The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Read Online Free PDF Page B

western stories or preposterous movies.
    At the crossing to San Diego, the records of combined forces showed that they turned back 524,231 Mexicans. About a million made it through. Near the end of 1999, they had for the single year stopped 182,267, which seems like a tremendous victory, except three still got through for every one stopped. Yet it still was a gamble for a Mexican to try without a professional smuggler—a coyote.
    Suddenly, and from everywhere, the traffic became overwhelming. The North American Free Trade Agreement of January 1, 1994, erased duties and left customs and immigration people standing at ramparts designed to inspect and impound drugs and keep out Mexicans without papers, trying to block a flood with their feet. All border troops try to ignore being parties to the fiction that you can stop masses of people who want to move. They stand on the border as fierce defenders of the American way of life: paycheck. Andas part of the great new law enforcement industry, they understand the need for official statistics. Stop two illegals, the figure becomes five in a government press release in Washington.
    This still requires a lot of plain hard, frustrating work. They’ll receive a tip that a trailer truck is coming through with illegals. Stop the truck and find sixty Mexicans huddled in back. Send them back. Away goes the truck. Acting on information and belief, agents pull over a van and find many pounds of marijuana. The driver says he has no idea how it got there. He is arrested. And as far as the eye can see there is a line of trucks waiting to cross, eighteen-wheel trailer trucks coming from Tijuana. An average of three thousand trailer trucks brush past the border booths every twenty-four hours like an armored column and head anywhere in America.
    And in the southbound lanes, another three thousand trucks head from America to Mexico.
    Some American unions said the safety standards of these Mexican trucks and their drivers was so low that they were a rolling threat to America. That never happened. The California Highway Patrol and the local San Diego police could not come up with any records of an uncommon number of trucks from Mexico, or trucks going there, involved in accidents on Highway 35. By May of 2000, the Senate Commerce Committee found that of the 63,000 trucks from Mexico running in the United States, 73 percent were inspected during the year and therefore rated as approved.
    The common fear was that trucks from Mexico carrying cheaply produced goods would suck up the American economy.
    “I don’t see anything sucked up,” Rudy Camacho, the customs agent in charge of southern California, said as he stood at the border plaza, the sound of trucks forcing him to keep his voice raised. “One can’t do without the other anymore. Twenty billion dollars a year in trade. Southern California can’t do without it. What’s it done to Mexico? It woke up a sleeping giant.”
    Ray Kelly, then customs commissioner, in for a visit from Washington,stood at the Tijuana crossing and watched the long lines of trailer trucks. Once he figured out that the ones coming from Mexico were carrying mufflers for America, thousands of mufflers, he knew the idea of stopping Mexico was over. “You get something this commonly used and if you slow it up, you’ll have auto dealers calling for your head,” he said. “What’s happened is we’ve been overwhelmed. The government agencies can’t handle the situation. We all need more people. We’re told to forget it. What they want is more roads to handle all this. We seized three hundred eighty-five thousand pounds of drugs this year. Pot. We’re burning forty thousand pounds of it tomorrow in Long Beach. I don’t care how you feel about drugs or pot, but nobody in Washington is interested in drugs anymore. Whether anybody wants to recognize it or not, we’re going to have more and more trouble stopping drugs from coming through. Who knew there would be this