-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Arizona Project
Michael Wendland©1977
ISBN 0-8362-0728-9
Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc.
6700 Squibb Rd.
Misson Kansas 66202
276 pps. - first edition - out-of-print
New revised edition - available amazon.com
Paperback, 304pp.
ISBN: 0945165021
Blue Sky Press, Incorporated
June 1988
--[9a]--
9
Border Traffic
The cactus blossom is Arizona's state flower. A more appropriate symbol is
the poppy. For the Cactus Blossom State is a doper's delight. The IRE
reporters discovered that Arizona had become the major narcotics corridor in
the country. Contributing factors are a sparse population, plenty of rugged
country for cover, over two thousand clandestine landing strips for
airplanes, and U.S. 19, Arizona's main north-south expressway, which connects
with the Pan American Highway just inside Nogales, Sonora. After the 1972 ban
on opium poppies in Turkey, Mexico had become the United States' main heroin
source. From isolated mountain regions in southern Sonora and the adjoining
Mexican state of Sinaloa, opium harvested from huge poppy fields was refined
into the distinctively brown-colored heroin called "Mexican Mud." In the late
1960s it was almost impossible to find anything except the white heroin of
the Near East on U.S. streets, but by 1976 over 92 percent of all the heroin
recovered by American police was a product of Mexico.
And it was pouring across the Arizona border by the ton, smuggled in by
truck, cat, light airplanes, and even mule trains. From the modem jet
airports in Tucson and Phoenix, smugglers had direct access to every major
American city. IRE reporters surveyed federal, state, and local authorities
in each of Arizona's fourteen counties, finding that there were no more than
180 narcotics agents available to stem the narcotics flow across the state's
113,909 square miles. Conversely, reporters had come up with estimates that
as many as 800 pilots made a full-time living flying drugs out of Mexico into
Arizona. They had identified 23 major smuggling rings operating through the
corridor, made up of some 2,000 persons. At least five of the drug
organizations were wholly or partially controlled by U.S. Mafia families-one
of which was the Joseph Bonanno syndicate from Tucson, according to
officials. Before leaving New York, Bonanno's family had set up the original
French Connection for Turkish heroin. IRE reporters now had police
intelligence reports detailing a meeting in Mexico between Bonanno and
several of Mexico's leading suppliers.
There were other documented ties between Mexican smugglers and U. S. Mafia
figures. On December 29, 197 1, a fifty-five-year-old New York man arrived in
the dusty cowtown of Douglas, Arizona, a hundred miles east of Tucson and
directly across the border from Agua Prieta, Sonora. He was traveling under
the name Pete Patterson, but his real name was Antonio Gambino, and he was
the brother of the recently departed New York mob chieftain Carlo Gambino. In
a secret meeting with a man who turned out to be a U.S. customs informant,
Gambino said he had been sent to find a new source of supply for the East
Coast, which was then feeling the pinch of the combined U. S. -Turkish
crackdown on Near-Eastern opium. To show his good faith, Gambino flashed
$60,000, which he was carrying in his briefcase. Four days later, Gambino
hired one of the state's top drug-smuggling pilots, who introduced him to a
Mexican narcotics source. By April the next year, the ring was fully
operational. Somehow the snitch was discovered, and one night the customs
informant was taken by four Gambino associates to a desert area outside of
Tucson and shot twice in the chest.
The hard facts of the story had been gathered, written in memoranda, and
placed in the IRE files. But a closer look was in order. And the only way to
do that was to go into Mexico. Wendland and Drehsler were selected for the
trip. Neither was particularly anxious to head south of the border. They
would be totally isolated from the rest of the team. It would not be safe to
use telephones in most of the places they were going. The files noted that
the Mexican smuggling rings were a paranoid group, known to tap hotel
telephones routinely. The Mexican police in the border towns were often
corrupt and could not be counted on for help. The reporters ran the risk of
being mistaken for U.S. undercover drug agents, on whom several Mexican drug
dealers had allegedly issued an open murder contract of $1,000.
