by being a “Chicano” heading home to the barrio after “hitting the bars,” but he’s being replaced by the new breed. And woe to that crackhead if the Young Turks get hold of him. He’ll be found with his hands tied behind his back and a .9 mm slug in his brainpan.

  Even asking questions about these criminals is considered dangerous. Queries into the Coyote operation behind the Yuma 14 catastrophe, for example, elicit three different warnings about being “shot in the head.” One gets the feeling that the entire world of Coyotes is waiting, waiting to merge with the narcotraficante underworld immortalized by Norteño music and movies such as Traffic, waiting to hook more deeply into the white slavery and sex slavery and child-labor rings of the world, waiting for a human-smuggling visionary to unify them.

  Gangs are so in control now that walkers who want to go alone, without a pollero to guide them, must pay a fee just to enter the desert.

  Criminals are at the gate of Disneyland: they’re scalping tickets, and they’re scalping each other.

  The criminal operation that lured the Yuma 14 and their companions into the desert and abandoned them was not the biggest, by far. But it was well established, and it operated out of Phoenix, Arizona, and the Mexican state of Hidalgo. It was a family operation. The main man, the Tony Soprano figure, lived in the United States. Or maybe he lived in Hidalgo. He liked to wear cowboy boots, and he kept his figure slim. Or he was never seen by the troops. A voice on the phone.

  In Phoenix, it was Luis Cercas.

  Luis Cercas, at the time of the Yuma 14 deaths, had contacts in Florida, Illinois, and California. He had a Florida associate, Don Francisco Vásquez, and another roving associate was placed in Mexico. He was the brother of Luis, Daniel Cercas, and he lived in Hidalgo.

  Like all of the smugglers, Daniel had an alias, “El Chespiro,” derived in part from “Chespirito,” the cloying little red cricket of Mexican kids’ TV. (Chespiro! Did some of the walkers think Don Moi was in touch with the television star? Did some of them secretly believe that Chespirito, the red cricket, was a massively powerful gangster? It made a kind of sense to the Mexican mind. Stranger things had happened.) This Chespiro never met the bottom-feeders of the gang face-to-face; he kept in contact via cell phone. All payments went to Chespiro, and all payouts allegedly came from Chespiro.

  Chespiro sent people to Sonoita from all over Mexico. A sister-in-law worked in Phoenix, running the administration of the corporation. She organized pickups and human deposits in the double-wides and barrio apartment safe houses. One of these drop-offs is known to have been on Peoria Street in Phoenix.

  A step beneath Luis and Chespiro Cercas and their sister-inlaw were the soldiers and drivers and guides.

  In the Yuma 14 case, the Coyote was a shadowy and notorious figure known as El Negro (with the wonderful Mexican bandido name of Evodio Manilla). He had the universal black mustache. He was short and thin, with an “aquiline” nose and a haircut that in reports sounds like it was a mullet. He wore gold chains around his neck, and he had a curious head-bobbing walk. He had three vehicles, and all of them might have been white. El Negro was also alleged to be the brother-in-law of Luis. Bada Bing! It’s a family thing.

  El Negro apparently worked his way up from an early life as a guide. It was said he never crossed into the United States for any reason once he achieved middle-management status. At the time, he was about twenty-eight.

  El Negro, dreaded enforcer and manipulator of Sonoita, Sonora, had a driver known as El Moreno. The Black Man and the Dark Man. Scary. El Moreno affected the black border mustache like his boss, and his round face had a scar slanting down the left side. The combination of the scar and the ’stache made him a really convincing bandido. El Moreno was described as “robust” in the investigation documents.

  In Sonoita, El Negro and El Moreno lived together in criminal bliss in a house described as being “around the corner” from an evangelical temple on the west side of town. Local directions are simple: go to the road to San Luis Río Colorado; El Negro’s house is there, between the templo and a disco called Angelo. Jesus Chris
t on one side, and party hardy on the other. El Negro sometimes danced at Angelo with his girlfriend, Lorena. Lorena seems to be one of the only people in Sonora not involved with the smuggling gang.

  Immune to prosecution, Chespiro oversaw El Negro and El Moreno via long-distance cell phone, and they in turn commanded a small army of soldiers. These were secondary drivers, guards, enforcers, and guias (“GEE-yahs”), or guides. Today, these guides are what we used to think of as Coyotes.

