Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (38 page)

The sensors are monitored in the sector HQ, where an operator had radioed Johnson and Greenfield. There had been two
"hits below the dyke. Greenfield had a pair of binoculars, and
Johnson was trying out an experimental infrared scope that made
him look like he was wearing a nineteen-inch television around his
neck. "Most of the illegals are good fellows," said Johnson. "You'll
see, we kid around with them." Although they didn't much, that I
saw.

The agents scanned the darkness until Greenfield said,
"Yep." Then Johnson handed me the infrared scope.

It showed heat as light so that the warm soil and grass glowed
faintly. Coming through this luminescent hay were two brilliant,
featureless silhouettes, looking like aliens indeed, like Close Encounter of the Third Kind aliens. It made me wonder, for a moment,
how many nine-eyed refugee-oids from collapsing-white-dwarfstellar systems are out there in the Milky Way.

"They'll head for the brush," said Greenfield. To our left, the
front slope of the dyke was covered with trees and undergrowth.
Johnson went down to the foot of the levee, and Greenfield and I
walked along the top and lay down in the grass at the edge of the
shrubbery. A few minutes later, we could hear the illegals crashing
through the sticks and leaves.

Immigration may be a moral quandary. But, at the moment, it
was lots of fun too. I almost forgot the thumb-sized mosquitoes and
the fact that I'd plopped down in what seemed to be a patch of fishhook plants. The noise came directly at us. It sounded as though
the illegals would step out of the bushes onto Greenfield's head.
And the first one almost did. Greenfield let him walk between us so
that we were, the three of us, as close together as people in a cashmachine line. As the second illegal came out of the woods, Greenfield jumped up.

The second man did a back dive into the greenery. But his
friend seemed too startled to move. Greenfield took him by the
arm, and the fellow sighed and-shrugged.-

When the first illegal had been locked in the car, we went
through the strip of brush, just like you do to flush grouse. Greenfield pushed up the middle. I walked along the top of the dyke.
And Johnson took the edge of the field. It was a moonless night,
and cattle were grazing everywhere. I walked into a cow and scared
the socks off myself. Meanwhile, the second illegal disappeared, a
"got-away" as they're called.

We went to another crossing point, which Johnson said was a
local favorite. There was a long, sandy road running down to the
river between sugarcane fields. The infrared scope picked out two
tiny bright dots, and we hid in the cane until an old man and a boy
walked by. Greenfield and Johnson grabbed each by an elbow. Neither protested. They shrugged as they were patted-down for
weapons and put in the backseat cage with their countryman.

These three desperados had been caught red-handed. Their
crime? Looking for work. If they'd pulled the caper off, they would
have scored less than minimum wages in conditions not fit for farm
animals. But they'd been nabbed. Now they'd have to face the
music. Their punishment? Greenfield and Johnson would take
them to the nearest international bridge and let them go home.

"What do you do if they run away?" I asked Greenfield.

"I chase them."

"What if you can't catch them?"

"I let them go."

"You don't shoot them?"

Greenfield looked shocked. "What for? They're trying to make
a living. They're not criminals." He thought that over. "They're just
breaking the law."

The next day I drove an hour and a half north to Falfurnias,
with assistant chief patrol agent Juan A. Garcia, to look at a
highway checkpoint. We pulled over a couple miles short at a rest
stop. "If somebody's carrying illegals," said Garcia, "they'll stop
here and make them walk around the checkpoint to be picked up
on the other side. It's a long walk."

We went over to the fence behind the rest stop to "cut sign," as
the Border Patrol calls tracking. The land was dry, baked scrub,
hot and flat as a griddle for fifty miles in every direction. "That
business about Mexicans being close to the land and never getting
lost and being able to withstand thirst and heat forever is nonsense," said Garcia, whose own parents had come over when
nobody minded.

There were plenty of footprints at the fence, mostly cheap
men's sneakers. But mixed with these were fresh prints from a
woman's high-heeled shoes and from a small child's sandals. We
followed the tracks a hundred yards into the scrub. Those high
heels must have pinched like a thumb in a car door. And how far
did the kid get before it started to bawl? "We'll check for them at
the drag," said Garcia.

