The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [84]
Mexicans still behind the barbed wire continue to listen to fabulous tales of Los Estados Unidos. They watch drunk and disorderly teens vomit in the streets of Spring-Break-Atlán. They wait tables and mop floors while sailors scream and naked girls dangle from balconies. Topless gringas pout on their beaches, where they are not welcome unless they’re sweeping up cigarette butts or carrying trays of Day-Glo liquor concoctions. They watch television, go to open-air twelfth-run movie houses where the tickets cost fifty centavos and the mosquitoes bite their necks. Radio is alive with propaganda: Eminem! ’NSync! Britney! Ja Rule! (They call him: Ha!) It’s Radio Free Mexico, on every AM and FM dial! They buy castoff American clothes at the segundas, and by God, even the gringo trash is better than anything else they can buy!
Border dwellers, come from the hinterland, are twelve hundred miles from home but five miles from the United States.
We gonna get it back.
In ancient days, the Rain God was fed by the tears of the innocent. For any rain to fall now, it will take gallons of tears, rivers. In the desert, the drops evaporate before they hit the ground. Our dead men opened the gate for the most deadly seasons ever seen on the border.
The Mexican consul in Tucson said, “The media only cares about the Yuma 14 because of the large numbers. But this tragedy goes on every day. It never stops. If only one person dies out there, it is exactly the same horror story.”
Victims are continually gutted by the power. In Juarez, young women are still being slaughtered and abandoned in desert lots, rotting and mummifying where their rapists and torturers dropped them. Their empty chest cavities are home to bees and scorpions. No one knows yet who is killing the women. All they know is that more than three hundred of them have been butchered. A reporter from Mexico City who went to Juarez to investigate was abducted and beaten so severely that he was permanently disfigured. Local women’s rights groups whisper that it’s “Los Juniors,” the pampered sons of the maquiladora owners, engaging in sport with the easy prey of poor displaced women. Cops say it’s Satanists, or a gringo serial killer. Federales say it’s a foreigner, or a gang of foreigners. Bus drivers. An Egyptian. Street gangs. Narco smugglers. Americans say it’s the Mexican cops themselves. The year 2003 brought the hideous allegation that the women were actually being harvested by a shadowy syndicate of transplant-organ providers. It sounded like a story from a book of urban myths or a bad horror movie: young women cut up and sold, liver by liver, heart by heart, to wealthy white folks, and while the harvesters are doing their butchering, they stop for a bit of rape and torture to make it interesting.
Susana Flores, a thirteen-year-old girl, was mercifully shot in the head. After all, the coroner discovered that during her torture, she had suffered four heart attacks. Imagine her pleading, her tears. Imagine what made a young girl suffer heart attack after heart attack after heart attack after heart attack before the Angel of Sorrow laid a tender gun to her skull and pulled the trigger. Even on the border, there is sometimes grace.
Steve Ganitsch, the über-officer of the Cactus Cops, says: “Five miles from the border, nobody knows. Nobody cares. Nobody understands. They don’t want to know.”
In Organ Pipe, ranger Chris Eggle, everyone’s all-American, your favorite daydream of what a ranger would be—an Eagle Scout, a class president from Michigan, a tall clear-eyed handsome man that fellow officers said was the embodiment of the Spirit of Christmas—was gunned down by two scuttling hitmen from Tijuana. How like Desolation to surprise Chris Eggle with a burst of gunfire on a bright beautiful day with the heat roaring up out of the land and the hard disk of blue scraping overhead. The gunmen had tied up their victims outside of Sonoita. Drugs. Fifteen thousand dollars a head. They shot each man in the back, full auto, rattatatta