The Devils Highway: A True Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

head.
    Texas Rangers allegedly handcuff homeboys and toss them into irrigation canals to drown, though the walkers can’t tell the Border Patrol apart from the Rangers or any other mechanized hunt squad: they’re all cowboys. Truncheons. Beatings. Shootings. Broken legs. Torn panties. Blood. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Kicked ribs. Rape. These are the words handed from border town to border town, a savage gospel of the crossing. And the dark image of the evil Border Patrol agent dogs every signcutter who goes into the desert in his truck. It’s the tawdry legacy of the human hunt—ill will on all sides. Paranoia. Dread. Loathing. Mexican-American Border Patrol agents are feared even more by the illegals than the gringos, for the Mexicans can only ascribe to them a kind of rabid self-hatred. Still, when the walkers are dying, they pray to be found by the Boys in Green.
    The Border Patrol is understandably touchy about this reputation. They think the Jack Nicholson film
The Border
, where all agents and officers are corrupt, is funny as hell. They recommend a good Charles Bronson film about the Border Patrol if you want to know what it’s really like. Something a little more straight up, more cowboy —cowboy in a good way, in the traditional way.
    The five men rushed toward the truck.
    “They’re dying,” they gasped.
    “Who’s dying?”
    “Men. Back there. Amigos.”
    Seventeen men, they said.
    Agent F. gave them water. They gulped. They puked the water back out and didn’t care. They drank more.
    “Muertos! Muertos!”
    Seventeen. Then thirty. One man thought there were seventy bodies fallen behind them.
    When Agent F. called it in to Wellton, the station’s supervisory officer said, “Oh, shit.”
    For a long time, the Border Patrol had worried that something bad was coming. Something to match or outstrip the terrible day in 1980 when a group of Salvadorans was abandoned in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and thirteen of them died. If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.
    The guys at Wellton knew the apocalypse had finally come.
    Southern Arizona is divided into two Border Patrol sectors, Tucson and Yuma. Fifteen hundred agents patrol Tucson sector; three hundred work Yuma. Tucson handles the eastern half of the state, starting at the small city of Ajo and covering Tucson, Nogales, Douglas, Patagonia, and so on. Yuma sector patrols the west, all the way to the Colorado River and beyond. They are responsible for Gila Bend, Dateland, Wellton, San Luis, and Yuma. Strangely enough, they also patrol into California’s Imperial County. This has caused legal tribulations with the Mexican consulate in Calexico, California: illegals apprehended in eastern California should be tried in San Diego, but they are transported to Phoenix, where their cases are heard. Responsibility for these people can stretch from San Diego to Calexico to Tucson and finally to Phoenix. It only adds to the general chaos that rules the border, a chaos that the Tucson consul calls “the politics of stupidity.”
    Both Border Patrol sectors had been hammered by growing tidal waves of illegals. Urban crossings had been sealed off, and now smaller rural crossings were systematically clamping down. Operation Gatekeeper, the final solution to the border crossings, introduced by California in the late nineties, had ushered in a new era of secure urban borders and trampled wilderness. San Diego, Calexico, Yuma, El Paso, Nogales, Douglas, they were all becoming harder to get through. This looked great for the politicians of the cities. Voila! No more Mexicans!
    Bigger fences, floodlights, a Border Patrol truck every half-mile, sensors, infrared spy videos, night vision cameras, Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoints on all major freeways in and out of town, more agents.
    But now, smaller, rougher places were becoming hot spots. The drug-smuggling village of