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By Root 588 0

—covers all the Central and South Americans swelling the ranks of the walkers. Many Americans don’t know that Chinese and Russian refugees cross Desolation as well. And Mexican smugglers are now using freighters to run the North American coastline and drop the walkers into Canada, where the rules are lax and the border —twice the length of the Mexican border —is even more abandoned. Middle Eastern operatives look like Mexicans; as long as they keep their mouths shut, they can pass. Muslim missionaries have moved into southern Mexico, often taking up where Christian evangelists have left off. They set up Koranic schools in Indian villages, and in tribes where the children do not even speak Spanish, they are being taught to read, speak, and write Arabic. Reportedly, the largest al Qaeda training ground in the New World is in Brazil. The Texas and Arizona branches of the Border Patrol have aired suspicions that the smugglers are happy to transport al Qaeda members across the Devil’s Highway. In a world of pure capitalism, Osama’s crew has the juice: these ultimate OTMs are said to pay fifty thousand dollars apiece.

Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human—wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: “If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?”) In politically correct times, “illegal alien” was deemed gauche, so “undocumented worker” came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is “undocumented entrant.” As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant.

Maybe it is.

In the strange military poetics of the Border Patrol, the big kill itself is known not only as the Case of the Yuma 14. It is officially called “Operation Broken Promise.” Of all the catch phrases of the event, this is perhaps the most accurate.

In the postmortem packets, you will find death certificates, coroner’s reports, INS or sheriff’s reports, and the pictures. Each report has color photographs of the dead, both in hard copy printouts and digitized on computer disks. The pictures focus on the faces, or what’s left of the faces, then the torsos, occasionally the genitalia. Hands are greatly in evidence, but you never see feet.

The dead have open mouths and white teeth. They are stretched in angular poses, caught in last gasps or shouts, their eyes burned an eerie red by the sun. Many of them are naked. Some of them have dirt in their mouths. When the corpses are those of women, their breasts have shrunk and withered and cracked open under the sun. The deads’ open mouths reveal gums that have turned to some substance that looks like baked adobe, crumbling and almost orange. They look like roadside attractions, like wax-and-paper torsos in a gas station Dungeon of Terror. For many of them, these are the first portraits for which they have posed.

The Yuma 14 are all male.

Along with dead flesh, the photographs show pants, shoes, underwear. Teeth in close-up. Tattoos, if any. The pants are Latino knockoffs of American designer jeans: Furor, OK Roy, Fase 2000. Most of the underpants are colored, as if the walkers hoped to be stylin’ when they got to Phoenix. Blue, red, and black are the favored colors. The underpants are stained, either with urine or other body liquids that have boiled out of the corpses.

Among the paperwork and photographs in each packet is a king-size Ziploc sandwich bag. Each baggie contains the final effects of the walkers, whatever was found on and around the bodies that might be returned to their survivors, or that might be used to identify the dead. Some reports wittily call these men Juan Does. Jane Doe becomes Juana Doe. The women of the consulate open the files and catalog what remains. If you are lucky, they will show you these treasures. As they search for the Yuma 14’s archives, they place a fresh folder on the table. It contains a wallet, a few coins, a comb with hair and dandruff in its teeth, and a Catholic scapular. The picture on the scapular is of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The stench sneaks from the