The Coyote's Bicycle Read online

  After a year in Los Angeles Roberto was back in Tijuana, knocking on his uncle’s door.

  “What are you doing here, mijo? Are you okay? Did you get deported?”

  “No, uncle,” Roberto said, “I’m fine. Everything is good. It’s just that I was in Los Angeles and I was washing all of those spoons and forks in a kitchen that was like a hot, white dream and I kept thinking back to the last time I felt good. I mean really good. And the only moment I could find was here on the border—when I was crossed by el coyote into Otay.”

  “What are you saying, son?”

  “Well, I want to do that work.”

  “With the migrants?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dumb kid! I hand over my savings to put you into a new life, and you want to be el coyote?”

  “Let me tell you,” Roberto said, “I had a really hard time finding people who would help do the work. You could almost count all the polleros on your fingers. And it was a difficult time. We had to watch out for the police here more than anything. During the shifts of certain cops, you couldn’t even walk near the edge of the border. You’d end up in the ‘70-76’ under investigation, which was not pleasant. It’d start with a bag over your head, electric shocks to your testicles—all to see what they could get out of you.”

  Roberto’s critical first associate was a young woman he called La Señora Diana. She was a beautiful, straight-backed Mexican American girl just a few years out of high school, with high cheekbones and feathered hair. Her gender, looks, and citizenship status were all serious bona fides in her role as levantón. As with most pickup drivers, La Señora had family and contacts on both sides. She was culturally bilingual, and understood that minutiae like a blown headlight or taillight just screamed for a pull-over. And if she were stopped and couldn’t flirt her way out of further inquiries, she could always claim Mexican citizenship, offer an assumed name, get deported with the pollos, and, later, saunter right back into the United States.

  “Soon, I got ahold of Carlos and Juan, who helped recruit pollos. And with me as guide, from 1980 to ’83, we crossed about twenty a week in the usual ways, at Otay and San Ysidro. La Señora was always there and waiting. I couldn’t complain. Things were going well for me. But then, from about 1984 to ’87, my luck changed. To be honest, I don’t know how, but people from Central and South America started to come to me in droves—very good, very grateful people.”

  The coyote from Sinaloa’s change of luck was actually a consequence of disastrous geopolitics. Simultaneous civil wars in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador—instigated and supported by Cold War powers—had reached a zenith. Death squads and militias plagued Honduras and Colombia. Some countries like Ecuador and Peru were just flat-out destitute. And by the early 1980s, people began streaming north in methods reminiscent of the Underground Railroad.

  “Nicaraguans were some of the first,” Roberto said, “and later I crossed people from El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. Without a doubt, they made a difference in my work. In my family, we were always taught to help our fellow man. And I was much more careful with these migrants. They would come to my house and I wouldn’t take them out until everything was in order.”

  The custom was that a migrant’s contact in the United States paid the fare. So if a crossing failed, el coyote was obligated to offer second and third chances. The arrangement required el coyote to be contactable by both migrants and their families.

  “I gave my phone number to the people I took across,” Roberto said. “Later, the uncle would call me, the sister, the niece, the daughter, the godfather, the godmother—you know, I put whole families over there on the inside.”

  In a short time, Roberto built a substantial organization of guías, ganchos, comunicadores, checadores, and levantones. His tentacles ran as far south as Mexico City, where international migrants were often met at the airport by drivers, taken to a local safe house, and then whisked north. With an organization reaching into the United States, he could guarantee arrival in any American city—from New York to LA.

  The original coyotes played a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with Tijuana’s city police. Roberto was jailed a number of times. A conviction carried a stiff prison sentence, but trafficking was a tough charge to prove unless a pollero was caught in the act, by which time, he’d be on the inside. And migrants, who relied on their pollero for second and third attempts, should their crossing be thwarted, had no interest in squealing on the operation. Among the discomforts of jail, Roberto explained, was an enhanced interrogation technique called a tehuacan, something like waterboarding. The victim was gagged and inverted, and a well-shaken Coca-Cola was forced up his nose—a fizzy, painful, drowning experience that Roberto recalled as “not at all pleasant.”

