Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (37 page)

Oh well, it's not as though either side really needs many
warheads. A couple dozen apiece would do the trick. The Russians
could have some aimed at Japan, so if we act up they can destroy
our economy. We could have some aimed at The Village Voice, so if
the Russians misbehave, we can kill a lot of communists.

After the treaty signing many VERY IMPORTANT THINGS happened, all of which I scrupulously followed in every painstaking
detail on the giant-screen TV at the Kit Kat Klub. Make that a
triple, please. This is another technical term journalists use:
"Covering a story from Mahogany Ridge."

Tuesday night, the Gorbachevs had dinner at the White House
and Mikhail kissed Van Cliburn a lot. Wednesday, Gorby met with
congressional leaders and discussed whether the Soviet Union is an
Evil Empire or just like the United States or both. Later that day
The Gorb met with a delegation of American intellectuals, led by
John Denver. Raisa went to tea with Nancy. If body language is
anything to go by, they got along like two cats in a sack. Raisa had
to sit through the whole Just Say No routine but managed to resist
the temptation to shove the First Lady's face into a plate of
cucumber sandwiches.

On Thursday Gorb-O breakfasted with George Bush, but
George just spent the whole meal buried in The Wall Street Journal,
grumbling about bond prices. Barbara says that's the way he always
is in the morning.

And, of course, Ronny and Splotch had a whole bunch more
meetings, which seems to make everyone feel warm all over. I can't
think why. The last time an old, sick, addled American president
(Roosevelt) sat down with a Soviet leader who'd had great press
("Uncle" Joe Stalin), half of Europe was given away.

OCTOBER 1986

I just came back from a month on the Mexican border, where I
personally captured three illegal aliens. This saved the United
States a lot of money in welfare, social services and unemployment
benefits. Therefore, each of you owes me 50¢. Unless, of course,
you happen to be illegal aliens, in which case you owe me a kick in
the ass. Thoughtful-type readers-the kind who worry about the
morality of the whole issue-may be confused about whether to
send me money or wring my neck. I'm confused myself. A month
on the border would confuse anybody.

It was in Laredo that I captured my aliens. I didn't mean to
capture anybody. I just got over-excited, temporarily forgot I was a
journalist and started acting like a law-abiding citizen.

I was riding around town with a very affable young border
patrol agent named Howard Adams. His job for the evening was to
keep "illegals' from hopping the midnight freight to San Antonio. A
radio call came in saying three aliens had been spotted slipping
into an equipment pen next to the rail yard.

The pen was a link-fenced half-acre filled with couplers,
wheel trucks and other giant, rusty train junk. The moment we
pulled through the gate, two young men hopped out of the scrap
iron. Adams ran them down while I trotted after him, trying to take
notes, get my flashlight to work and not bark my shins on things.
The illegals got as far as the fence, examined its height, shrugged
and surrendered.

Adams locked these two in the car and went looking for the
third. I followed him as he ducked behind a derelict semi-trailer.
He shined his flashlight underneath and said something in Spanish. There was a wiggling in the gloom. A rather plump adolescent
had managed to squeeze himself into the trailer suspension, into a
six-inch gap between the axle and bed. He squeezed himself out,
shrugged, and Adams marched him to the car. I peered underneath, jiggling my defective Everready, trying to see how somebody
could fit in that miniscule space. Somebody could, I guess, and
with room to spare, because when the light finally came on, there
was another somebody staring at me. He had pushed himself even
further back above the axle.

"Howard!" I shouted. "I found one more. Is there something
that I'm, like, supposed to say to him?"

"Say, `Vamos!"' yelled Howard.

"Uh, vamos," I said. The fellow crawled out and stood next to
me, shrugging a great deal.

I looked back under the trailer to see how in the hell two
people could possibly fit in that space and shit, there was a third
guy as squashed as filet of sole. I was beginning to feel like the
circus cop arresting all the clowns in the miniature taxicab. "Come
on, vamos yourself," I said, and when he did, there was yet another
goddamned kid packed in behind him. I had them all shrugging in
my flashlight beam by the time Adams got back to the trailer.

"Me compadre es periodista," (My friend is a journalist) said
Adams. The illegals nodded their approval. That they'd been
busted by somebody with no power to do so and no business doing
it and who, on second thought, wished he hadn't, seemed to bother
nobody but me. One of the Mexicans said something, and Adams
translated. "This is the eleventh time he's been caught in two
weeks."

Illegal-alien traffic is so heavy at Laredo that there's no time to
take people back to the border one by one. A school bus with
chicken wire over the windows is parked by the freight yard until
it's full. It made three trips to the border that night, by no means a
record.

There was a lot of singing and laughing on the bus. The
prisoners leaned against the chicken wire and traded jokes in
Spanish with the border patrol agents. I talked to one of the women
agents. "They're going up to get construction jobs in San Antonio,
Dallas and Houston," she said. "Mostly they're young men. They'll
send for their families later. We see a few women and children
through here, and we worry about them because the trains are so
dangerous. There was one family with two beautiful little girls. We
caught them three times.

"We haven't seen them for a while," she added with a slightly
wistful tone. "I guess they finally got through."

Adams took me to the freight yard where the train was being
made up. It was terrifying in there. Switch engines were moving the
stock around in the dark, and the sidings were so close together
there was only a shoulder's width between the rumbling boxcars.
Shapes and shadows appeared in our flashlight beams as illegals
darted through the crashing machinery. I saw one roll himself
across the rail bed between moving wheels, trying to get out of our
way.

