The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [63]
Or he stole three hundred dollars.
The money confuses more than the terrain, more than the hyperthermia. Versions of the dollar amount, and what the dollars implied, never end.
Mendez: “The people asked me and the other guide to go and get water for them, and they donated ninety dollars to us. Actually, they gave it to Lauro. I never touched the money.”
U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service Report of Investigation, Case Number YUM200105000-002, page two, quotes Rafael Temich:
“The group offered to pay the guides $70.00 U.S. Dollars to bring them water but the guides demanded $200.00 Dollars more. When the two guides started to leave together the group asked one of them to stay with them and not to go. Rafael did not know how much money the group had given the two guides. ( … ) Monday the guides left and never came back.”
Francisco Morales Jimenez remembers Mendez asking him, “Got any dollars?”
“No, no,” he replied. “I’m only carrying pesos.
” “Oh yeah? I’m not going to walk if it’s for pesos.”
He demanded two hundred dollars.
José Antonio Bautista, from the town of Equimite, gave Mendez ten dollars. His uncle Reymundo Barreda Sr. probably had more money on him than the rest of them and he handed sixty dollars over to the Coyotes. Thirty for him and thirty dollars for his already dying son. Bautista recalls a hand reaching into the group and giving Mendez a twenty dollar bill, but he can’t remember whose hand it was.
There’s the ninety dollars.
Mendez, again: “We never imagined that the temperatures would be so high. So then the illegals asked me and my companion to go for water and they gave us ninety dollars to buy the water, because we didn’t have any money on us.”
No money. That part is true: guías seldom carried money. Like the bad clothes, the lack of money would serve to disguise them should they be arrested. A guy in new Air Jordans and a Kangol hat, with a roll of Benjamins in his pocket, would be sent on the express train to the holding cell. So Mendez had been broke. But he didn’t stay broke for long.
The Border Patrol’s “Operation Broken Promise” report: “The two guides collected money from the group and told them they were going to get water. They told the group to wait in this location and abandoned the group.”
United States Attorney Paul K. Charlton, “Proffer of Factual Basis in the matter of United States of America v. Jesus Lopez-Ramos”:
“The group’s condition deteriorated dramatically ( … ). The aliens began to consume cactus and their own urine in an attempt to sustain themselves and to fend off the effects of heat exposure and dehydration. As individual members weakened and succumbed, the group splintered into several smaller groups. During the evening of May 21, 2001, several group members demanded that Jesus Lopez-Ramos depart their location in search of water and transportation for those that remained alive. Lopez-Ramos agreed, collected $90.00 from the group’s members, then set out with ‘Lauro’ ( … ) to locate water.”
Well, the men say they met at dawn, not evening.
The INS official press release reverses this testimonial and has Mendez collecting the money and leaving, and then the group begins to succumb to the heat, to fall apart into disparate groups, and to die.
Mario González remembers: “We hit it and we hit it and we hit it again. When we were all dying, we told them, ‘Don’t be nasty you assholes. Go get us some water.’ ”
Maximino Hilario remembers the Coyotes demanding money, but he doesn’t know how much. Mario González adds that the walkers did ask Mendez to go for water, but that Mendez rejected all pesos. It was only the long green for Mendez. Francisco Morales says Mendez only collected ninety dollars of that cash, but that he did demand it, and that he put it in his pocket: Lauro never touched it. José Isidro Colorado Huerta saw Mendez take a hundred dollars.
Nobody, then, can agree on how much, or how it was collected, or by whom, or for what reason, or when. The stated purpose was, of course, rescue. Later