  They actually cut sign, make trails, and lead the walkers into the desert. Young men, mostly, who are as disposable as the pollos. They can die as easily as the walkers, and the organization will not be hurt. There are always more fools willing.

  Smugglers pay locals, like drug lords in the inner city pay off shorties and grandmothers, to cover their operations. Runners. Lookouts. Imagine living in a burning cement brick oven in Sells, Arizona; a guy comes along and offers you two hundred dollars to let him park his van behind your house for two days. Maybe he offers you five hundred dollars to go sleep at your mom’s trailer while he waits. You’d be crazy not to take it.

  The Cercas crew had a favorite illegal entrant pickup spot in the United States: mile marker 27, on Highway 86, on the O’Odham reservation. Or mile marker 27, or 21, on Highway 85. No one can agree. The Devil’s Highway forecasts are always for sun, heat, and impenetrable fog.

  But wherever the pickup spot was, when a load of walkers was due, a woman named Teresa would drive up and down the road after dark. Thin, with long black hair, she is our Mata Hari. Teresa must have been bold—even cops don’t like to be out there in the dark. The guía would gather his chickens at the mile marker post, and Teresa would then spot them on the drive-by. She’d speed-dial a transport on her cell phone, and one or two vans would depart from their prearranged parking spots.

  The walkers, squeezed out of the urban corridors, are relying more and more on the reservation. They cost the Indians millions of dollars a year in cleanup, rescue, enforcement, and land restoration. Hundreds of pounds of garbage accrue yearly: bottles, pants, tampons, paper, toilet paper. Corpses. And the Migra barrels through in their trucks.

  This may help to explain some of the frayed relationships between the Border Patrol and the O’Odham people on the rez.

  The Cercas gang’s western operation centered on Yuma and Wellton, their central operation delivered walkers to the Mohawk rest area on I-8, and the eastern operation—which ultimately killed the Yuma 14—targeted Ajo.

  Ajo (Garlic) is a small mining town not far from Why. (Locals quip: “Why not!” And: “Good question!”) It’s near the reservation. And it’s a straight shot to Gila Bend in one direction, and Tucson in another.

  The Cercas drivers got Teresa’s call and sped onto 86, mindful of Border Patrol vehicles or the unlikely sheriff’s cruisers. Cut north on 85, pull up at marker 27, throw open the doors, and hustle ’em in, slam the doors, and be gone. If you were slow or ill, and you missed the van, there you were, waiting for whatever fate would find you.

  Recently, a young woman was found dead beside I-8. Someone had dragged her out of the desert and left her like a bag of litter on the shoulder. It is entirely possible that she simply couldn’t manage the fast upload into the van and was left to stare at the stars as they drove away. One can imagine the tiresome complications of dealing with a dead or dying woman in Phoenix. The Coyotes are stone-cold pragmatists. Perhaps somebody kicked her out of the van. It was a big freeway—she still had a shot. By desert standards, it was a tender act.

  The Cercas’s vans would hustle onto I-10 and deliver their loads to Phoenix, where the illegals would squat in safe houses guarded by gang-bangers until they could be shuffled off into wider America. Their United States travel was arranged by big brother Luis, King of the Freeway. All it took was a van, a truck, a car with a big back seat or a roomy trunk. A rear seat on a Trailways bus.

  Luis, Daniel, El Negro, and El Moreno plied their trade in the vast reaches of the Cabeza Prieta wilderness. El Negro, El Moreno, and the Dark-Head Desert. It sounds like a Mexican translation of an H. P. Lovecraft story.

  It will shock no one to learn that Don Moi was said to be yet another relative of the prolific Cercas family.

  So this was their system:

  The Cercas familia controlled the operation from Phoenix; fixers in other states procured jobs for a fee; Daniel recruited the polleros and the guias for transport of walkers to these jobs, and he oversaw the tides of money, and he made the complex arrangements for housing and transport; Don Moi recruited the walkers—his title was enganchador, or the hooker; El Negro enforced and organized the shady doings in Sonora; El Moreno supervised the transport to the launching pad, where the walkers stepped off on a forsaken piece of desert on the brink of El Camino del Diablo, and he sometimes drove.

  At the bottom, there was the guía.

  4

  El Guía

  Three guides led the Wellton 26 into the desert: one will forever remain anonymous, one is only known by a code name, and one became infamous in the borderland.

