The Desperate Ones

"You get hundreds of peons arriving here every day, dreaming of getting rich on the other side. They get as far as the fence. You see them looking through like street urchins staring through the gate at some fancy party at a rich kid's house."

--Ernesto Barberi, manager of the Baja Inn,

Tijuana It was just before midnight when the helicopter spotted a group of people scrambling over the hills just east of Chula Vista, Calif. The big bird, working its spotlight, moved back and forth over an area lined with ragged footpaths as U.S. Border Patrol wagons sped to pick up the Mexicans who had just entered the U.S. illegally. On the edge of the canyon, Tilmon Gregg, 44, the Patrol's shift supervisor, spotted a man rising out of the scrub brush, hands over his head. Gregg searched him swiftly and took him into custody. Near by, Gregg's team found two more men, a woman and four young children, one a five-month-old baby, huddled together. Because of the children, the group was taken to the border gate and released immediately rather than held overnight for processing.

That scene could have taken place any night of the year along a strip of the U.S.-Mexican border near Tijuana that stretches 16 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Although illegal aliens enter the U.S. almost everywhere along the 2,000-mile border--some still swim the Rio Grande, from which the term "wetbacks" originates--the Tijuana area is a major trouble spot. Authorities estimate that 3,000 illegal entries take place every night along the strip; only about one-third of the people who attempt the crossing are caught. The problem is getting dramatically worse. In 1968, for example, 26,206 Mexicans were arrested for illegal entry near Tijuana; by last year the number had risen to 321,938. "On a normal night," says Gregg, "that hillside is crawling with people."

To stem this tide, the Border Patrol unit at Chula Vista has only 40 men working in the area north of Tijuana. They respond to radio calls, when electronic sensors planted in culverts or along canyon paths are activated, or wait for the chopper to announce that it has spotted a group of "wets," or "undocumented workers," as official jargon calls them. Most of the Mexican aliens are poor, frightened and docile people whose only crime is seeking to find work and a better life in the U.S. But occasionally there are smugglers and other criminals among them. The refugees are frequently targets of bandits on both sides of the border who rape, rob and sometimes kill their victims. Two areas on the American side, Spring Canyon and the aptly named Dead Man's Valley, where the worst bandits lurk, are so dangerous that even the Border Patrol rarely ventures into them. "We used to send teams down there," says Gregg. "They'd hear shots and women screaming every night."

An illegal who simply walks through a hole in the border fence will not get very far. He does not know the routes through the hills, where to look for work or how to find a place to live once he gets into the U.S. Thus most of the border crossings are organized by smugglers--known as "coyotes," orpolleros (literally, someone who takes care of chickens). The smugglers have their own fleets of cars and drivers, safe houses strung from San Diego to Los Angeles and a system of bribery that makes the trip up the California coast safer. Smuggling aliens has become a $1 million-a-month business and is proving so lucrative that organized crime is believed to be muscling in.

Officials estimate that about a third of the smugglers are Americans (including some Marines and their wives at Camp Pendleton, who have helped illegals skirt the San Clemente border checkpoint by guiding them through the base); another third are legal U.S. residents, while the rest are themselves illegals. All too frequently the smugglers are callous traffickers who care nothing for the people they supposedly help. Aliens have been found hidden under loads of fertilizer or packed so tightly in airless vans that they died. Children and elderly people with twisted or broken ankles are frequently left in the hills around Chula Vista to die. Sometimes drivers will abandon a car after an accident and run from it without bothering to let their passengers out. In one such case, a driver hit an embankment and his van went into a pond. A Border Patrolman dove into the water, recovered the keys and got the aliens out of the back before they drowned. Says Assistant U.S. Attorney Pete Nunez: "It's not uncommon to find dead bodies along any northbound road through San Diego or Imperial counties."

The going rate is usually $250 for each person. The rate rises for those who go to such cities as Chicago or Minneapolis, where the chances of discovery are less. Some of this is paid beforehand--usually borrowed from a village loan shark back in Mexico--but most of the transportation is on credit. Frequently, smugglers demand additional sums from the aliens once they get work, threatening to turn them in. The coyotes have found that smuggling aliens is a low-risk, high-yield business. Many judges do not take the crime seriously, and the average sentence given a convicted smuggler is less than two years.

Although many of the illegals return home within a year, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Agency estimates that at least 3 million Mexicans live in the U.S. as "undocumented aliens" and that the number is growing at a rate of 500,000 to 800,000 a year. About two-thirds of these are temporary workers looking for seasonal jobs as farm hands or fruit pickers. Their reasons for coming are economic, notably the sizable wage differences between the two countries and Mexico's chronically high unemployment rate (unofficially around 50%).

Since May the Mexicans have started operating patrols on their side of the border as well. The goal is not so much to prevent emigration--which officials of both countries concede is all but impossible--as to inhibit the smugglers who are responsible for most of the exploitation and violence.

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