I grew up on a farm where my father grew maize in the northern region of central Mexico, on the edge of the Sonoran desert, just a few miles from the U.S. border. It wasn’t a good place for growing much of anything and the water that fell there barely watered a houseplant. It never occurred to me that we could have lived anywhere else until I began to question everything, including, “Why here?”
That applied to many things.
Many young unwed girls of the village have babies. “Why here?”
TB is prevalent among the older villagers. “Why here?”
Very few children attend school. “Why here?”
The only fun thing to do is try to kill the gophers. “Why here?”
From the age of six I worked in my father’s fields. Not really worked. Sitting near the edge of a gopher hole holding a shovel and waiting for one to stick its head up and smashing it wasn’t work. It was hours of sitting in the blazing sun, stripped down to my shorts, faint from hunger and thirst, but it wasn’t work. The fun came when a gopher made the stupid decision to make a run for it, emerging from its tunnel only to have its brains splattered by my shovel or the shovel held by my friend Luis who sat at the other opening of the gopher’s tunnel. By age ten I was a gopher expert. I understood how they thought, what drew them out of their tunnel, and what made them stay hidden.
***
Many of the locals who dug the tunnels under the border of the Mexico and U.S. border ended up in shallow ditches with a gunshot to the backs of their heads for their labor. It was the way the cartel thanked them for all their sweat. Those of us who carried the drugs through the tunnel rarely picked up a shovel or pickaxe.
The tunnel I found myself sitting in mid-way through was a little under 1400 yards or about 4200 feet. It was five feet in height and a very narrow two feet wide. All together that’s a fair amount of dirt dug out and carried away so that the tunnel couldn’t be easily discovered by the authorities on either side of the border.
But inevitably most tunnels were found out, including the one I and my two companions squatted down in, frozen in place. We talked in whispers.
“Why aren’t they coming in after us?” That was Jorge, at seventeen, the youngest of us three.
“They’re waiting us out,” Mendocino, the oldest of us, at twenty-six, replied.
“But why?”
“They know we carry guns,” I said. “The US and Mexican border agents aren’t in a hurry and don’t want to risk getting shot in the process.”
“It’s a standstill and we’re caught in the middle,” Mendocino said.
“Right on – or under – the Mexican and U.S. border,” I added.
Six hours after being stopped by the sounds of voices at the US end of the tunnel, only Jorge had taken off his shirt because of the heat. He had the body of an old man; scarred from knife fights carried out in the back streets of Mexico city, wrinkled by years of poor nutrition and drug abuse. He had lived mostly on cerveza and fried tortillas since running away from home at thirteen. He thought becoming a gang member would be easier than his years of living on the streets and sleeping under the bridges and doing whatever he needed to do to earn the pesos he needed to feed his addiction to heroin. It wasn’t.
He sat on one of the burlap sacks filled with the millions in cash that we stole from the cartel. The scent of his sweat filled the air; it smelled like sour milk. He sweated like a fat man, although he must not have weighed more than fifty-four kilograms. He was short and very slender, but surprisingly strong. He had the face of a pretty girl, with thick lips and long, dark eyelashes. He pulled his knife on any guy who even hinted at his effeminate looks. Carlos Mendoza brought him into the cartel to guard over the stacks of bags filled with cash that was kept in an underground tunnel near Tijuana.
Sitting in the glow of one of the oil lamps that hung from the ceiling above him he scratched at the needle marks and scabs that lined his vein on his left arm. His AK-47 laid across his lap. “I’d give my left nut for an ice cold Corona,” he said, “or even a warm one.”
Sweat dripped from his long black hair.
“They don’t give you beer in American prisons,” Mendocino said.
“And you can’t drink it if you’re buried in the Mexican ground,” I added, thinking about the cartel.
***
In the village near our farm, the Le Sombrero Negro Saloon served beer to boys at any age as long as you had the money. On Saturdays my father would go there, taking me with him after I reached the age of twelve, with the promise that I said nothing to my mother about what went on there. It was a nine mile walk to the saloon. Along the way he told me tales of the many times he had visited Tijuana. He bragged of his sexual prowess with the prostitutes who “lusted after him.” He talked of mutilated bodies found in the streets and hanging from the bridges, but never explained how the bodies ended up there or mentioned the cartels. I was born a devout Catholic, and being young, thought that Tijuana was where you went to wait to go to heaven if you had died in a horrific way. I thought of Tijuana as a special kind of purgatory. During his trips to Tijuana he learned how to speak and write English from the prostitutes. On our walks to the saloon, he taught it to me. Needless to say, my vocabulary included a lot of vulgar terms.