  Guides are mostly tough boys who earn a hundred dollars a head every time they lead a group across the border. They never reveal their real names, so if they die, they are fated to lie in the potter’s fields of Tucson and Yuma. Each one has a code name, so the chickens cannot later identify him. And each one wears bad clothes so he blends in, should the group be apprehended. An army of border trash.

  The three guides that walked the Wellton 26 have few things to their credit, but one was the fact that they did not feed their pollos any drugs. Guias now give their walkers cocaine to make them walk faster and longer. Of course, cocaine helps their hearts explode, too. If the guía has been paid in advance, he doesn’t care if you get to your toilet scrubbing job or not. It’s easier for him, frankly, if you drop and return to dust in the middle of the Devil’s Highway. In 2003, it was reported in the Arizona press that low-rent Coyotes were using a new chemical prod to speed up their walkers. It turns out that ephedra-based diet pills are cheaper, effective, and easily available. The apparent Coyote favorites are over-the-counter “fat burners.” A dose of eight pills at a time really gets them hustling.

  The leader of the Wellton 26 group was a nineteen-year-old boy from Guadalajara.

  If he hadn’t inadvertently killed his clients, he would have made about three thousand dollars from the walk, which he’d probably split with his two associates. It was the biggest group he’d guided. Most of them were smaller, parties of twelve or eighteen. Twelve, say, at $100 to $150 a head, five times a month.

  He had trained and plied his trade in the Yuma area first, having commuted west from Nogales. He’d worked the drags out of Tinajas Altas Pass, and up around the ABC peaks where the Wellton signcutters patrolled. At some point in the past, he might have been apprehended by Kenny Smith or Officer Friendly or even Mike F., caught, boxed up, and sent back home, only to cross again another night.

  He wore his hair in a silly punk-rock style, cut short all around, with a red-dyed forelock hanging over his eye. He liked to flick it back over his head like an enemy’s scalp plopped on his skull. Some survivors said the hair was orange, or blond. To them, anything not black was blond.

  They didn’t know his name, but they all remembered the ’do. Border Patrol agents still refer to him as “Rooster Boy.” A couple of months before the disaster, in one of his other border busts, a federal judge had officially deported Rooster Boy. Sadly for everyone, he came back again.

  At the time of the last walk, he lived in a run-down white house in Sonoita with his girlfriend, Celia Lomas Mendez. The house was down at the end of the paved half of Altar Street, #67. He slept with her on a mattress and bedspring resting on the floor of a back room. Cement. Shadowy. The occasional palm tree rustled in the hot desert breeze.

  Beyond the end of the paved part of Altar lived his best friend, Rodrigo Maradona, another guía. Rodrigo lived on a dirt and stone alley, but he was close to his pal. El Ne
gro had provided them with cell phones. They’re all cybernauts, these polleros, instant-messaging and paging and celling each other like giddy teenyboppers in a shopping mall. They didn’t have proper plumbing, but they had da hook-up.

  Our boy’s Mexican cellular number was 65-13- 85- 21.

  His smuggling code name was “Mendez.” A romantic gesture in honor of his sweetheart. He still occasionally goes by his middle name, Antonio. Such was his idea of an alias. Antonio Lopez Ramos, aka Mendez.

  He had another alias, too. His boyhood nickname among his friends was sometimes Chuy, the diminutive of “Jesús.”

  This is his true name: Jesus.

  Jesus led the walkers gathered by Moses into the desert called Desolation.

  Jesus has the inevitable birthday of December 25.

  By way of this letter, I ask forgiveness and pardon for what happened in the Arizona desert, because I really am sorry from the bottom of my heart for what happened and it honestly wasn’t my intention to lead those people to their deaths. Rather, my intention was to help them cross the border. But we never imagined the tragedy would happen.

  But he did. He imagined it. It was no secret, this chance of death.

  Every week, walkers are left to die by their guias. It is so common that it must be seen as a standard Coyote practice. A business move.

  Wellton agents will tell you any number of heinous stories, as will the Mexican consular corps. Like the group jammed into a van that cut across the Devil’s Highway on a mad-dog cross-country run. Once in the United States, the van broke down. The walkers were at least thirty miles from the freeway. The driver told them it was an easy five-mile walk. Then he set the van on fire to keep it out of the hands of the Border Patrol. Said he was going to fetch a fresh van, and he’d be back to pick them up farther along the trail. He, of course, never returned. Many of the walkers died on that stroll. One of them was a pregnant nineteen-year-old woman.