  The worst part for the smugglers doing jail time was the loss of business and relevance in the fast-changing field. On top of Central America’s problems, a 1982 debt crisis in Mexico led to a period of economic collapse some describe as the “lost decade.” Things looked bright for a short time in the early 1990s, but just months after NAFTA was signed in 1994, Mexico was forced to devalue the peso by half, sending the country into another deep recession. Factory work drew thousands to the border towns, but the poor wages and conditions promised a shortened life span. While Tijuana factories made 80 percent of the TVs sold in the United States, few of their builders could afford to buy one. From the hilltop shanties along the boundary, the decision to cross was an obvious one. Globalization had presented el coyote with a motivated clientele.

  “We got together, the polleros of the area. We all needed to do something about the police—simply in order to work,” Roberto said. There was a council of eleven veteran polleros who sometimes made joint decisions. In this case, those who had a cop in their pocket were asked to share their contact and widen the net. “It was necessary to explain [to the police] that this business would continue with or without their help. Financially speaking, some of the police had already demonstrated the way in which we might be able to work together. And I can say, proudly, that we in Tijuana were the first to convince the police of that fact.”

  Afterward, Roberto said, the beat cops would “happily” come get their commissions. And the polleros started working with less stress. “Of course,” he admitted, “we’d never tell the cops the truth about the number we were crossing, and we definitely never told them the exact amount we were charging.”

  In 1995, Roberto crossed another Central American and put him on to a gardening job in Los Angeles—a contact he’d used a number of times. The business, as it turned out, had been sold to some people from the Philippines. In time, the new employers mentioned to Roberto’s migrant that they wanted to bring their siblings over as well, but that they couldn’t find the pollero who’d crossed them. “So my guy told the Filipinos about me. How he was able to convince them—because those people are extremely untrusting and good hagglers—I don’t know. They called by phone. I had a hard time understanding. Can you believe that as soon as I had their siblings at my house they asked how much I wanted for my cat? ‘What do you want it for?’ I asked. ‘Well . . . to eat,’ they told me. ‘Leave my cat alone,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring you another.’

  “So I walked a few houses down where there’s a lady with a load of cats and I took three. Then I went to the store with their grocery list and I bought everything they needed in order to cook their cats. And, believe me, they made a delicious meal. Seriously, I thought, ‘I have to take the Filipinos over right away or they’re going to finish off my neighbors’ cats—and mine too.’ But listen, because of the gracious way I handled them, I still have work with the Filipinos to this day. I’ve also crossed Koreans—humble, friendly; Chinese—they’re kind of fussy and obtrusive; and Cambodians—good people but they don’t speak Spanish at all. I have to pay a translator in order to communicate with them.”

  In short, Roberto became one of the polleros viejos, the old gua
rd, who rose above the fray with their connections and mutual cooperation. Over the years, Roberto crossed a Disney’s small world of clients over the fence, through tunnels, past customs stalls, and into airports with, albeit false, documentation. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve enjoyed this,” he said. “It is work I love doing—the satisfaction I’ve given to thousands of families in the United States.”

  Rooms were added to his house to accommodate international migrants in transit, and as his home literally grew, he brought family members from Sinaloa to stay with him in Tijuana. When the ranch was no longer as viable as it once had been, even Roberto’s mother and father moved north. And eventually the youngest and most treasured sibling, his twenty-two-year-old sister Marta, joined the household. On the ranch, she’d been bookish, but in the city she took to wearing miniskirts and short blouses and quickly developed a reputation as a woman afraid of nothing. Roberto noted traces of the La Señora Diana. From the first day Marta arrived, he and his sister were inseparable. She went with el coyote everywhere—to the canyons, the slums, the bars. And in doing so, Marta learned the trade.

  Roberto had the best recruiters and his work was bustling. “There were nights when I couldn’t get through it all and she started to help out—organizing the people, transporting pollos, making crucial calls to el levantón, et cetera,” he said. “Marta had a knack for calming the nervous. And people paid very close attention when she gave instructions. The girl was tough.”

  6

  “I never saw a beat that was more interesting,” said reporter Janine Zúñiga.

