The Coyote's Game

By Terry Mccarthy/Naco

Border-patrol agent Nate Lagasse is sitting quietly in his Toyota Land Cruiser about three miles west of a small Arizona town on the Mexican border, following a group of 12 immigrants through his night-vision goggles. He radios directions to three colleagues, who are out in the mesquite on foot and closing in on the aliens. "They don't even know we are here yet," whispers Lagasse, who has turned off his headlights and allowed his truck to roll to a halt without hitting the brakes. "It's just like hunting."

Something alerts the aliens, and they hit the dirt, probably at the order of the coyote, or guide, they have paid to get them across. But Lagasse has marked their location and talks his three agents in on top of them. After a few minutes, a voice comes over his radio: "We have them now." The immigrants make no attempt to escape. The sight of a few agents in uniform is often enough to pacify a large group; some agents have singlehandedly detained 100 people at once.

Between 6 million and 12 million illegal aliens live in the U.S., the majority are from Mexico and most move through Arizona. It draws more than a third of the illegals, including 14 men who died of dehydration near Yuma after the temperature hit 115[degrees] two weeks ago. But the busiest place in the state is the tiny border town of Naco, a place so anonymous that its name derives from the last two letters of Arizona and Mexico. Naco (pop. 800) is little more than a bar, a school, a couple of streets and 220 border-patrol agents. Across the line in Mexico is a town with the same name, 10 times the population and all the makings of a first-class staging area-- guest houses, grocery stores and an army of local guides, or coyotes, to show the way.

As soon as the sun goes down, hundreds of men, women and children, armed with water bottles, toothbrushes, toilet paper and perhaps phone numbers in Phoenix, or Denver or Los Angeles, come walking, running and crawling north across the border. Each night border-patrol agents round up roughly 500 and next morning return them to Mexico, only to have them start all over again the following evening. It's a never-ending drill, often with life-and-death stakes. The border patrol says 383 people died last year attempting to cross the border from Mexico. "Is this problem solvable?" asks Victor Manjarrez, 37, top agent in the Naco station. "I think we in the border patrol are getting better at what we are doing. But with a Third World economy to the south and a First World economic power to the north, you will always have this problem."

THE GAME Every night a busy industry gears up to test the weak points all along the border's 1,952 miles. In Tijuana smugglers cram three people into a car trunk and a fourth behind a dashboard, then drive through the customs checkpoint, hoping nobody suspects anything. In Calexico aliens float down a stream choked with toxic chemicals and sewage, betting the border patrol won't jump in to pull them out. In nearby Nogales smugglers tunnel 6 ft. under the border and funnel people through.

Around Naco everyone moves on foot. It's an elaborate game. The smugglers send out small decoy groups at dusk to confuse the agents and use metal detectors to locate the underground sensors buried at intervals along the border. The feds have erected stadium lights and video cameras at three-mile intervals down the line, enabling spotters to see anyone who crosses. Then the hard part begins. Agents must chase down every group before it reaches a road or a rendezvous point on the U.S. side, where aliens can be stuffed into trucks or cars and quickly moved north. If a group hangs together, it can be easy to find; if it "goes quail"--scatters in all directions--agents on the ground have a slimmer chance of catching everyone. But a group that splits up runs the risk of perishing in the desert.

As usual, Lagasse's radio has been crackling almost nonstop since the sun went down. An operator back in town is monitoring the sensors and reading the results over the air: "924, two hits, 956, 12 hits..." The sensors are placed under trails, arroyos and washes known to be used by smugglers. When a foot falls nearby, alerts go off at the sophisticated command-and-control center. The news is relayed to agents crisscrossing borderlands in dusty SUVs. Tonight a group of 25 aliens has been detected on South Hereford Road down by the San Pedro River. Lagasse hears of a group of 18 walking across a private ranch that has set the dogs barking; he moves eastward to cut it off. "It will be like this all night," he says, jumping out of his truck and climbing over a barbed-wire fence. It is heavy going. The ground is uneven, the bushes are thorny and there are barbed-wire fences everywhere. The trails are faint and hard to follow. On the Mexican side, trailheads are often marked with an article of women's underwear hanging on a bush or a tree. On the U.S. side, smugglers use lights, the outlines of mountains or a line of high-voltage transmission wires as landmarks. In summer, rattlers come out at night to lie on warm stones. In winter, temperatures drop below freezing. The group of 18 has disappeared into a clump of trees, but after 20 minutes, Lagasse picks it up with his night-vision goggles, heading toward the road. He and several other agents round up 12 members of the group. Six others manage to slip away in the dark.

Apprehensions have been falling in the past six months after a decade of near constant increases, partly because the feds have nailed down the big crossing points and forced more people out into the desert. But it is possible that word has gone back to Mexico by telephone that jobs in restaurants, construction, office cleaning and landscaping are not as plentiful because of the sluggish economy. Either way, there's no slowdown in Naco. From October 2000 to March 2001, Manjarrez's men turned back 56,819 aliens--up 11% from the same period a year ago, even as overall border arrests dropped 24% in that time period.