In the saloon I sat on a stool at the bar surrounded by friends whose fathers brought them along as a kind of rite of passage just as my father did. While I swilled down the two bottles of beer my father allowed me, he went into the backroom with Rita. She always wore the same thing, a black slip and red high heels. She was plump but very pretty. She hugged me every time I came into the saloon. She smelled like honey and vanilla. I knew what she and my father were doing behind the curtains that divided the back room from the bar area of the saloon. I never told my mother about my father and Rita, but I think she knew anyway. Where he got the money to pay for the beer, and for Rita, I never found out, but it may explain why I went barefoot.
***
I think the border agents found the tunnel by accident, or someone within the cartel tipped them off. Who knows? It was past midnight when we arrived there, hauling the stolen loot on our backs, our guns hanging from our shoulders. We climbed down the ladder at the Mexican end of the tunnel. Me first, followed by Jorge, then Mendocino. We made our way through the pitch dark hitting our heads on the hanging unlit oil lamps. Half way in, border agents at both ends of the tunnels using bullhorns, told us to come out with our arms raised. Jorge and I froze, but Mendocino dropped his bags, rushed to the Mexican end of the tunnel, and began firing his AK-47 up through the hole in the ground. It was a stupid move. It told the agents at both ends we were heavily armed and not afraid to use our guns against them. They could play a waiting game out in the fresh air. We were trapped in the tunnel like gophers. I lit a lamp and we sat on the bags of cash. Mendocino pulled a cheap cigar from his pocket and began nervously rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.
“Someone had to have tipped-off the agents we were coming,” he said.
That made sense.
“How could they have been tipped off?” Jorge said. “No one but us three knew we were going to take the money tonight and try to escape through the tunnel.”
That made sense too.
We sat in silence for a while, each of us trying to sort it out in our own head. Which of us was the snitch, and why? Drug smugglers were never given leniency by either government, and the cartel promptly executed anyone caught stealing from them.
It was Mendocino who spoke first. “Did either of you think to bring along some water?”
I took a half full bottle from inside my shirt and handed it to him. “Just a sip,” I said.
He held the bottle to his ear and shook it. A grin spread across his face as the water sloshed around.
***
The child of migrant farm workers, Mendocino was the only one of us who had ever been inside the United States beyond the city of Nogales, where the tunnel led to. He was nine and his parents were picking pears in Mendocino County, California, when he acquired the nickname, Mendocino, which stuck with him from then on. On Sundays the workers were given the day off and his parents would hitch a ride to the town of Mendocino, located on the coast, and swim in the ocean and walk the streets of Mendocino, allowing themselves the cost of and treat of one ice cream cone a piece. They’d return to the migrant camp late at night, hungry, but happy.
“It was the only happy time in my childhood,” he once told me soon after we both joined the cartel. “From then on my life has been shit.”
Mendocino was angry; angry at the world and angry at anyone who was better off than he was. He wore his anger on his sleeves, in his fists, and in the dark bags under his eyes. He never slept, fearing that if he closed his eyes for very long that he’d see the images forever imprinted on the insides of his eyelids of his father being beaten to death and his mother strangled to death by the men who burst into their home to steal the 7982 pesos his father kept in a shoe box under the bed. He was sixteen at the time and would have been killed also hadn’t he fought off the man that held a knife to his throat, forcing him to watch what was happening to his parents, and run out the open back door of their house.
I met him in Tijuana during a cookout hosted by Carlos Mendoza a year after I arrived there. He, Jorge, and I became an unlikely trio of friends who did drug runs between Mexico and the U.S. long before the tunnel we found ourselves trapped in had been dug.
He leaned back against the tunnel wall and looked at the tip of his unlit cigar. “How come they’re not smoking us out with tear gas or something?” he asked.
“Who’s to say we don’t have gas masks just like they do?” I said.
“We don’t have gas masks,” Jorge said.
Sometimes Jorge wasn’t so bright. “They don’t know that. The last thing they want is to walk into a smoke filled tunnel with bullets from our AK 47s flying every direction. They can do this the easy way. The easy way for them.”
Mendocino put the cigar in his mouth. “What’s the easy way?”
“They wait us out. We can’t stay down here forever.” I looked over at Jorge who had a vacant look in his eyes and he was hugging himself as if cold. He was showing signs of needing a fix which he planned on getting once we were in Nogales. “Or even for another few hours.”
***
I don’t recall whose idea it was that we steal the money from Carlos and the cartel. It all seemed to fall into place. Jorge knew how and when to get to the money, I knew the area where the tunnel was being dug since it was close to the village where I grew up and how to make a quick getaway in Mexico if it came to that, and Mendocino knew how to get us to Northern California where he had connections to help us unload the money and hide out. We stole a car off a street in Tijuana and from there it was easy-peasy, although we took more money than we had intended. Instead of taking one large canvas bag filled with dough each, we each took two. Taking the additional cash slowed us down.
