El Juego

El JUEGO The Game By Victor 297 To first see the U.S.-Tijuana border is somewhat akin to stepping into the pages of Dante’s Inferno. It is a hellscape, a sort of desolate and eerie substratum between the third-world purgatory below and the city of angels above. The monotonous brown of the chaparral with its mustard plants and coastal sage makes the mind thirst for color. Silvertipped cholla cacti loom everywhere, ready to insert their fanged tubercles into any flesh that brushes past. Barrel cacti also lurk underfoot, and their steel ribs and fierce spines will slice right through a combat boot to skewer a whole foot. Scorpions, tarantulas and rattlesnakes are common residents. At night, the air reeks of wild anise and burning tires – a smell so acrid that it lodges in the olfactory nerve for years. The skeletal remains of smugglers’ cars haunt the canyons like lost souls, and the eight-foot landing strip that separates the countries stands ready to snag a ringed finger and strip it to the bone, or take fingers off hands entirely. Everything hangs in perpetual limbo, until the hour when the game begins. A sort of divine comedy between the United States Border Patrol and the Mexican population has played itself out here for decades, with each side keenly aware of the other’s timeworn ruses and unspoken rules. It is a game, essentially, with no end and no winner. If a patrol agent (PA) plants a movement sensor too close to the border, a coyote will sneak across and steal it. If an alien refuses to admit that he crossed illegally, a PA will pull out his radio, tell him it is a lie detector, and dupe him into confessing (or just hit him with it). If an alien is feigning an illness in the holding cell, he is experiencing a “Mexican heart attack.” Since aliens not from Mexico –“Other Than Mexicans” (OTRs) – mean deportation and paperwork, their presence reverses the game: when agents encounter an easily discernible pack of El Sals or Guats, the agents run from them. Smart OTRs, however, will march to the nearest station and loiter around until a deputy chief wonders what they are doing outside his office window. They are all called tonks, in 1

illicit Border Patrol slang, because it is said that that is the sound your flashlight makes when it bounces off of a head. I joined the Border Patrol in 1993 when the San Diego border was still hemorrhaging illegal aliens. The numbers could be staggering, especially during the wet season when the rains made the canyons impassable and restricted agents to working “the pavement.” Any night during the rainy season could yield 800-1000 aliens. That’s one ten-hour shift at one station consisting of around fifteen agents working five square miles. Multiply that number by three to add the neighboring stations of Brownfield and Imperial Beach and that’s 2400-3000 aliens. Since agents only catch less than half of what they see, or roughly one out of four, triple that number, add in the catch from the other two shifts, and you get a rough estimate of five to ten thousand aliens crossing through San Diego in one day during the busy season. Only a handful of these aliens ever face deportation charges; the rest are “VR’d”, or voluntarily returned to Mexico where they try again the next night. It was not unusual to catch the same alien twice in the same shift. These numbers took a toll on agent psyche. In law enforcement, a unique phenomenon occurs among officers; it is called contempt of cop. The police hold tremendous power, and they expect that their mere presence will elicit compliance. When obedience is not forthcoming, and that scumbag on the street corner talks back, cops will lash out with anger. It is natural and unavoidable, but more experienced officers are savvy enough to refrain from punching a big mouth. In San Diego, Mexicans were either petrified, innocuous peasants from the interior (Oaxacans were famous for their happiness and matching haircuts) or career smugglers and hardened gang bangers. Want to make a group from the interior surrender? Threaten to kill them and they will believe you and dive into the dirt. That was power, and when La Migra showed up, you expected surrender. Smugglers and 3126s (felony criminal aliens) ran though, and more experienced crossers did too. That pisses you off, and if you catch them, you will make them remember it. At the end of a shift, the more psychopathic agents would have blood and hair embedded in their flashlights; a few months into the job, you knew what you could get away with and in front of whom. Some never outgrew the intoxication of police power, others tired of it, some never engaged in it, but any agent who showed

