The Devils Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea Read Free Book Online Page B

consul’s offices in the borderland. The consul of Calexico flew home with the bodies, their first and last trip by airplane; and Tucson’s consul, Carlos Flores Vizcarra, collected the files. The death reports went to the groaning shelves of the Tucson consulate. It was all quite routine, with regular patterns, ruts, and observances.
    When a fresh death report comes into the consulate building, the women of the consulate light votive candles. Each desk flickers with a small flame. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a religious observance.
    The reports arrive from the officials, so many that it’s getting hard to file them. Shelves are stuffed with them, and piles of reports sometimes accumulate on the tabletops. The Yuma 14’s documents, like all of the death reports at the consulate, were tucked into accordion folders, cheap manila packets available in any Target or Kmart. The death packets are known as “archives,” and harvest season—May through July—is known as “death season.” It is then that lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, strawberries are all ready to be picked. Arkansas chickens are ready to be plucked. Cows are waiting in Iowa and Nebraska to be ground into hamburger, and grills are ready in McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s and Taco Bell for the ground meat to be cooked. KFC is waiting for its Mexican-plucked, Mexican-slaughtered chickens to be fried by Mexicans. And the western desert is waiting, too—its temperatures soaring, a fryer in its own right.
    OTM —Other Than Mexicans —covers all the Central and South Americans swelling the ranks of the walkers. Many Americans don’t know that Chinese and Russian refugees cross Desolation as well. And Mexican smugglers are now using freighters to run the North American coastline and drop the walkers into Canada, where the rules are lax and the border —twice the length of the Mexican border —is even more abandoned. Middle Eastern operatives look like Mexicans; as long as they keep their mouths shut, they can pass. Muslim missionaries have moved into southern Mexico, often taking up where Christian evangelists have left off. They set up Koranic schools in Indian villages, and in tribes where the children do not even speak Spanish, they are being taught to read, speak, and write Arabic. Reportedly, the largest al Qaeda training ground in the New World is in Brazil. The Texas and Arizona branches of the Border Patrol have aired suspicions that the smugglers are happy to transport al Qaeda members across the Devil’s Highway. In a world of pure capitalism, Osama’s crew has the juice: these ultimate OTMs are said to pay fifty thousand dollars apiece.
    Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human—wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: “If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?”) In politically correct times, “illegal alien” was deemed gauche, so “undocumented worker” came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is “undocumented entrant.” As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant.
    Maybe it is.
    In the strange military poetics of the Border Patrol, the big kill itself is known not only as the Case of the Yuma 14. It is officially called “Operation Broken Promise.” Of all the catch phrases of the event, this is perhaps the most accurate.
    In the postmortem packets, you will find death certificates, coroner’s reports, INS or sheriff’s reports, and the pictures. Each report has color photographs of the dead, both in hard copy printouts and digitized on computer disks. The pictures focus on the faces, or what’s left of the faces, then the torsos, occasionally the genitalia. Hands are greatly in evidence, but you never see feet.
    The dead have open mouths and white teeth. They are stretched in angular poses, caught in last gasps or shouts, their eyes burned an