At the depot a railroad detective showed me photographs. In
one picture a man, about twenty, had been cut into five distinct
pieces-two legs, a head, a torso, one arm. His eyes were open.
He died so quickly there wasn't much blood. "It happens two or
three times a week," said the detective. "Sometimes in the yard
and sometimes out on the line. The wets are all afraid of snakes.
They sleep on the ties because they think snakes can't get between
the rails."

When the train was ready to pull out, we went to the last
switch onto the main track. As the locomotive moved through,
dozens of Mexicans dashed out of the shrubbery and tried to grab
hold of the gondolas and flat cars. Most of them fell back. The train
was moving too fast. The illegals already on board whistled and
waved. When the train was gone, Adams and the other agents rounded up the stragglers. One illegal said, "Will you drive around
a little and look for my friend. He'll need a ride to the border."

"Oh, for chrissakes," said Adams and began scouring the
neighborhood.

The boundary between Mexico and the United States is two
thousand miles long with few natural barriers. It's just an imaginary map doodle through a bunch of scrub. There isn't even a
linguistic gulf since the majority of people on both sides speak
Spanish. But this ill-patrolled and undefended frontier is the one
place on earth where a fully developed nation collides head-on
with the filth and chaos of the Third World.

The burghers of northern Europe have Italys, Greeces and
Yugoslavias between them and true want. The Japanese are a sea
away from the needy Filipinos and Chinese. Even Russia has its
own dirtball provinces of Kazakhstan and Uzbek to give it some
distance from the hordes of Asia. But in North America the poor
and benighted stand with noses pressed against the candy-store
window, from the yacht basins of San Diego to the yahoo party
beaches of South Padre Island.

A walkabout on the border raises all the big, ugly, stupid
questions of the twentieth century: What makes a Mexico a Mexico? What makes a United States a United States? And what the
hell are we supposed to do about it?

The Mexicans have another question: Why stay where money
isn't when you can go where money is? A question they answer with
their feet. And the U.S. Border Patrol doesn't have much of an
answer to that. Manolo Ortiz, PR chief of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service's Southern Regional Office, told me that in
1968 the Border Patrol nabbed 128,000 people trying to sneak into
the U.S. In 1984 it was one million. And last year's total was almost
twice that. Ninety-seven percent of these folks are Mexican, and,
though two million get caught, between two and four million don't.
That means at least a couple Clevelands worth of Mexican citizens
gate-crashed our country last year.

"We only have 3,200 agents in the entire Border Patrol," Ortiz
said. "All it amounts to, really, is controlled illegal entry."

An agent in Ortiz's office put it this way: "We could stand on
the border with linked arms, and they'd still get across."

Ortiz took me to meet the INS Southern Regional Commissioner, Stephen H. Martin. Martin is a prominent businessman
from Louisiana, active in Republican politics, but not too full of
gas for a federal appointee. "Our mandate," said Martin, letting a
little of that gas out, "is to protect the border and to protect all the
people along the border regardless of nationality."

Ortiz, who had a better sense of humor, said, "There's a fence
on the international boundary in El Paso. It's called the `Tortilla
Curtain.' Aliens were cutting themselves going through the holes in
it. So the government built a flimsier fence."

"What causes all this illegal immigration?" I asked. Here was
a real stupid question, but it's a stupid world.

"Economics," said Martin, looking as if he'd been asked a
real stupid question.

"Okay, then, why is Mexico so poor?"

For the next month I asked everybody on both sides of the
border this question. The only answer I got that made any sense
was from an El Paso bartender. He said, "You know, this old Texas
boy and this Mexican were having an argument, and the Texan says
to the Mexican, `How come you-all are always mad at us and
blaming America for everything and so on?' And the Mexican says,
`You stole half our country. And not only that, Senor, you stole the
half with all the paved roads."'

There are a lot of other stupid questions that I asked, too. In
McAllen, Texas, I asked Silvestre Reyes, chief of the Border Patrol
division that covers the boot toe of Texas, if we should use the
military to seal the border.

"The border is dangerous enough, without bringing a war-time
mentality to it," he said and made a face. "That's an obvious
conflict in philosophy to use our military against a peaceful ally."

In San Antonio I asked Deputy Southern Regional District
Dirctor John A. Abriel what would happen if we did seal the
border.

"Some congressmen have said if the border was sealed off
we'd get a revolution in Mexico," he said. Abriel looked tired and
harried. He looked like a man facing a question so big and so
stupid that it might need a big, stupid answer.

"But maybe," he said, "sealing the border would give Mexico
impetus to reform."

"Is the United States," I said, "using its border as some kind
of political safety valve for Mexico or something?"

"I wouldn't throw that theory down the drain," said Abriel. "I
have a similar gut feeling." And he gave me another load of
horrible wetback statistics.

"Look," said Abriel, "illegal immigration is not malum en se,
not evil in itself. We sympathize with the illegals. We empathize.
But the bottom line is the taxpayers expect protection, expect
enforcement of the immigration act. I think it was President Taft
who once met with an old Indian chief and asked the chief if he had
any words of wisdom for the president of the United States. The
chief said, `Watch your immigration laws."'

In McAllen I went out on night tour with two supervisory
patrol agents, Travis Johnson and Benny Greenfield.

Both were Texans in their forties.

Greenfield was a tall, laconic, cowboyish man who dipped
snuff as most agents do, lest a cigarette give them away on
stakeout. Johnson was shorter and very kindly mannered, with a
chuckle that might be called giggling in a man with less dignity
and no gun.

We drove to a low dyke near the Rio Grande, overlooking half
a mile of fallow bottom land. There are electronic sensors planted
along the U.S. bank of the river, old Vietnam War equipment, the
same sensors that were used to stop traffic across the DMZ and
down the Ho Chi Minh trail. And you remember how well that
worked.