The drag looked like a wide dirt road crossing the highway between the rest stop and checkpoint. But it was raked daily so that
any tracks across it would show. We drove for two miles along the
drag without any sign of the little sandals or the high-heeled shoes.
"They've gone wide into the brush," said Garcia. "Sometimes we
spot them because of the vultures."

At the checkpoint the patrol agents had just caught a young
man, an illegal, with four pounds of marijuana in his pickup. They
opened the package for me, and I sniffed it. It was really fortytoke, am-I-high-yet? Tampico ditch weed. I'll bet I wasn't the only
person in the room who felt like a dick nodding over the gravity of
this crime. The dope had been hidden in a hole cut through the
floorboard behind the pickup's seat. A section of sheet metal had
been carefully sawed out and put back in place with auto-body
filler. Then it had been sanded, spray-painted and covered with
carpet. The Border Patrol agents were mystified about why anyone
would go to so much trouble over four pounds of stems and seeds.

"Maybe it's a test run," said one of them.

"Or maybe it just shows how bad things are in Mexico,"
Garcia said to me while we were driving back. "The Mexican
minimum wage is $3.21 a day. Unemployment is 50 percent."

When we were about thirty miles from McAllen, Garcia spotted four illegals standing under a tree on the other side of the
highway. They weren't hard to pick out. They were each carrying a
little plastic grocery bag, usually the only luggage an illegal has.
They wore shoddy jeans and dusty, cotton plaid shirts. And they
were thin, the way only very rich Americans and very poor nonAmericans are. We were in an unmarked car, and when Garcia cut
through the median strip to get to their side of the road, the poor
ignoramuses stuck out their thumbs.

Garcia patted them down and put them in the backseat. Then
he got a snub-nosed revolver out of his briefcase and slipped it in
his pants pocket. The illegals were all from the same little town
near Reynosa. The oldest, who looked well past middle age, was
forty-three. Two others were in their mid-twenties. The youngest
was eighteen. They'd come across the river somewhere, they
weren't sure where, between McAllen and Brownsville at ten
o'clock the previous morning. They'd been walking ever since. It
was three P. M. when we picked them up. They said they'd come out on the highway because they were hungry. "Why don't you interview these guys," Garcia said. "See what their lives are like?"

I asked them how much money they had, Garcia translating.
One said one thousand pesos. Another said five hundred. The
eldest had four hundred. That was a little over $2.50 among them.
The youngest had nothing.

"Where did you expect to find work?" I asked.

"Wherever," said the eldest. He told me he had eight children. He'd been to the United States three times before. The two
guys in their twenties had each been twice. This was the first time
for the youngest. When they'd been here in the past, they had
worked on ranches, mostly picking fruit and vegetables.

"How long did you hope to stay?"

"As long as there was work," said the eldest. He had been
here for two months the last time. Usually he got $2.75 to $3.00 an
hour with room but not board.

Garcia told them I was a periodista who worked for a magazine
called Rolling Stone, "Piedra Rolar." They all thought that was a
very funny name for a magazine. They were still chuckling about it
as Garcia escorted them to the pedestrian walkway across the
border.

Not everything that comes over the Rio Grande is quite this
benign, of course. Since Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas
cleaned up south Florida, Mexico has become the main drug route
into the U. S. There's also a lively trade along the border in
"OTMs"-"Other Than Mexicans." These are aliens who get smuggled for a price out of South and Central America, China, Korea,
India, even Poland. OTMs are routinely robbed by "Border Rats,"
gangs who commit their crimes in the U.S. then slip back to
Mexico. The Mexican illegals are robbed, too, though there's little
enough to take from them. And the Border Patrol has the highest
casualty rate in the line of duty of any U.S. government uniformed
service.

I went on a drug stakeout with one of the agents from the
McAllen sector. "The smugglers are armed, and they will shoot,"
said the agent, who was carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun. After hiding his patrol car, he and I stood alongside a
road about a mile from the Rio Grande. Between the road and the river was a huge mesquite thicket. "The joke along here," said the
agent, "is that you can stop your patrol car anywhere on this road,
blink your headlights three times, and the smugglers will run out
and jump in your backseat by mistake." He'd no more said that
than a car came down the road at about three miles an hour. We hit
the dirt.

