Crossing Over

I'm reading this book called Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail. In the prologue the author explains the story of the Chávez brothers. I was stunned after I read this and I wanted to share it:



It is five o'clock in the morning on Saturday, April 6, 1996. Two weeks before Easter, two more weeks of Lent before the Passion. The sun will soon break over the Temecula valley. The moon is a little less than half full, dipping low into the southwestern sky. The stars have dimmed with the approach of the sun. Only the planet Jupiter is visible, and it is just about to fall into the leaves of a stand of avocados on the south side of Avenida Del Oro. It is a clear and dry morning, and although it is early spring, the temperature is already seventy degrees; it will reach into the nineties at midday.

Avenida Del Oro (in California) is an east-west rural two-lane road of pitch-black asphalt and a bright solid yellow dividing line that runs for several hundred feet across the intersection with Calle Capistrano. Here, Avenida Del Oro falls into a steep gully along a long, sharp curve, the kind that creeps up on you and causes you to instinctively hit the brakes as you come to the bend. Calle Capistrano is a smaller road that runs north toward a few residences and orchards. The point at which the two streets join is precisely the bend in Avenida Del Oro's curve.

Deck lights glow amber from a ranch house high up on a hill to the east. There is no breeze. Occasionally there is the sound of an avocado falling, at first slithering through the branches, then hitting the thick bed of dry dead leaves below with a loud, brittle crash.

At five-fifteen the eastern sky is pale yellow. Shades of dusty pink rise into blue-greens and finally into deep blue at the zenith and in the west. A 1989 GMC truck, blue with silver trim, equipped with a camper shell of darkly tinted windows, speeds westward down Avenida Del Oro. Twenty-seven people are inside, twenty-five of them in the camper and two in the front seat. All are undocumented Mexican migrants.

The reason the coyote (A person who smuggles Latin Americans across the US border, typically for a high fee) is on this isolated rural road is the inauguration of the U.S. Border Patrol interdiction effort known as Operation Gatekeeper. In 1994, a massive new steel wall was built along several miles of the border running east from the beach at Tijuana. After the Border Patrol claimed success with Operation Gatekeeper, it followed with similar measures in Nogales, Arizona (Operation Safeguard), El Paso, Texas (Operation Hold the Line), and McAllen, Texas (Operation Rio Grande). Consequently, the Mexican coyotes, not to be outdone by gringo technology, have chosen more circuitous routes through rugged terrain eastward. These new routes are extremely dangerous. Dozens of migrants have died of exposure in the torrid heat and bitter cold of the Colorado Desert since 1994. There are hundreds of such crossings between the beaches of Southern California and the Gulf Coast of Texas, and the cat-and-mouse game between the coyotes and the Border Patrol is never-ending.


A Border Patrol truck spots the GMC several miles south of the intersection of Avenida Del Oro and Calle Capistrano. What the BP agents see is a vehicle clearly overloaded, its fenders practically scraping the tires. From this point on, there are differing versions as to what occurred. The BP maintains that their personnel followed the vehicle at a discreet distance, with its emergency lights off. Lawyers representing the victims say that the BP wrecklessly and needlessly endangered the lives of the migrants by engaging in a high-speed pursuit.


For most of the hour-long ride up from the border, Benjamín, Jaime, and Salvador Chávez and their compatriots in the camper shell see nothing, not even one another's faces, because very little of the approaching dawn's light penetrates the camper's tinted windows.


When the coyote notices the BP truck in his side mirrors (he couldn't have seen much in the rearview mirror, given the dark glass and the twenty-five bodies piled like a cord of wood in the back), he speeds up, the tires screeching on the curves.


Inside the camper, panic rules. Those closest to the small window that looks in on the cab of the truck pound on it and scream at the coyote to stop. Several survivors recall that Benjamín Chávez shouted the loudest, a deep-throated yell. But it is to no avail. The coyote has been drinking. He has been snorting coke. He is hunched over the steering wheel, oblivious to everything but the BP truck behind him and the dark, winding road ahead.


Increasingly desperate, the migrants pop the camper's rear window open. They throw their small travel bags, their water bottles, and even a tire jack in the direction of the BP vehicle, but these fall harmlessly by the side of the road. They make dramatic hand gestures at the agents, imploring them to give up the pursuit, not because they want to avoid apprehension but because they want their driver to slow down. They are in fear for their lives.


The Chávez brothers, crunched against one another in the truck bed, see very little even when the rear window is opened. They are deep inside the camper, hemmed in by twenty-three other bodies. They only feel the lurching of the truck and hear the men's groans as they are slammed about on the curves.


The GMC hurtles down Avenida Del Oro at close to seventy miles an hour. About three hundred feet from Calle Capistrano, the coyote realizes he can't negotiate the curve and slams on his brakes. The realization comes too late.


There is  along skid, and the truck spins 180 degrees.


Then there is silence for a split second, as the truck flies off the road and turns over in the air.


And now a thousand sounds at once: the crumpling, the breaking, the crushing, and the snapping of glass, metal, plastic, and bone. The truck comes down roof-first in the ditch. Most of the bodies inside the camper shell spill out. Not all are completely ejected. Several are crushed underneath the mangeled chassis of the truck. A cloud of dust rises from the impact.


The sun crests the horizon in the east now. It is possible that one of the last things some of the migrants saw, for just a fraction of a second, was the yellow glow on the horizon. Or maybe some of them saw the dust from the crash hanging in the air and heard the silence of the desert return as the groans of the dying faded.


Benjamín, Jaime, and Salvador were crushed under the truck. They had departed their home in Cherán, an Indian town in the highlands of Michoacán, a few days earlier and were on their way to Watsonville, California, to their usual stint of seasonal work picking strawberries in the fertile hills east of Santa Cruz. The accident made headlines in the United States for the enormity of the tragedy (eight people killed, nineteen inured, many critically) and because just a few days earlier another incident involving Mexican migrants had attracted attention. A videotape reminiscent of the Rodney King footage had aired on the evening news showing Riverside sheriff's deputies beating unarmed Mexican migrants, none of them visibly resisting, by the side of a Southern California freeway at rush hour.


Over the last decade, the numbers of casualties at the U.S.-Mexico line have begun to look like the tallies from a low-intensity conflict in a corner of the developing world. A University of Houston study counted some three thousand deaths in the last half of the 1990s, a conservative figure. Many bodies, the researchers concluded, will never be found. The bones of these migrants are hidden in the sludge at the bottom of the Rio Grande and scattered across the open desert.