  On January 30, 2009, I came across a photo on the cover of the city daily that showed a man pushing two bikes down a dirt road. Another pictured a man inspecting a pile of them. From the sage and cobbles on the path, the terrain couldn’t have been more distinct. My gaze flashed on two words in the subhead—“dumped bikes”—and I experienced a combustible, buzzing sensation brought on by both an instinctive rivalry with this newspaper writer and a grudging companionship in the pursuit: there was another seeker in the valley. And indeed, when I’d located Zúñiga through a mutual reporter friend, the river valley loomed in our conversation like a silent monument. Not only did I want to know what secrets she had coaxed from the valley, I wanted to know why she’d been looking at all.

  An intrepid journalist, she’d worked for the Associated Press news agency in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas. But over the most significant decade of her career, Zúñiga covered South San Diego for the city’s largest newspaper, the Union-Tribune. If not the focus of the metropolitan paper, the south county did offer considerable variety. It was by turns coastal, rural, international, and big city. Mountains crumbled into foothills. Desert wasteland gave way to swamp. It included both the massive border complex at the intersection of two freeways and the tiny hamlet of San Ysidro caught in its shadows. There were a handful of small municipal governments to contend with. And then there was that great rambling valley, that little-known world rife with the remnants of the past.

  In July, Zúñiga reported on the annual sandcastle contest—the US Open. She dutifully sat in on city council meetings and redevelopment schemes. She never slouched from menial civic matters but the predictable stories were often punctuated by curious events—the case of the strange tar balls that washed up on the Strand, for example, or the toddlers found wandering the streets of Chula Vista. One of her favorite reporting discoveries was a clutch of rare green turtles found basking in the warm water discharged by a South Bay power plant. There was petty larceny, like the robbery of a pizza deliveryman and, later, a gas station clerk. But when the drug wars began to heat up just across the border, Zúñiga’s lens broadened. She cowrote a lengthy series about a fourteen-year-old cartel hit man who’d become infamous for beheading his victims. He was called El Ponchis, or Pudgy. He helped slay a cook, a gas station attendant, a student, and a small-businessman. And then the teen, Edgar Jimenez Lugo, was arrested as he attempted to flee Mexico and reunite with his mother in San Diego. What did this US-born kid’s career reveal about Mexico, Zúñiga asked, or America? How many other boys and girls were caught between these two worlds?

  In January of 2009, Zúñiga decided to drop by the Gomez place off Monument Road. She wanted to follow up on the flooding story she’d recently covered, and wondered how the cleanup was going. Plus, Zúñiga believed it was just good practice to keep in touch with her contacts. This visit served both purposes.

  “People in the valley are quite reserved and skeptical at first,” she said on the telephone. “I would go visit on occasion so that I could reach them immediately if there was an emergency.”

  That emergency potential was rich. The Pacific Ocean offered any number of unexpected stories, be it disabled vessels, smugglers, or natural phenomena—like giant waves, creatures, or sea rise. Amazing things washed up and, often, familiar things washed away. But then there were the immigration patterns, the specter of terrorists crossing from Mexico, and, in recent years, the largest buildup of border security in the history of the United States. Driving past horse ranches, community plots, organic farms, and wild wetlands, one expects the weather stories; the international intrigue seemed, well, so foreign.

  A thin strip of bleached country asphalt divides the Gomez property. Thirty acres of flat agricultural land extend north in a patchwork of fields that halts at a wall of dark thickets on the riverbank. The remaining eight acres rise with the border highlands to the south of Monument Road. Zúñiga passed the Kimzey place and then the Martíns’ farm, a parcel that had once belonged to a Japanese family that was said to have been interned during World War II. As she rounded the bend in the road at Smuggler’s Gulch, Zúñiga caught the old Monterey cypress and pine trees that framed the Gomezes’ stucco farmhouse. A barn, with its tin roof caving in, slumped like an auto wreck on the western edge of the farm. Zúñiga passed a small plot of dark brown earth that was sometimes topped with bright orange pumpkins, sometimes with deep red strawberries. Here, she turned off onto a dirt lane and parked next to a little plywood shack that served as the farm stall when the berries arrived. Stepping out into the ocean air, Zúñiga noticed something that she hadn’t caught during her last visit. Was it a rummage sale? No. But maybe it was something close. “There were bicycles all over the property,” she said. “Upright and in rows, everywhere.”