"You've got to understand that the places you are going to are totally and
completely controlled by the dopers," they were warned by a U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration agent shortly before they left Phoenix. "Not even
the army gets in there. Every damned villager from the little kids to the
grandmothers are involved. The whole area is dependent on the drug business.
Remember, in these areas you're dealing with Mexicans who don't go anywhere
without a gun and a knife. These are dangerous, dangerous dudes."
On Friday, November 12, Wendland and Drehsler headed south.
The sixty-five miles between Tucson and the border on U.S. 19 was a scenic
route. To the east rose Mount Lemon, showing the winter's first signs of snow
at its crest. Below, just past the mountain's gently sloping foothills,
flowed the underground Santa Cruz River, the main water supply for Tucson.
The river flowed straight south to Mexico, before turning back to the States,
almost parallel to the highway. Its path was marked by a lush but narrow
green belt of paloverde trees. To the west, the highway passed barren desert
land, occasionally broken by a stately Saguaro cactus. A dead coyote lay on
the shoulder of the road as a pair of turkey buzzards made lazy circles in
the sky waiting for a break in the traffic that would allow them to partake
of the waiting feast below. The reporters passed the beautifully preserved
San Xavier del Bac mission, founded in the late seventeenth century by
Spanish Jesuits dispatched to convert the Indians, and, as they neared
Nogales, Arizona, the deep gorges and colorful rises of the Red Rock
Mountains.
They reached the American city of Nogales about noon, checking into a
downtown motel just a few hundred yards from the ten-foot-high wire fence
that separates Nogales, Sonora, from Arizona. After a quick lunch, they drove
around the city of fifteen thousand for a couple of hours, identifying
various spots that looked like clandestine border crossings, such as a confusi
ng network of sewage canals that began a block from the border and ended just
outside of town. The file memos had noted that the canal was heavily used by
smugglers, who knew full well that American customs or border patrol agents
would never follow them there.
They saw no point in going across to Nogales, Sonora, until after dark. The
people they would be looking for were probably still asleep. So they killed
the rest of the afternoon back at the motel, reading a local newspaper and
watching Mexican soap operas on television. About six o'clock, it began to
rain. Just after dark with the rain still failing they crossed into Mexico.
Nogales, Sonora, was in another world, a boom town gone wild, crowded with
over 120,000 residents, swelling each day with hundreds of new arrivals. As
in most border towns, there was virtually unlimited access for U.S. tourists,
who were simply waved through by a bored guard. Even in the rain the narrow
streets were crowded. The last of the tourists were making their way back towa
rds the border as Mexican shopkeepers and downtown office workers waited on
street comers for buses. By eight o'clock, the rain had chased all the
tourists away for the night and a new type of people emerged. Groups of
young, gaunt-looking men stood in the doorways of closed tourist shops.
Occasionally, a taxi would pull up and an American, usually young and
long-haired, would get out to converse with one of the Mexicans. It looked to
Wendland like John R. and Brush Streets back in Detroit, where narcotics
deals go on around the clock.
Since parking the car, they had already been approached a halfdozen times by
peddlers hawking joints of marijuana, pills, and, from a parked cabdriver who
proudly opened his glove compartment to display his wares, small,
foil-wrapped packages of heroin. But the reporters weren't interested in
street dealers. The only thing unusual about the street scene compared to the
slums of any large American city was that all the action transpired under the
noses of Mexican police officers, who seemed to be on every comer
nonchalantly passing the time of day with the dope dealers.
The reporters walked east of the main downtown tourist district to Calle Ruiz
Cortinas, a narrow brick street of mostly warehouses and old, decaying office
buildings. Both were getting wet. They were looking for La Posta restaurant,
one of several nightspots identified as places where major deals were
regularly made. A taxi driver, spotting the lone pair of Americans, pulled to
the curb.
"Taxi?" asked the short, greasy-haired driver.