2

sympathy to a tonk could expect censure. I was often morally torn between whackin’ someone in the head who dared run from me, and the guilt of picking on someone blatantly not my size. I was lucky – I lost all interest in the game and only rarely asserted my “uniform presence.” The game was not all whoop-ass-in-a-canyon though. It was pure comedy more often than not. The language barrier was always a reliable source of ridiculousness. For example, senior agents often directed junior agents to practice their Spanish with the aliens in preparation for their oral exams. They usually struggled and felt the need to apologize by saying “somos novatos,” or “we’re trainees.” Inevitably, they would mangle it, and the phrase would turn into “somos novios,” or “we’re boyfriends.” The border terrain itself also provided its own amusement. Trainees were always getting lost, which was quite easy. When one wayward agent lost his way and tried to radio his location, he said he was “east of the moon.” Even worse, an entire vanload of trainees in hot pursuit lost track of the border and drove straight into Mexico, where los federales were only too welcoming. Hours of negotiations later, the Mexican authorities released them – with neither van nor badges. The Mexican cops were infamous for their corruption – when the Patrol let the Tijuana police qualify on its shooting range, every single gun there disappeared. By the time I arrived in San Diego, the numbers of illegal aliens were still high, but they were a marked improvement from the prior decades. The government had erected an actual fence, even though it was routinely drilled through and tunneled under, but it was better than a measly strip of barbed wire. Before the fence, the border was an open party, and soccer games went on all day. High-speed car chases between agents and smugglers were so commonplace that abandoned smuggling vehicles littered the entire county. (A particularly gruesome crash that killed many school children ended that practice). Drugs flowed north, and money and guns went south.

This continued into the

early 90’s until the immigration problem in Southern California finally garnered Washington’s attention. The Border Patrol then swallowed a political correctness pill, underwent a hiring wave, which is still going on today, and instituted “Operation Gatekeeper.”

3

Operation Gatekeeper ruined everything, or more correctly, solved the problem. Traditionally, agents let aliens have free entry for a half mile. Agents would “lay in” in various canyons near well-traveled footpaths where alien foot traffic would trip sensors. The basic idea was to hide, spot a group, jump out and scream “La Migra!” They either collapsed in fright or the race was on, and you might get three or four out of twenty. Gatekeeper changed the strategic thinking. Now, agents would form a sort of human fence down close to the border and prevent entry altogether. They sat on static “Xs” every hundred or so yards, and this line of agents stretched from the ocean in the west to the mountains in the east. In the beginning of the operation, a typical shift would yield maybe a few hundred, but as the operation progressed, the numbers dwindled significantly as the foot traffic moved into eastern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Eventually, I would go a week without seeing an alien. Gatekeeper also brought mass disgruntlement. Agents were all adrenaline junkies, and sitting on an X for ten hours at a pop was the exact inverse of what they were used to doing. Sabotage was constant. Agents would break ranks to chase a sensor to the north, and aliens would stream through the opening. In Washington, numbers mean everything, and a night with a high yield of aliens would be interpreted as an operational failure. At muster, supervisors harped on us not to catch any aliens, and in turn, we would go out and try to catch as many as possible. When that failed, agents just gave up and refused to catch anyone at all. And when the boredom became unbearable, they quit, almost en masse. In one year, the Border Patrol hired 400 new agents for the San Diego sector to bolster manpower. Three hundred and ninety-eight quit. Today, a triple fence cemented deep into the ground barricades the San Diego border. An actual high school sits on the old Dillon Tree Line. Almost all alien traffic has moved east, and the appearance of citizen groups like The Minutemen in Arizona reflects those years of border sitting in San Diego. A recent e-mail to my former supervisor, who is one particularly tough hombre, described today’s linea this way: OK. The border. Changed a lot since you were here. For a couple of years you could go days without an entry. Then the brilliant geniuses at HQ decided we didn't need to patrol anymore because we had no traffic, losing sight of the fact that there was only no traffic because of effective patrol. East county was always out of control, so was Arizona. So they sent all the resources out there and stripped the line in San Diego.

4

Now AZ is out of control, East County is out of control: dope and alien drive-thrus, bad guys shooting at us, us shooting back. And the smugglers are back in BRF and CHU. Another big problem is because of the mass hirings, we now have a corruption problem: two ECJ agents arrested for moving dope, for example. Nobody has a clue as to the anti-terror mission either. My job is to take care of the really pressing enforcement issues. I have a 1326 squad, a tactical intel squad because sector intel can't provide criminal intelligence, and four anti-smuggling squads. In other words, I formed the first detective bureau in the Border Patrol. We have done a lot of good stuff, over 200 felony convictions in 2 yrs, and some amazing intel stuff. ( I'm also a collateral Mexican Liaison officer, passport and clearance to travel.) Most of the shit I can't talk about. Right now my guys are chasing multiple loaders from the east end of CHU, out by Donovan Prison. It is a game – es un juego - with no winner and no end. Ya viene la migra! Corrale vatos!

5