The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [81]
Later, Williams heard about the brushfire the boys had started. How unlikely was it that the roving Border Patrol pilots and sign-cutters missed the initial big group, then missed a raging fire in a protected wilderness? Were there no rangers spotting for grass fires? Was there no Migra agent scanning the landscape? If they saw a fire out there, would they not call it in, to someone, anyone? And wouldn’t it stand to reason that a chopper would cruise by, just to see if the valuable habitat was about to explode in a conflagration? Bighorns and Gila monsters and javelinas and saguaros going up in bursts of sparks and billows of smoke? Yet nobody saw it. Or, better yet, if they saw it, they didn’t bother to investigate.
A vast borderland conspiracy was at work.
Mendez liked the direction it was going. He liked pinning it all on the pinche Migra, because the Migra was laying it all on him. Case after case of manslaughter, maybe even murder if anybody could be turned to say that he’d beat them or threatened them. And then there was the detail that troubled everybody except the prosecutors and the Border Patrol: Mendez and Lauro collecting money from the dying.
Any signcutter will tell you that in every case, without exception, when the walkers are abandoned to die by their Coyotes, the Coyotes “borrow” or steal all their money. This is a standard business practice among those who leave humans to die for convenience’ sake.
Mendez swore, to anyone who would listen, to Williams, to the jailers, in writing and out loud, that he had set out to save the dying men.
Why did he need money to save them?
To buy water!
All their money?
To buy water and to pay for a ride!
What about every other group left to die? It’s a standard lie told by the troops of all the El Negros and Chespiros who work the line. We’re going for help; we’re buying a car; we’re going for food and water; we’re hiring a driver. By nightfall, the Coyotes are buying marijuana and hookers with the money of the dead. What about that?
Mendez could only say, “I am not like that.”
When the Wellton gang heard this, some of them laughed out loud.
The living talked.
Details poured out of them, and cops and the Migra and the prosecutors and the Mexicans listened. Rita Vargas penned a long, detailed report covering every aspect of the event and the identities of the walkers, living and dead. Investigators started hunting down the Cercas gang’s U.S. operators. Dark rumors started floating, that the dreaded BORTAC commandos were in Mexico, on search and destroy missions. An unprecedented wave of investigation was launched in Mexico. Eight hundred Federales were said to have flooded the northland, attacking Sonoita, hunting in Veracruz and Hidalgo. Cercas gang associates started to go down.
Indicted in absentia by a grand jury in Phoenix in September 2002, El Negro, taking his role as a norteño-music-style outlaw seriously, fled the border. He hit the road in his pickup, all cowboy boots and evil whiskers. El Negro wore shades! El Negro drove fast! Women flocked to El Negro! He was sighted all over Mexico. El Negro—the new Dillinger! He taunted them from tabloids. He was reported to have gone, in a dazzling bit of ban-dido hubris, to Veracruz itself. He was photographed playing soccer, perhaps on the very fields where Reymundo Jr. had once played. El Negro wears shorts! El Negro shoots—he scores! Goal!
Even the newsmen said: This hombre