  Zúñiga found the farmer, Jesse Gomez, a man in his fifties. He wore knee-high rubber waders, jeans, and a canvas camouflage jacket.

  “Hey Jesse, are you starting a bike collection?” she asked.

  The taciturn man paused; his sleepy brown eyes were so light they appeared almost a dark yellow. He looked up at the highlands across the street. Then, in his slow drawl, he told her what he knew—which wasn’t much more than what she could see for herself: bicycles, just about everywhere.

  “The first few bikes, that was exciting,” he said when I later caught up with him. “But then it’s like, ‘Oh, we gotta go pick ’em up.’”

  A cobbled track cuts the green hill, covered in manzanita and wild sage, all belonging to the farm. Gomez kept the gate open to give recreational horse riders and Border Patrol access to the mesa above. Sometime around 2007, however, as Gomez lay in bed, he began to hear what sounded “sometimes like cascading water, and sometimes almost like horses trotting.” The sound seemed to be roiling down the hill, his house in its path. Soon enough, he realized what it was.

  “There’d be fifteen riders at a time—two, three times a night.”

  Gomez’s son, David, wandered over. He said the traffic set a family routine. “We’d get up for work in the morning, and we’d see shiny spots on the hill. I’d go up and collect at least twenty bikes a day.”

  The family heard motor vehicles in the night too, and they figured that some of the cyclists were getting picked up. They’d just ditch their bikes on the property and hop into a van. But in the daytime, Jesse and David would also see people who “just looked illegal” pedaling bikes.
Once, Jesse watched a familiar cycling club ride Monument Road to the beach, a passing whir of color. On their way back out of the valley, he spotted a lone rider in work clothes turn from a dirt lane out of one of the canyons, and then merge into the pack as they sprinted off toward the I-5 freeway. Some of the migrants might have been picked up by people on horseback, as had happened in the past with foot crossers. But there were obviously migrants who rode out to the river as well, leaving bikes on the banks before wading through the wetlands and into the north.

  “It was like an explosion,” Gomez said.

  Jesse and David didn’t hunt bikes off of their own property and they didn’t sell the ones they found. The wheels just presented themselves, to a point of annoyance. A bearded Border Field State Park ranger once stopped by in a pickup and off-loaded bikes he’d found, as if their place were the depot. Then again, Jesse Gomez did come upon his neighbor, Terry Tynan, who looked to be scavenging on the Gomez hillside. “Matter of fact, I had to kick him off the property,” Gomez said.

  The phenomenon did not dissolve the rules of the neighborhood. Picking things up wasn’t new. There had always been backpacks and excess clothing tossed aside by passers-through. Plastic shopping bags fluttering on the road’s shoulder contained hairbrushes, razors, soap, deodorant, makeup—everyday toiletries essential for long trips. These packages likely belonged to migrants who’d been intercepted. Abandoned items read as clear and simple descriptions of the neighborhood’s nighttime traffic. But this latest trend brought something else in its wake: looky-loos, people covetous of anything free, people crazy about bikes.

  By the time Zúñiga discovered the bicycles on the Gomez place, the family had already donated a big batch to Father Joe’s, a homeless services provider in downtown San Diego. Extended family members had been outfitted with the appropriate bikes. Jesse Gomez’s immediate family all liked the beach cruisers. Which was not a problem; they’d been descending into the valley for nearly two years. But the best bicycles—GTs and Treks—had been donated to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These bikes had been specifically selected for the young Mormon missionaries who rode them house to house spreading the gospel. Gomez was proud of the fact that he could outfit them, because he believed he had benefited from the missionaries’ teachings himself. It was an image I particularly liked, too. Clean-cut young men in white shirts and dark ties coasting along on bikes that had violated the sovereignty of the United States—wheels that had served one pilgrimage now serving another.