The reporters shook their heads and continued walking.
He ran after them. "Eh, uno momento, por favor. It's a very bad night, hey?
Listen, I know a nice place with nice ladies, you know? I take you there. It
is not far. You like ladies? They got nice ladies in this place. They got
Americano ladies. Mexican ladies with big chi-chi's. Even black nigger lady.
You come with me, hey?"
Drehsler mumbled something in Spanish, and the driver, looking surprised,
turned and went back to his cab.
"What'd you say?" asked Wendland.
"I told him to fuck off. You can't be polite to those dudes. They think
you're a tourist and they won't stop. This way, he doesn't know who we are,
but he knows we speak the language and we aren't interested in getting
hustled."
They found the restaurant they were looking for in the next block. From the
outside, it appeared to be just a hole in the wall. But inside, it was a
carbon copy of any expensive stateside restaurant. Neat, candlelit tables,
doting waiters in red coats, and expensive-looking art work gave the
restaurant a mildly chic atmosphere. They went to the bar and ordered a
couple of Carta Blanca beers, telling the maitre d' that they would have
dinner later.
The place was much bigger than the reporters had expected. As their eyes
adjusted to the light, they saw that it occupied both sides of the block. A
second entrance connected to the next street over. In the back of the main
dining area, a carpeted stairway wound its way up to a second floor. The
restaurant was owned by Hector Miller, one of Mexico's top narcotics
wholesalers.
There were fewer than a dozen people in La Posta. Though it was nearly nine
o'clock, it was still early for dinner by Mexican standards. The reporters
sipped their beer and watched a couple of waiters running back and forth
between the main floor and the upstairs area. It was up there where the deals
went down, they figured.
"We'd like to eat upstairs," Drehsler told the maitre d' after they finished
the beer.
"I’m sorry, senor," he replied, carefully looking the two reporters over,
"but that is a private area."
Instead, he ushered them to a rear table on the main floor. "Enjoy your
dinner," he smiled as he walked away. Instead of returning to his station,
the maitre d' went up the stairs. He was back down in about two minutes.
"My guess is that we'll soon see if we're right about what's going on up
there," said Wendland, pouring a second beer. Drehsler nodded. It didn't take
long. Two men, both Mexicans in dark suits, came down the stairway. They
quickly walked into the bar and then, trying to look casual, strolled back
towards the headwaiter. As they pretended to be talking with him, they
carefully scrutinized the two gringos at the back of the restaurant before
returning upstairs.
"They don't know who we are," said Drehsler. "They probably think we're
either a couple of dudes looking to make a score or a couple of drug agents.
For our sake, let's hope it's the first." For American undercover drug agents
are given no legal authority or protection in Mexico. They are not even
allowed to carry their own weapons.
The restaurant was heavy on steak "done to the perfect degree of doneness."
Neither piece of meat ordered by the reporters was particularly good, though
the steaks were certainly done, so welldone they were dried out.
There was a shuffle of feet on the second-floor landing above. The reporters
looked up. The same two men who had checked them out before came down the
steps. Both had their hands in their right coat pockets. They were followed
by two other men, one a tall, balding Mexican of about forty-five, the other
a young, well-dressed American. The bodyguards followed the two through the
bar and out the second door.
"What the hell do you make of that?" asked Drehsler.
Wendland shrugged. "Something went down up there, that's for sure." Wendland
was about to get up and go to the door, to see if he could spot what kind of
car the men had. But the maitre d' was carefully watching him. He sat back
down and finished his dinner. "No sense in spooking him now," he said.
The bill came to just over eleven dollars. They left the waiter a five-dollar
tip. "That way, they'll know we aren't cops," laughed Drehsler. The maitre d'
was solicitous and hoped they had enjoyed their meal. They had, they assured
him. "Say, has Hector Miller been around tonight?" Wendland asked.
The maitre d's eyes narrowed. "He just left, senor. Not five minutes ago."