We ditched the car a mile from the tunnel and burdened down with the bags of cash we trotted across scrubland on a moonless night. As we expected, the tunnel wasn’t being guarded when we got there. At least that was what we thought. And it was our second mistake.
The first mistake was that stealing from Carlos Mendoza.
Carlos wasn’t the top man in the cartel we were members of, but he was close enough to the top to easily smell the farts of the drug lord who commanded an entire army of thugs, thieves and murderers who dealt in drugs, prostitution and revenge killings throughout most of Northern Mexico. I had never met him, but I had seen him on many occasions as he rode through the streets of Tijuana in the back seat of a bulletproof limousine.
Carlos was a squat, mean little man who had a penchant for torturing anyone who betrayed him in any way before having one of his henchmen put a bullet in the victim’s head. I know this because I was one of those henchmen. If any one of the three of us who took millions of dollars from him had only taken a few hundred, the result would have been the same if he had ever caught us.
It was easy to see how he could figure out that theft was carried out by Jorge, and by extension to Mendocino and I because of our friendship with Jorge, but sitting in the tunnel we didn’t know if Carlos or any of his henchmen had followed us. But we felt it, in the same way it feels to have a toothache, knowing the tooth needed being pulled. We didn’t talk about it, but we were afraid of being caught by Carlos a lot more than we feared being captured by the border agents.
***
Nine hours after finding ourselves trapped in the tunnel, it began to stink of our piss and shit, despite our attempts to bury any excrement. Occasionally an agent from either end of the tunnel would call to us through a bullhorn telling us to give ourselves up, and then it would return to silence. They thought they had caught drug traffickers. As Jorge was bent over puking his guts out a little way down the tunnel I looked around at the bags of cash and then it struck me. There was a simple solution to the first problem. Or so I thought.
“We gotta burn the money,” I said to Mendocino.
“Burn it?” he said, his bloodshot eyes widened to the size of silver pieces.
“Yeah, every bit of it, including the bags.”
“Why?”
“If they catch us with nothing, no drugs or cash, the only thing they can arrest us for is trying to enter the U.S. illegally.
I must have been talking louder than I intended. From down the tunnel I heard the clicking of the safety on Jorge’s gun and turned to see him pointing it as us. Even from a distance I could see it shaking in his trembling hands. “You ain’t burning the money,” he said. “You guys are my friends, but I didn’t risk having a bullet being put in my head by Carlos just to watch it go up in smoke. I’ll kill you before I let that happen.”
“Jorge, listen, this is our only . . .”
Mendocino raised his gun and filled Jorge full of bullets. The youngster flew backward, landing on the floor on his back, blood streaming down his body. Aghast I turned as Mendocino lowered his gun and asked, already knowing the answer, “Why?”
“He was willing to kill us. It was him or us,” Mendocino said. “The agents probably heard the gun fire. We better burn the money, fast.”
What quickly came to my mind was there was now a new problem: murder.
“Pile the bags of money at under the entrance on the Mexican end of the tunnel,” I stammered, picking up two bags and running that direction. Mendocino slung his gun over his shoulder and followed on my heels, also carrying two bags. We threw them down, ran back and got the two that had belonged to Jorge, along with a lit oil lamp. With the bags in a pile, I doused them with oil and then set them afire. Mid-way back where I had left my gun, I stopped, picked it up, and aimed it at Mendocino. He was near Jorge’s body when he stopped and turned.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Sorry my friend. You killed Jorge and all I have to tell anyone for either of us to get away scot-free is that you were going to kill me. It’s self defense,” I said. My gunfire drove him almost all the way back to the U.S. entrance to the tunnel before he fell to the ground.
The agents waited until the smoke stopped streaming out of the Mexican end of the tunnel, and not hearing any more gun fire for a while, before they clamored down the holes at both ends, taking aim at me. I was standing on the American side of the border with my gun on the ground and my arms raised.
***
Getting away free, wasn’t as easy as that. There was still the matter of the other problem: Carlos and the cartel. For the next year I was housed in a maximum security prison, kept in seclusion so that no one could get to me, during which time I brushed up on my writing skills, and told the U.S. authorities everything I knew about Carlos and the cartel in exchange for U.S. citizenship, a new identity, and a house in Northern California, near the town of Mendocino.
As it turned out, neither Carlos or anyone in the cartel knew we had taken the money that night. For the three of us, fear was a powerful force behind our paranoia.
Some days I feel bad about what happened to Jorge and Mendocino, but I learned very young, that when it comes down to it, gophers are solitary animals.
by 
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