The Shadow Catcher: A U.S. Agent Infiltrates Mexico's Deadly Crime Cartels - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hipolito Acosta is the most highly decorated officer in the history of the U.S. Immigration and Nationalization Service. The son of Mexican-American migrant workers, Acosta rose through the ranks from Border Patrol Agent to a key position in the Department of Homeland Security. Acosta and his wife live in Texas.

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CHAPTER ONE

Playing Pollo from Ciudad Juarez to Chicago

THE CHILL OF the river cut through my body like a jolt of electricity. The night was black and starless, and the water was creeping up to my neck. I felt like I was suffocating, the coldness of the water and air were sucking the breath out of me.

My fear turned to panic as the current threatened to pull me under the surface. I was too far advanced into the river to turn back, and I was not close enough to the other bank to feel confident. Our slimy smuggling guide was moving effortlessly through the swift waters of the Rio Grande, but he did not bother to offer us encouragement. He had made this crossing many times. This was his livelihood. Behind us, closer to Ciudad Juarez, I spotted what seemed to be a separate group of mostly women and children. The younger ones were being carried on the shoulders of their elders.

Everyone who made it this far was exhausted from days of traveling from Central America and other parts of Mexico to reach the Rio Grande. They were risking the lives of everyone in their families in the unforgiving currents. As many as four or five hundred people drown each year trying to cross the Rio Grande where it forms the border between Mexico and the United States, but many of the deaths are not officially reported or recorded.

I was thinking of my young wife and sons in Chicago waiting for me to come home from this assignment, just as the immigrants behind me must have been thinking about family they had left behind. In our own ways, we all wanted the same thing. It was just that I was born and raised on the side of the river these people were willing to risk everything to reach.

I had traveled to Ciudad Juarez five days earlier as an undercover U.S. government agent. My assignment was to infiltrate a human smuggling ring, the first time a mission like this was ever attempted by our agency. I had been forced to acknowledge that our effort in Chicago to capture and deport illegal immigrants was getting us absolutely nowhere, and I was determined to do something more proactive by going after the human smugglers at the starting points of their pipelines.

One such staging area was La Rueda Bar, a crowded, smoke-filled, downtown Juarez lounge along a drag jam-packed with similar establishments, for block after block. It hadn’t taken me long to find it. It was one of the primary contact points for smugglers and pollos in Juarez, according to my preliminary research. I was able to pick it out from the other drinking holes along the strip by its ugly, garish lime-green color and its trademark oversized wagon wheel hanging over the side entrance. The Mexican and American patrons loitering in the shade on the sidewalk outside were guzzling cold beers or tequila. Most were completely oblivious to the human transport wheeling-and-dealing in their midst.

The city of Juarez, Mexico, is impoverished, dirty, and dangerous. It was settled in 1659 by Spanish explorers, but its population exploded in the 1970s, when streams of Mexico’s migrants began arriving from all parts of the country with the hopes of finding employment at American-owned assembly plants, known as maquiladoras. These plants hired Mexican laborers to manufacture goods with American raw materials, trying to create a win-win situation for the unskilled Mexican laborers without necessitating border crossings. Despite the thousands of secure but low-paying jobs offered at the local plants, the vastly more lucrative trades of drugs, prostitution, and human smuggling attracted a ruthless criminal element to the town. Juarez was a hard-edged frontier town that was slowly drifting toward lawlessness.

The town’s nightlife was not suffering though. Americans crossed one of the three border controlled bridges from El Paso into Juarez for an evening of inexpensive fun on the “Juarez Strip” that contained more than fifty bars and nightclubs offering cheap drinks, dancing, dinner, and sex. La Rueda Bar was always a particularly popular destination.

I had crossed into Juarez on two consecutive nights to stake out the location. Both times, the dive was buzzing, overflowing with locals, prostitutes in short skirts and their johns, and drunks at all levels of intoxication. I was disguised as apollo, or chicken. A pollo is a person seeking passage into the United States illegally. They were calledpollos because of the way they followed their smuggler like frightened chickens with their heads about to be removed. Many in the United States call them “wetbacks,” a derogatory term referencing their swim across the Rio Grande. Being Hispanic, my disguise wasn’t much of a stretch.

In my pre-mission investigation, I had gathered enough information from street-level informants back in Chicago, where I was based, to learn that La Rueda was a major clearinghouse for immigrant smuggling. As apollo, I was the lowest creature on the human trafficking food chain. Other agents had posed aspollos before, but only in U.S. operations, and with backup. No agent had ever infiltrated a smuggling organization in Mexico, never mind alone.

Going deep undercover would give me an inside view of the workings of a human trafficking organization, making it easier to identify ring leaders and dismantle the organization once I had gathered enough evidence. I would be dealing with the main smugglers firsthand. I would also have to endure the harrowing journey that thousands of illegal migrants were taking daily, risking their lives to escape the misery and poverty in their homeland.

I had been working in the Chicago district office for the past several years, mainly deporting illegal immigrnts, which was frustrating. Deportation was nothing but an inconvenience, not a deterrent to desperate people. I knew that immigrants deported one day were back on U.S. streets by the next week at the latest. The smuggling that got them here in the first place was the problem that troubled me most.

The antismuggling unit had been a department in name only when my colleague Gary Renick arrived in Chicago two years before me. No agents were assigned exclusively to the unit, but there was one priority target, the Medina family. The Medinas were an extremely tight, impenetrable human smuggling and drug syndicate, well-known to INS agents in Chicago and El Paso. Their lucrative smuggling ring ran between Juarez and Chicago, and I decided to do whatever it took to take them down, including going undercover in Mexico to infiltrate their operation at its source.

The mission may have bordered on reckless, but we had no model to follow. We were becoming overwhelmingly frustrated at the usual immigration procedures, which were stale and ineffectual, almost like Band-Aids on a hemorrhage. We hungered to try something different. Since our intelligence was that the Medinas used La Rueda Bar for their base of smuggling and narcotics operations, this was the logical place for me to get at the family.

I flew into El Paso several days before the operation was scheduled to commence. My sister Minnie and her family lived there, so I stayed with them until I did some reconnaissance of the Juarez area.

On any night, La Rueda was hopping. During my two days of surveillance, I had seen peasants gathered on the street, most likely determining who would go inside to negotiate. Eventually, one of them would enter the bar, emerging shortly with a contact. They would exchange money on the street, not concerned about being...