The War Between the Cactus

PART ONE

To first see the U.S.-Tijuana border is somewhat akin to stepping into the pages of Dante’s Inferno. It is a hellscape with a pulse, a sentient being that throbs with the immutable power of the human will each and every night in a twenty-five or so square mile microcosm between the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Ojai Mountains to the east. Mobs of shadowy bodies, crouching and creeping in the night like chickens, such that they are called the Spanish name pollo, traverse the tennis-shoe hardened trails that weave in and out of the border canyons, some with sinister names like Smuggler’s Gulch, or ridiculous ones like Arnie’s Point where a border patrol agent by the same name absorbed a Mexican bullet in his ass cheek, or the Apple Turnover where a certain agent Apple rolled his SUV down ass over tea kettle a rock slide. Silver-tipped cholla cactus loom like wayward chessmen, ready to insert their fanged tubercles in the tender flesh of any fleeing corpus.. Barrel cacti lurk underfoot, and their steel ribs and fierce spines will slice right through a combat boot to skewer a whole foot. The air is heavy with the acrid smell of wild anise and burning tires, and you can’t see shit because this is a darkness you have never before experienced.. Even once you have developed the night eyes of a patrol agent, you will still hallucinate imaginary Mexicans floating past in the inky air. The skeletal remains of smugglers’ cars litter the canyons like abandoned shipwrecks,, crashed headlong into gullies, and the eight-foot landing strip that separates the countries stands ready to snag a ringed finger and filet it to the bone.. There are no cameras in canyons, just gold badges glinting in the moonlight, sensors buried in the dirt, byzantine footpaths, and the faint waft of Tijuana River stench polluting the Pacific sea air. It is here that the United States Border Patrol of the San Diego sector calls its office where the nightly ballet between hunters and hunted has been methodically playing itself out for as far back as the turn of the last century.

For the better part of five decades, the Tijuana border by day was an open air party where aliens congregated to play soccer, get drunk and buy new tennies while waiting for the sun to dip into the Pacific when the cover of darkness escorted them into the canyons where the Border Patrol lay in wait. Groups could number over 50 at a time, and it was not unusual to see a group running past you as you chased another group. They are called pollos because they crouch into a half-squat as they navigate the foot paths, and the bob of their heads and stutter steps make them look like chickens. Agents called them tonks because it was said that this is the noise an extendable baton makes when it bounces off heads. (The term has long been retired because of its derogatory insinuation). Many nights, there was not enough gas to fuel the small fleet of Ram trucks, and there were pitiful few agents to handle the onslaught. This bred a constant sense of defeat and futility and morale among the agents was low. Washington roundly ignored the plight of the border patrol because illegal immigration has always been quietly regarded as a harmless condition. Entry without inspection was not even a crime, and the border was so porous that the job of the U.S. Border Patrol resembled a three-ring circus. In fact, the crimes that did occur were Mexican-on-Mexican as apathetic coyotes who promised safe passage turned on their flock and robbed and raped at will. Crimes in the canyons grew so bad that the San Diego Police launched a crew of cops to infiltrate the border, and this episode in border history became Joseph Wambaugh’s novel Lines and Shadows.

The Border Patrol is a proud outfit. It takes great pride in the uniqueness of their job, which requires a certain ruggedness and tenacity to negotiate the perils of the desert, or a mountain, or the middle of the city. Agents in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas will track a group for days; it’s called cutting sign and it requires immense skill to follow sneaker tracks over sand and rock. Seasoned agents can follow the same sneaker tread for miles. But the San Diego border sector was unlike the rest of the border. It was fucking chaos. Probably ten thousand aliens would cross every night in the space of maybe 5 square miles, and the patrol would deploy maybe 25 agents from three stations -Imperial Beach to the west, Chula Vista, or properly San Ysidro in the middle and Brownfield, the mountain station, to the east. They might catch one thousand a night, but many old timers simply gave up and slept through their shift. The job was pointless, and nobody cared and since murders and gunplay were real, the border never garnered national attention.

Until Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1992. By this time, Californians had grown vocal over their frustration with hordes of Mexicans crashing through their yards or crops every night, and they made enough noise that they held the key to the presidency due to the number of electoral votes the state held. Clinton listened and the Border Patrol got rich. There was a massive influx of new agents and brand new vehicles and a serious attempt to thwart the tide of illegal entry through a new enforcement strategy called Operation Gatekeeper was hatched. It was modeled after the tactics of the agents who policed the Del Rio river in Texas. They would form a sort of offensive line at the water’s edge to prevent entry altogether through this show of unified force. San Diego agents traditionally granted a certain freedom of invasion, preferring to masquerade themselves - it’s called laying in-along the beaten paths like green ghosts, waiting to jump out of sage bushes, scream “La Migra” and scare the living piss out of everyone. Now, there would be no leniency and agents would sit in stationary positions close to the fence and prevent entry altogether in the hopes of pushing the traffic east over the Otai Mountain. And it worked, but border patrol agents, who disdain authority and tend to not do what they are told by supervisors, hated it. San Diego agents were used to alot of action - high speed chases all day and night, foot pursuits after groups of 50 or maybe 100 until the sun rose, and now they were so bored by sitting in one place all night that of the 300 new agents who signed on, 298 quit. The new found attention they had finally won was overshadowed by their wounded pride. Americans would refer to these hard-bitten veterans as border “guards,” and their egos just could not take the humiliation. So they sabotaged it. Night shift became a true Mexican stand-off as crowds gathered at the fence waited for agents to nod off, usually around four a.m. and the free-for-all would begin. Thus begin a bigger war between agents and supervisors than with the aliens. But Clinton got re-elected, and the traffic was pushed so far east that the bowels of the Texas border became the new flashpoint for the border war. To Be Continued