That's what the reporters thought.
They went out by the other door, onto a street called Calle Elias, and walked
north. It was still raining. The odor of burning kerosene filled the air,
coming from the ramshackle homes that began to scale the slope of a
mountan[sic] that loomed at the end of a side street off to their left.
Garbage was strewn across the sidewalk in many places, its sickly sweet smell
mixing in the wet night air with the odor of the fuel oil.
But a few blocks further up, they abruptly came to La Rocha, Nogales's best
restaurant. Literally carved into the side of a small mountain, complete with
a courtyard and fountain illuminated by discreet electric bulbs and
flickering torches, its opulence mocked the poverty surrounding it. The
dining area was reached by a narrow stone stairway. Inside, the restaurant
was empty except for a small group of well-dressed Mexican men being
entertained by a twelvepiece mariachi band and served by a retinue of
uniformed waiters. A huge mesquite log burned fragrantly in the stone
fireplace.
The reporters ordered a drink. The elegance of the place was overwhelming,
the equal of anything the reporters had ever seen. Soft lights brought a
rainbow of unseen color from the stone walls and filled the room with an
atmosphere of intimate charm. Wendland counted sixteen employees, who, with
the exception of the four who were waiting on the single dinner table, looked
like statues formed from the mountain itself.
Wendland and Drehsler nursed their drinks. There was nothing of interest to
observe. The band played softly. Both reporters missed their wives. The
restaurant was an incredibly romantic place. It would have been nice to have
had their women with them. They had been away from home a long time.
It was almost eleven. They had two more places to check out. But neither
would be anything like the two restaurants they had just taken in. The new
places were on the other side of the proverbial tracks, in what local people
called la zona de tolerancia or la zona roja—the red-light district.
Prostitution is legal in Mexico. And it is a traditional part of many a
Mexican man's lifestyle. In tourist towns like Nogales, the red-light
districts used to line up almost on the border fence. No more. Forced by
awakening community values, they have been moved back to the outskirts of
town. But they are still prospering. Nogales's whorehouses are clustered on a
dirt path called Canal Street, which backs up against the first slopes of the
Pajarito Mountains.
The windshield wipers of the IRE car had trouble, even at full speed, in
clearing the sheets of driving rain. Traffic was light. It was a terrible
night. Drehsler, who had been in Nogales many times before, had no trouble
finding Canal Street. But instead of stopping, he drove to the end and made
an abrupt right-hand turn on a side street.
"Don't think I'm getting paranoid," he said, "but I think we're being
followed."
Wendland turned around. Back about a hundred yards, a pair of headlights
turned the comer they had just taken. "Who do you think it is? The police?"
"I don't know. But let's find out." Quickly, he made another right, then a
left. A dirt trail wound its way to a small parking area behind a warehouse,
and he took that, dousing the car lights.
The other vehicle wasn't far behind. Slowly, it cruised down the street they
had just turned off from. It missed the dirt turnoff and continued past. But
from their hiding place, the reporters made it out to be a silver Mercedes,
with two occupants.
"Well, we know they aren't the cops," said Wendland.
They waited five minutes but the car did not return. Drehsler pulled out of
the parking lot and headed for the Club Mexico. Out front, a running stream
of water cascaded over the pockmarked sandy street. Dodging puddles and the
rain, the reporters raced out of the car and up a short staircase leading to
the club's main entrance.
A small mariachi band played for a dozen customers in the dining area. Eight
hookers, all plumpish Mexican women stuffed into hot pants, platform shoes,
and low-cut, frilly white blouses, sat around a single table. Three more
prostitutes were seated at various tables with the male clientele.
Wendland and Drehsler went directly to the bar and ordered beer. To their
right sat an American couple in their late thirties. The reporters could hear
the man trying to converse with one of the hookers. "My name's Don," he
slurred. Obviously he'd been drinking for a while. "And this here's my wife,
Mary Anne. We're from America. Been married six months. I thought I'd bring
Mary Anne down here to show her what I've been missing." The wife looked
mortified. The hooker, standing between them with her arms around their
shoulders, didn't understand a word of English.
"Don,* I don't like it here. Let's go back."
"Now, just hush up," he shot back out of the comer of his mouth. "You don't
want to insult these people." With that, he gave the whore a big grin and
reached up to squeeze one of her breasts.
"You're insulting me, Don. Please."
"Oh, shit, Mary Anne. You're no goddamn fun at all." He got up and, handing
the hooker a dollar bill, grabbed his wife's elbow and steered her out of the
bar. "I was just having a little fun." The whore shrugged and walked away,
stuffing the dollar into a side pocket on her shorts.
The reporters shook their heads. "Jesus, no wonder Americans got such a
crappy reputation," said Wendland. Suddenly, two of the hookers were all over
the reporters. Caressing their shoulders, arms, thighs, and backs. Wendland
started to push one of the women away.
"Don't," smiled Drehsler. "They're frisking us for guns."
"What?"
"Standard procedure. They're just making sure we're not carrying heat."
Satisfied, the women sat down on either side of the reporters. "Buy us
drink?" one of them asked. Wendland motioned for the bartender, who poured
the women some sort of an orange concoction.
"Ah, mi amor, I love you, I love you, let's go fuck," said the girl on
Wendland's right.
He laughed. "She certainly has a way with words," he said to Drehsler.
"You Re my chi-chi's?" she said, cupping her breasts. "I love you. I have hot
pussy. You like hot pussy?" Her hand began to creep up his leg.
Wendland grabbed it. "Hold it. No. You understand? No."
She smiled, taking her hand back with a mock pout. "You no like Flora?" she
asked. "Flora likes you. I fuck you for twenty dollars."
Wendland had been hustled before, but never so aggressively. Remembering the
way Drehsler had dealt with the cabbie earlier, he summoned up a severe look.
"No. I don't want you, Flora. Leave me alone. I'm here to drink. That's all."
It made no difference. Her hand went back to his knee.
"Goddamn it, no." His voice was louder than he expected. The whore hesitated
for a moment, then started to reach again. Wendland didn't want to make more
of a scene, but it was getting ridiculous. He grabbed her chin and forced her
hand back.
"Now listen, bitch. I said no. And I mean no. You do that again and I'm going
to break your arm."
She understood. "Okay, okay. Shit, I am just trying to make a living." Her
English, though heavily accented, was obviously a lot more fluent than she
wanted her customers to know. "Who are you gringos?"
Drehsler, who had similar problems with the girl on his left, had cooled her
advances by talking to her in Spanish. He was now deep in conversation with
her.
"Never mind who we are," said Wendland, continuing the bravado. "We're just
here to do a little business. But not with you. We're here to meet somebody."
"Ali, si. You mafioso."
In Mexico, drug dealers and smugglers are referred to as mafia, with the
lowercase m.
"Never mind."
"You're here to see Jesus, hey? Well, he is not here. He is away on business.
He will not be here tonight."
Wendland had no idea who this Jesus was. But he grunted what he hoped was a
suitably depressed acknowledgment of his disappointment at not finding Jesus
present.
"When will he be back?"
"Who knows these things? Ask Pancho." She pointed to the bartender. "So
long, gringo." She went back to the table of waiting women, taking her orange
juice with her.
Drehsler was still talking to his whore. Wendland looked around the bar. They
were the only two Americans. No one seemed to be paying any attention to them.
"Uno mas?" asked Pancho the bartender, pointing to Wendland's half-empty beer.
He shook his head. "Habla ingles?
"No, senor."
In English, Wendland asked the bartender where Jesus was. He looked up from
pouring the beer. "Culiacan. He will be back tomorrow. Maybe Sunday." He
walked away.
Drehsler's girl was leaving. She smiled at Wendland too, as if he were an old
friend. Alex finished his beer and the reporters left. Outside, he filled in
his partner on what the girl had told him. She also thought they were
mafiosos come to see Jesus. She said that Jesus, who used the place as a sort
of narcotics brokering office, was in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, the
state just south of Sonora where most of Mexico's clandestine heroin labs are
located. She suggested, however, that they return later on that night. "Jesus
has a friend, Miguel, who sometimes helps people like you," the girl told
Drehsler.
They drove around Nogales for half an hour, finally locating the Matador
Club, a sleazy bar identified as a hangout for Johnny Grant, one of Mexico's
top narcotics dealers. Also known as "El Negro Johnny," Grant, the son of a
Mexican woman and a Cuban black, had been deported from the U.S. in the early
1960s, only to settle in Nogales. With Hector Miller he established a heroin
smuggling operation that was estimated by U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration agents to gross nearly seven million dollars a year at its
peak. Grant, who sported a diamond for a front tooth after the real one was
knocked out in a barroom brawl, had recently been released from prison and
was supposed to be rebuilding his smuggling operation.
The Club Matador was practically deserted. Wendland and Drehsler took a
rickety table near the bar and ordered another round of beer. This time, the
waiter brought a shaker of salt, a plate of lime wedges, and a bottle of hot
sauce with their drinks. Drehsler showed his gringo friend how to use the
garnishments. "First you squeeze lime juice around the top of the can," he
demonstrated. "Then shake out a couple of drops of the hot sauce. Add a
little salt and take a sip." It wasn't bad.
The only other patrons were at the rear where a table of three Mexican men
were drinking whiskey out of an open bottle. Wendland watched a cockroach
wiggle its way across the bar. The aproned waiter, who had absent-mindedly
been shaking dice in a cup, also spotted it. Slowly, he walked over to the
cockroach, made an overdone display of raising his right hand, and, making
sure the reporters were watching, brought his thumb down to squash the
cockroach. He then turned to glare at the gringos before resuming his
original station with the dice.
"I don't think that dude particularly likes us," said Drehsler.
They finished their beer and left. An hour had passed. They'd try the Club
Mexico again, to see if Miguel had shown up.
But outside the Mexico, standing on the porch, were the same two bodyguards
the reporters had seen earlier in La Posta, the restaurant owned by Hector
Miller. Their backs were to the street, and they were talking to the whore
who had told Drehsler to come back later. Parked in front was a silver
Mercedes.
The reporters turned off Canal Street without being spotted.
"How about that?" said Wendland. "I'll give you two guesses what those two
are talking about."
"Yeah, you and me."
The reporters figured they had blown it. They had asked too many questions at
La Posta. Whatever the two bodyguards wanted with them, they decided,
wouldn't be worth finding out. They needed a better way to get close to the
smugglers. They only spooked the dealers by going in cold and asking
questions. They needed a plan.
They decided to return to the border. The IRE files had detailed the ease
with which smugglers could cross the border. While there is a checkpoint
through which all pedestrian and vehicular traffic must pass, the reporters
were breezed through with only one question asked—what their nationality was.
Wendland found it easier to cross from Mexico into Arizona than to cross into
Detroit from Canada. Still, some random automobile searches were conducted.
They scanned the darkened hillsides on both sides of the border checkpoint.
The IRE sources had reported that dope smugglers often stationed a lookout on
the American side with a pair of binoculars to determine what pattern the
guards were using to search cars. By sending signals with a flashlight, the
lookout lets the actual smuggler on the Mexican side know that, for example,
every third car is being searched, allowing the smuggler to ease his car into
the line in such a way as to avoid the pattern. The night's rain and the
lateness of the hour had reduced border crossing traffic to a trickle. And
the reporters saw no sign of a lookout. But the checkpoint was not the only
place where smugglers crossed. Indeed, the really large dealers seldom used
it. There were plenty of easier crossings.
On a previous visit to Nogales with Lupe Sanchez, Wendland had found a spot
on the border fence a quarter-mile west of the checkpoint that was
particularly active. In a fifteen-minute period, he and Lupe had counted
seven Mexicans climbing the fence. And that was in broad daylight. When he
had stopped to photograph the scene, he had been driven back to the car by a
barrage of rocks tossed by a group of Mexicans on the other side. That was
during a reconnaisance visit two weeks before. Now was time for another look.
The reporters drove the short street which parallels the fence for a
half-mile. It was quiet. At the end, they stopped the car and got out to
inspect the fence, leaving the lights on. The Border Patrol was supposed to
patrol the fence around the clock. In addition, special sensors, of the type
used by the army in Vietnam, had been installed at various locations along
the border to alert authorities to illegal border crossings. Wendland walked
to the fence and shook it. Footprints were all around on both sides. Drehsler
pointed to the top of the ten-foot-high fence where the three strands of
barbed wire had been cut in several spots to allow a fence climber to roll
across the top without snags. Further down, they found a small section of
fence that had been cut at ground level.
They had spent ten minutes at the border with the car, engine running and
lights on, conspicuously parked in the middle of the street. But there was no
sign of the Border Patrol.
They drove to the east side of the border, where a narrow series of almost
vertical streets climbed a small mountain. Winding their way up and towards
the fence, they came to a deeply rutted dirt road that dead-ended in a tangle
of underbrush. As Drehsler tried to maneuver the car so it could be turned
around, Wendland grabbed his arm.
"Hold it, I think I saw something. Shine the lights off to the left."
It was the border fence. But what had attracted Wendland's interest was a
movement of some sort. He thought he had seen someone. With the lights still
on, they got out of the car and walked east along the fence a few hundred
feet. There, they discovered that an entire section had been knocked down.
The hole was at least ten feet wide, enough to drive a truck through. And in
the thick mud caused by the rain was a fresh set of footprints, heading
north. It looked like the big hole in the fence had been there for months. A
virtual footpath had been worn down the middle of it.
"You saw somebody crossing?" asked Drehsler.
"I think so. It was just a flash of something moving."
"Incredible. Look at the size of this hole."
Wendland stood at the missing section of fence, one foot in the U.S., one in
Mexico. They would want to photograph the scene in daylight.
"I wonder how many people use this place every day," mused Drehsler.
"If we can drive up here bold as hell in the middle of the night, just think
how easy it is for the guy on foot."
They returned down the winding little roads to Morley Avenue, the city's main
street. As they stopped at a traffic signal on the way towards their motel, a
green Border Patrol car pulled alongside.
"Well, what do you know, these guys really work after all," said Drehsler.
The reporters were sure they were about to be pulled over. It was nearly 3:00
A.M. on a rainy night. Their car was splattered with mud, and they had just
come off a road that led to the fence. But when the traffic light changed,
the Border Patrol car drove off without a second look at the reporters.
The next morning, the reporters set out to learn more about the problems
facing Nogales, Sonora. They were considerable. In just four years, between
1970 and 1974, the population had nearly doubled in size, swelling from
53,000 to just over 100,000. No one knew the exact population for 1976,
though estimates ran as high as 150,000. On the American side, Nogales,
Arizona's population remained a steady 15,000. The population explosion had
caught the Mexican city totally unprepared. There were severe shortages of
water, housing, transportation, and medical facilities. Over a quarter of the
population was without running water, and outhouse latrines were common
sights as the reporters drove around during the daylight. Most of the
immigrants were from dirt poor villages from the south, drawn to the border
and its legendary higher wages. But in the fall of 1976, the reporters found
that the average hourly wage, for those peasants lucky enough to find work in
the city's few industries, amounted to sixty-eight cents American.
There were three neighborhoods the reporters wanted to visit. The first was
the place many of the new arrivals settled in. The colonia, or neighborhood,
was called "Without End." Located on the southern outskirts of the city, it
housed several thousand new residents. It resembled a refugee camp. All
around were cardboard shacks and crude shelters that reminded the reporters
of the illegal workers they had encountered at the Arrowhead Ranch back in
Phoenix. There was no water, no electricity or plumbing. Garbage and open
latrines surrounded the ramshackle little homes clinging precariously to
mounds of worn dirt.
Drehsler talked in Spanish to one weather-beaten woman who looked to be near
sixty but, she said, had just turned thirty-five the previous month. Her
family-twenty persons, including nine children, grandsons, nieces, and
cousins-had come from a small village near Guadalajara. Her husband had
looked for work in the manufacturing plants without success. He was now a
gardener. His weekly salary averaged thirty-two dollars. When Drehsler asked
her about narcotics smuggling, a panic-stricken look came over her. She
wheeled around, mumbling "mafioso," and ran off.
Closer downtown and almost resembling a modest suburban U.S. subdivision was
the neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The homes were small, prefabricated,
ranch-style buildings. Various sources back in Phoenix had cautioned the
reporters not to leave their car while visiting the neighborhood. And they
were told never to go there at night. For Buenos Aires was mafioso territory,
where the up and coming young smuggler lived. Gunfire was often heard there.
Strangers were unwelcome. Even the Nogales police refused to patrol there at
night. On seeing a strange car with two Americans, little children abandoned
their play to run to the porch and summon their parents, who stared coldly at
the passing car. And outside one house, three men stood in apparent guard
duty around a small, wooden hut. A rifle leaned conspicuously against its
door.
Nogales's newest and smallest neighborhood was Colonia Kennedy, whose large
homes, elaborate brick buildings heavy with wrought iron and stained glass,
reflected the status of their owners. There were Cadillacs and Lincoln
Continentals parked in the drives. Law enforcement sources referred to the
neighborhood of two dozen mansion-like homes as "Dopers' Row," for this was
where the narcotics kingpins lived.
The federal prosecutor for the state of Sonora and the man charged with
keeping the dopers in line was Jorge 0. Villalobos, whose downtown Nogales
office was stark by U.S. standards, the furnishings consisting of a battered
desk, a couple of file cabinets, a transistor radio which blared Mexican
music, and a black telephone that the prosecutor answered himself. There was
also a loaded semiautomatic rifle propped up in a comer. Villalobos was a
short, slightly built man with a limp handshake. He did not fit the image of
a macho Mexican law enforcer. But the reporters' sources in Phoenix had told
them that he was indeed a rare breed. He refused to take the mordida, or
payoff money, from the dopers. And he was also an endangered species. There
was, he said in matter-of-fact tones, a mafia assassin looking for him at
that particular moment. Such things were not unusual in Mexico, he explained
with a shrug. His counterpart in the adjoining state of Sinaloa, Antonio
Coppola, had recently been shot down in a burst of machine-gun fire.
"I walk to work every morning clutching my revolver inside my coat pocket,"
Villalobos told Drehsler in Spanish. "If they want to kill me badly enough,
they will do it, despite every precaution."
Villalobos was uneasy with reporters. He was asked whether the Nogales police
department cooperated with him in cracking down on narcotics smugglers. He
shook his head. The local police, he felt, were apathetic, even though the
mafiosos were all about the city. For example, Villalobos described the
recent arrest of a major drug smuggler. The guy had pulled out a gun and
Villalobos had shot him. "Although he was seriously wounded, he still tried
to kill me," Villalobos explained. "We wrestled on the ground as I tried to
get his gun away from him. I saw a local policeman standing nearby. He was
just calmly watching us struggle. I yelled out for him to come over and give
me his handcuffs. It took a long time, but finally he did."
Villalobos's assertion had to be checked out with local police. Rafael Torres
was police chief for the city of Nogales. Drehsler asked him whether city
police handled drug investigations. "Drug trafficking is a federal crime and
the city police do not investigate federal violations," replied Torres.
So much for the Mexican side.
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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