THE AGENT Manjarrez knows what it means to want to come to the U.S. His father did it on foot at the age of nine. Victor Sr. illegally crossed into Arizona after traveling 800 miles from his hometown of Te-pic, Nayarit, in west-central Mexico. He had only a second-grade education and spoke no English. "I have a 14-year-old son now," says the border patrol chief, "and I cannot imagine him doing the same thing. [My father] didn't have a childhood, but when I ask him why he did it, he says, 'I didn't have a choice.'"

Manjarrez's father crossed 50 years ago and began a life that matches that of many people his son is trying to apprehend today. Victor Sr. made his way to Tucson, Ariz., worked as a dishwasher and a meat cutter and every month sent money back to his family in Nayarit. They teased him about how proud he was to be an American and nicknamed him Eisenhower. He raised his two children in the U.S. and sent his eldest--Victor Jr.--to college, then saw him join the U.S. border patrol. Its ranks are filled with agents who have similar family histories.

"The first time I did this," Manjarrez says in his office a mile from the border, "it felt like I was chasing my own family. Detainees often say to me, 'You are one of us. Why don't you let us go?' I tell them I am just doing a job. But it gives me a bit of insight, a different degree of compassion." If he forgets, his father is quick to remind him. When he visits his father's home in Tucson, Victor Sr. sometimes yells out the front window, "Viene la Migra!" (the ins is coming).

THE ALIEN Tonight Manjarrez's agents caught 709 illegals. One was Aurelio Gonzales, 52, a farmer from Durango. He had crossed with his 20-year-old daughter, intending to link up with a sister who lives in Phoenix. Gonzales paid smugglers $800 for each passage, up sharply from the $300 it cost before the border patrol put in all its lights, cameras and extra agents. The father and daughter had been walking for two days, though their coyote had said it would take less than an hour to cross the border. "They lied to us," said Gonzales, sitting, exhausted, in a border-patrol holding cell before being taken back across the border.

Gonzales has a 40-acre farm in Durango, but half of it is covered with cactus, and the beans he grows earn him less than $5 a day. "With six children and my wife, it is not enough." He was in debt 50,000 pesos--about $5,000--and could not pay even the interest on his loan. "I was thinking about coming to the U.S. for a while. Finally, I told my wife, and she said, 'If you can do it, get it done.'" His only other choice was to sell part of his land, which would make it even harder to earn a living for his family. He and his daughter arrived by bus in Naco, where the guides were waiting at the bus station. Says Gonzales: "They took us to a hotel. We waited there for two days. Then in the afternoon, we were taken to a ranch, and at around 7 p.m. we started walking."

Sometimes the smugglers have safe houses on the U.S. side where the immigrants can hide while awaiting transport north. Others must walk much farther. For Gonzales and his daughter, it was 10 p.m. before they crossed the border, and they had only begun their journey. Gonzales fell and twisted his knee in the dark and had trouble keeping up. With no map and no idea of the area, he was at the mercy of the two guides accompanying his group. After sleeping in the desert, they continued walking the following day and finally arrived at Highway 90, favored by smugglers for pickups. The guides disappeared. "They said they were going to find a car." Some time later, Gonzales and his group were found by a border-patrol officer. They were too tired to run away.

THE COYOTE Aurelio Gonzales was back in Mexico four hours after being picked up, but with his twisted knee, he was not sure he would try again--at least not that night. Many others do. Mexican officials say most aliens try six times before giving up. That's partly because the first thing returnees see back in Mexico is the coyotes on the corners, waiting to make their pitch. These days coyotes get paid only when their charges make it to their U.S. destination, so there's every incentive to keep trying. Tomas Romero, 33, hangs out in the park a block from the border post, and as soon as the ejected Mexicans come across, he shouts out with an encouraging smile, "Don't be depressed! There is a better place to cross!"

Romero has been a coyote in Naco for nine months. He comes from Veracruz and has a wife and two daughters. He used to work in California driving a truck, but says, "It was too much stress, and the money here is better." In a good week Romero can make several thousand dollars, even after he has paid the standard 10% bribe to the Mexican military and police in order to operate on the Mexican side of the border. "They have soplones--snitches--to tell them how much business each coyote is doing. So you have to pay," he says. U.S. officials say people smuggling is nearly as profitable as drug smuggling in some parts of Arizona, and there is some evidence that drug cartels are expanding into the human trade.

Romero doesn't go across himself anymore. He has been caught so many times that the border patrol has him on a list of smugglers who are subject to arrest if caught again. Now he hires runners to do the guiding. And with the buildup of agents, lights and cameras along the Naco border, he's bringing his clients much farther west, to Sasabe, where they have to walk 45 miles across the desert before they reach the first road on the U.S. side. "I tell them they will walk some but not much--maybe six hours." Few realize he is lying, that it will take them several days to cross the desert, and by the time they find out, it is too late to turn back. Few guides will wait for a person who lags behind or runs out of water. Romero doesn't seem to care much. "It is just a business, no?" he says, his eyes scanning the street for more clients.