The car was a convertible with two flashy Latin girls in it,
radio turned up loud. It rolled to a stop not twenty feet from us.
"This is it," whispered the agent, and he belly-crawled forward,
moving fast and soundlessly, until there was just one ragged shrub
between him and the car. He could almost reach the door handle. I
followed, more in the fashion of a trout across the bottom of a
rowboat. I could see the agent slipping a clip into the MPS.

I tried to muffle my frenzied breathing by shoving my face into
the ground. But that only got dirt up my nose, so I had to muffle my
frenzied sneezes by shoving my face further into the ground, which
got dirt between my chattering teeth. This went on for thirty
minutes. So did the legion of bug bites.

Finally, the driver turned off her radio.

Giggling voices filled the night air.

`Antonio es muy simpatico."

"St, st, cdmo no, y Roberto es muy generoso."

We had been pinned down for a half-hour by an all-girl heartto-heart. The driver gunned her engine, and the two young ladies
drove away to their disco date.

But what does this tomfoolery look like from the other side?
Not so snappy and dramatic, I'm afraid. I rented a car and drove
along the south side of the border, from Matamoros on the Gulf of
Mexico to Tijuana on the Pacific. It was what TV news cameramen
call "cut to obligatory squalor." The overfed white reporter goes
around stuffing his microphone-or, in my case, pencil-in people's faces.

"Just how poor are you?" "Mind if I look around in your
hovel?" "Say, you wouldn't happen to have any kids that are a little
more crippled or anything, would you?"

Anyway, it's a mess over there. To tell the truth, it isn't a worse
mess than the Brownsville section of Brooklyn or downtown Detroit. But it's a different mess. Even in the best parts of Nuevo Laredo or Juarez, the pavement is coming to bits. There's garbage
all over the place. The buses and trucks belch smut. Buildings are
being made from such bum materials that it's hard to tell if the
construction is going up or coming down. In fact, neither. Since the
oil bust and foreign-debt crisis a couple of years ago, most Mexican
building sites are just sitting there.

The individual poverty was grim-o. But it was the corporate,
the commonweal poverty that jerked the senses. Mexico isn't just
squalid homes. It's squalid industry, squalid infrastructure. No
adequate capital investment has ever been made in Mexico, not
even by capitalists in the machinery of their capitalism. The whole
country looks like it's run by slum landlords. Especially the
bathrooms.

There aren't many sewage treatment plants in Mexico or, for
that matter, many sewers. Even septic tanks are a luxury. Mexico is
a nation of cesspools, of holes in the ground. You can't put toilet
paper in a cesspool; that clogs it. So all the used toilet paper goes
in wastebaskets or, more often, cardboard boxes on the bathroom
floor. Except people forget, and half the toilets in the country are
overflowing. I think public rest rooms are crucial to understanding
a culture. Look at the street-side pissoirs of France, the ancient
water closets of Britain, the ceramic relief palaces of the United
States. But don't go to the john in Mexico unless you plan to learn
more than-you-want to know.

Besides bathrooms, I figured I'd also better go see some
politicians. If you're looking for fleas, you have to lie down with
dogs. When I got to Juarez, across from El Paso, I went to the local
headquarters of PAN, the National Action Party (the acronym
means "bread" in Spanish). PAN would be the opposition party if
there were such a thing in Mexico. But the ruling party, the PRI,
has won, by this means or that, every presidential and gubernatorial election since 1929. PRI stands for "Institutional Revolutionary Party," a name that manages to include most of mankind's
bad ideas about governance. PAN occasionally wins a municipal
election.

PAN HQ was a large building in one of the better commercial
districts. But all the windows were broken, and the walls were
defaced with spray paint.

I arrived in the middle of a press conference-as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.
When it was over, instead of running for the bar like American
reporters, some of the journalists stayed and argued vehemently
with the PAN spokesmen. They were employees of the governmentcontrolled papers and TV stations. Imagine Peter Jennings giving
you grief on the air and then sticking around to tell you President
Reagan thinks you're a shit, too. When all the reporters had finally
left, I asked Juan Torres, the pissed-off looking president of the
PAN Juarez committee, my favorite question: