The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [28]
Of course, if you know Spanish, you know that the word for “chicken” is gallina. “Pollo” is usually reserved for something else. A pollo, as in arroz con pollo, has been cooked.
Now, more than ever, walkers need a Coyote.
In the new organized crime hierarchies of human smuggling, the actual Coyotes are middle-management thugs. The old Coyote, the scruffy punk leading a ragtag group of Guatemalans into San Diego via the bogs and industrial parks of Chula Vista, is rapidly becoming extinct. You will still encounter a dope fiend who will walk you into the infrared night-vision RoboCop scrub for fifty bucks, or the homeboy in the Impala who blusters you through the line by being a “Chicano” heading home to the barrio after “hitting the bars,” but he’s being replaced by the new breed. And woe to that crackhead if the Young Turks get hold of him. He’ll be found with his hands tied behind his back and a .9 mm slug in his brainpan.
Even asking questions about these criminals is considered dangerous. Queries into the Coyote operation behind the Yuma 14 catastrophe, for example, elicit three different warnings about being “shot in the head.” One gets the feeling that the entire world of Coyotes is waiting, waiting to merge with the narcotraficante underworld immortalized by Norteño music and movies such as Traffic, waiting to hook more deeply into the white slavery and sex slavery and child-labor rings of the world, waiting for a human-smuggling visionary to unify them.
Gangs are so in control now that walkers who want to go alone, without a pollero to guide them, must pay a fee just to enter the desert.
Criminals are at the gate of Disneyland: they’re scalping tickets, and they’re scalping each other.
The criminal operation that lured the Yuma 14 and their companions into the desert and abandoned them was not the biggest, by far. But it was well established, and it operated out of Phoenix, Arizona, and the Mexican state of Hidalgo. It was a family operation. The main man, the Tony Soprano figure, lived in the United States. Or maybe he lived in Hidalgo. He liked to wear cowboy boots, and he kept his figure slim. Or he was never seen by the troops. A voice on the phone.
In Phoenix, it was Luis Cercas.
Luis Cercas, at the time of the Yuma 14 deaths, had contacts in Florida, Illinois, and California. He had a Florida associate, Don Francisco Vásquez, and another roving associate was placed in Mexico. He was the brother of Luis, Daniel Cercas, and he lived in Hidalgo.
Like all of the smugglers, Daniel had an alias, “El Chespiro,” derived in part from “Chespirito,” the cloying little red cricket of Mexican kids’ TV. (Chespiro! Did some of the walkers think Don Moi was in touch with the television star? Did some of them secretly believe that Chespirito, the red cricket, was a massively powerful gangster? It made a kind of sense to the Mexican mind. Stranger things had happened.) This Chespiro never met the bottom-feeders of the gang face-to-face; he kept in contact via cell phone. All payments went to Chespiro, and all payouts allegedly came from Chespiro.
Chespiro sent people to Sonoita from all over Mexico. A sister-in-law worked in Phoenix, running the administration of the corporation. She organized pickups and human deposits in the double-wides and barrio apartment safe houses. One of these drop-offs is known to have been on Peoria Street in Phoenix.
A step beneath Luis and Chespiro Cercas and their sister-inlaw were the soldiers and drivers and guides.
In the Yuma 14 case, the Coyote was a shadowy and notorious figure known as El Negro (with the wonderful Mexican bandido name of Evodio Manilla). He had the universal black mustache. He was short and thin, with an “aquiline” nose and a haircut that in reports sounds like it was a mullet. He wore gold chains around his neck, and he had a curious head-bobbing walk. He had three vehicles, and all of them might have been white. El Negro