Squatters’ View : 3 Undercover Officers Experience Good and Evil

A lot of people in North County talk about the uneasy relationship between illegal aliens and the Anglo majority, but Raul Paceno, Joe Lopez and Rudy Quinones have seen it from both sides.

What they have seen is cruelty and kindness, naivete and cynicism displayed by both Anglos and aliens.

Paceno, Lopez and Quinones are Spanish-speaking sheriff’s deputies who dressed in scruffy clothes and knock-around hats and spent three days in January wandering among the aliens who live in makeshift encampments in the hills and valleys of the Poway area.

Posed as Recent Arrivals

Their goal in going undercover was to discover where the aliens are living, their numbers, and what danger they pose to the surrounding community and to each other.

Paceno and Quinones shuffled into alien camps and gathering places, posing as recent arrivals from Mexico who had worked recently as migrants in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

“The conversation at the beginning was always the same: ‘Is there work here?’ ‘No, not enough work,’ ” said Paceno.

Lopez, 35, a sergeant who looks a bit like the actor Jimmy Smits from TV’s “LA Law,” was always nearby observing. At a brawny 6-foot-1, he was the least likely to pass for an impoverished rural Mexican driven north by economic desperation.

In the camps, the deputies found filth, flies, pornography, hundreds of beer cans and mounds of trash. They sensed the presence of knives and other weapons.

“When you would walk into the brush to find a camp, you had the sense of being watched by people you couldn’t see,” said Quinones, 39. “It reminded me of being on patrol in Vietnam.”

Camp Elder Laments Changes

Quinones, who dressed for the part by buying clothes from a thrift store in San Ysidro, remembers going into one camp and hearing the camp elder lecturing the younger members and lamenting a change for the worse in the type of migrants coming north.

“He was an older man, a ‘Godfather’ type, and he was just talking about his life,” Quinones said. “He said that he and others just came north to work and make money for their families but that now there is a new ‘mean Mexican’--he kept mentioning Oaxaca--who just comes to fight and steal.”

The undercover deputies followed the migrants on their daily rounds as they stood on street corners pleading for work and walked down rural roads knocking on doors.

“Some of the Anglos were terrific and offered us work and food,” said Paceno, 35. “Some treated us like dogs. One guy tried to hire me to do roofing work for a day and a half for $8 total.”

Lopez, who devised the operation, said he was surprised that many Anglos are so trusting of aliens despite news stories and rumors of burglaries and other problems. At community meetings, he now advises homeowners to be leery of strangers coming to their doors asking for work.

Lopez saw a woman hire some aliens to do yardwork and then tell them she was leaving and would not be back for two hours, making her expensive home vulnerable to burglary.

“People think the aliens are all passive and trustworthy, but we know differently,” Lopez said.

Quinones is even more emphatic. “I tell residents: Never hire an alien, because you do not know what you’re getting,” he said.

The aliens complained of being robbed by bandits and cheated out of their pay by scheming Anglos. They talked of having to threaten their employers with violence to get their money.

An older migrant known only as Albert took pity on the “new arrivals” and offered to buy their pesos for $5, rather than force them to trek to the nearest exchange house in San Ysidro. But, on the final day, a group became hostile and threatened the deputies with hammers and screwdrivers.

“We retreated and called in backup to have them arrested,” Paceno said. “By 10 o’clock the next morning, we ran into them again on the streets. They had already gotten deported to Tijuana and hitched a ride back. They told us they threatened us because they thought we were going to rob them.”

Open Talk of Drug Deals

When Paceno and Quinones went to a bowling alley for a beer, a security guard rudely ordered them out for no apparent reason other than their appearance. Quinones felt the hostile stares of the Anglos.

“They looked at us with disgust,” he said. “You could tell they were thinking, ‘Boy, these guys are being pretty brazen.’ All we were doing is drinking a beer.”

They went to a bar and were shocked at the open talk of drug deals among the Anglo patrons.

“They just thought we were two Mexicans, so they were talking to each other about getting drugs and asking each other, ‘You know where I can score? You know where I can get some crystal?’ ” Quinones said. “We couldn’t bust them, or it would have blown our cover.”

From the trio’s foray into the brush, they were able to pinpoint the major alien encampments in the Poway area. Lopez estimates that more than 500 migrants live in the camps--many of whom are in Poway because they cannot afford the smuggler’s fees for passage to Los Angeles.

The deputies’ knowledge of the location, size and temperament of the encampments was useful when the Sheriff’s Department organized a heavily armed sweep of the camp in a controversial response to the April 24 rape of a 15-year-old girl behind a Poway grocery market.

Five aliens were eventually arrested.

Lopez said he was able to arrest the final suspect because the description provided by the victim--of an unusually large, long-haired Latino--reminded him of an alien he had seen during the undercover operation.

The deputies said they were not surprised that the rape occurred. While on their usual patrol duties, all have answered calls from residents complaining about drunken parties, loud music into the night, aliens urinating and defecating on lawns, and aliens staring or leering at women, as well as petty theft and burglary.

“The more they drink, the more brazen they become,” Lopez said.

To the deputies, the camps represent a dangerous combination of large numbers of unattached males, primitive living conditions and a lack of social control. Add desperation to the mix, as more aliens chase fewer jobs, and things get worse, they said.

“Most of these guys are truly here to work,” Lopez said. “But, if they get hungry enough or drunk enough, that’s when trouble starts.”