SECRETO A VOCES My column in The News of Mexico City

COCHI FEO, SONORA – The shot-up Chevy Blazer sat up ahead of us on the trail, lurched off to one side of the narrow, sandy path. Its side windows had been blasted out; rifle size bullet holes strafed the doors.

This wouldn’t normally be a concern, the road west from Sasabe, Sonora, is dotted with the rusting hulks of gunned-down cars.

Except that this SUV looked suspiciously like the one that had passed us just five minutes before.

The London reporter who’d hired me for the job started shouting, “Go, go, go!” I gunned the truck’s engine and immediately, the laws of Sir Isaac Newton and Capt. Edward A. Murphy, kicked in: The sudden burst of horsepower spun out the tires in the deep sand and everything went to hell. We sunk in past the fenders, the truck waving wildly from side to side, engine howling, and then coming to a dead stop, fifty feet from the shot-up Blazer. For a moment, there was a fantastic silence all around us.

I know this silence all too well; it’s the quiet that has dawned every catastrophe of my life.

I heard that silence the time I crashed in a mountain bike race and landed on my head.

I heard it after I saw a man shot in a bar in Culiacán.

I heard it after my mom called me on a hot summer day three years ago and said, “Michel, tengo cancer.”

Don’t panic, don’t panic, stay calm. I climbed out of the truck and looked at the back tires, now buried two feet deep in the sand. Okay, now panic. I walked back to the shot-up SUV. Oh God, don’t let there be bodies in there, I thought. And if there are, please don’t let them be still stirring, flies beginning to swarm over the bloodied faces. If there were, then the killers were still here and we were grabbing our camera gear and high-tailing migrant style, due north four miles until we hit the Arizona border. Let some bored U.S. Border Patrol agent find us, two Brits and a shady American clamoring about gunfire and dead bodies.

I got to the SUV, it was empty. Stripped in fact; red and white wires jutting out where the stereo once sat, the glove box ripped open, a bucket seat missing.

It was not the same SUV that had passed us.

I clambered back through the deep sand of this place, under the over-shadowing arms of thick mesquite and saguaro cactus, a portal into the United States like no other.

Welcome to the road to Rancho Cochi Feo, Ugly Pig Ranch, just east of the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation.

Look at a map of Arizona and put your finger on Nogales. Now run your finger about four inches to the left and you’ll hit Sasabe. Keep going another inch and you’ll hit a tiny little place called the San Miguel Gate, a crossing point for Native Americans who live on the only reservation to straddle the United States and Mexico.

More than any other place on this border, the land ceded to the Tohono O'odham has become the busiest single stretch responsible for most of the drug-trafficking and migrant deaths in Arizona.

A bureaucratic quiet has nailed the place down, turning it into an effective sieve into the country; sometimes the tribal council publicly criticizes the Homeland Security Department for putting too many agents on its "ancient tribal lands." Other times, the council complains that there's too few agents. Meanwhile, families – including familymembers of the last chairwoman – continue to profit moving dope north to Maricopa and Phoenix.

Non-governmental organizations like Humane Borders have publicly condemned the reservation for not allowing water stations to be placed on their land. Yet, U.S. Border Patrol statistics show the O'odham land is busier than Douglas station in eastern Arizona or most of Yuma Sector for migrant trafficking.

Small-time narco-traffickers from Caborca have taken over the illegal migrant routes; and I've talked to people in Santa Rosa, Sonora, on the reservation border, that have been displaced by narcos who wanted to use their homes as stash houses. All in all, an interesting place to be.

When I got back to the truck, the Brits were using their hands to scoot sand out from around each tire. I didn’t have my shovel; I’d brilliantly left it at home. Which is why you keep your shovel at all times. Because the one time you don’t have it … well, you know how it goes.

An old, beat-up Ford truck rumbled beyond the bend, heading towards us.

Who now?

Then: “Marizco! Marizco, cabrón! Que haces aquí?”

I was so happy to see this old friend, an old border rancher, I nearly tore off his door to pull him out and bear-hug him.

He laughed and laughed, shaking his head, while he worked. He pulled a braided lasso from the truck bed, lashed one end to my tow-hooks, the other to his hitch, kicked it into four-wheel drive and pulled us out of the sand.

He kept a fast pace ahead of us, rushing toward the ranch, toward our story. These Brits wanted to talk to migrants, wanted to document their tales and their exploits heading toward the United States to scrub toilets in expensive Maryland hotels, lay down shingles on Nevada roofs, and trim bougainvillea vines in sunny Louisiana neighborhoods.

My old friend waved at us as he headed toward the ranch; I honked back happily. Runner of coyotes or no, to me, that’s a good man.

We got to the Gate where drunken O’odham cross through every Sunday morning to get blasted on cheap whiskey.

A Border Patrol Chevy Suburban sat on a hill across the fence, watching. A bulldozer and two trucks stood idle, the Homeland Security Department’s unfinished vehicle barrier stretching out for a mile in each direction. Part of the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Frenetic O’odham music blasted out of a car’s cd player. A drunk Indian staggered toward us, glowering as we unloaded our camera gear.

A migrant woman, Mari Reyes, 32, from Veracruz sat a good distance away, under the shade of a gnarled desert tree, watching this international scene of Americans, British, and native Indians. Another drunken Indian shouted obscenities; something along the lines of “white man, go home.”

Her smuggler nodded his head at me, or rather, at her, giving her permission to talk to me. Drinking with these men can have its advantages, I’ve found.

She’s scared, intimidated by the television camera pointing at her. Her immediate ambitions are vague; get to the U.S., no, I don’t know where yet. I just want to work and then go home.

Is there a lesson in any of this? Just this: These borderlands are a paradox, ugly and beautiful, all at once. You never know who your friend is out here.

And for God’s sakes, always carry a shovel.

-- Michael Marizco