Station of Dreams : Tijuana Bus Terminal a Haven for Immigrant Smuggler Rings

The buses approach on the hillside roads of a barren urban plateau, a ponderous steel herd rumbling into the Tijuana bus station.

Fuselages rippling through fumes and dust, the buses disgorge human cargo at the one-story terminal that dominates a landscape of limbo in semi-industrial east Tijuana. The bus station is known popularly as the Central Camionera : oasis, danger zone, unofficial hotel, hustler’s gold mine, microcosmic society.

The station receives 175 buses and 5,000 people a day--70% of them bound for the United States. Babies have been born here. People with AIDS have come here to die. Children of the street sleep here, sometimes paying their way to other stations by washing bus windows and doing errands.

It is the gateway of a singular frontier, with all of that frontier’s energy, decadence and hope.

On the map, the California-Mexico border is 2 miles away. In reality, the border begins a few hundred feet from the bus dock, just beyond the street entrance of the cavernous lobby. It begins on the sidewalk that belongs to the young men known as talones.

Talon means both talon and ticket. The talones are recruiters for organized criminal rings that smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States. They are brash, athletic, piratical. They have cultivated loitering into an art form, a matador’s dance. As migrants from deepest, poorest Mexico emerge blinking into the pale sunlight of their future, the talones circle past the half-hearted parries of security guards and swoop, murmuring a gruff incantation over and over again:

“ Los Angeles. “

Alfonso, a curly-haired 23-year-old, leans against a wall in a practiced crouch. He claims to be a full-fledged, free-lance smuggler who takes people north himself, not just a recruiter.

“It’s all hustlers around here,” he grins. “Figure it this way. If I work in a factory five days, I make $125 a week. If I take one person across the border, I get $300.”

The 33-year-old manager of the station is Alfonso Arellano. He works for a private company that runs the station for the federal government and sees himself as a social worker as well as a transportation administrator.

“These are poor people who arrive here with very little money,” Arellano said. “You have some truly pathetic scenes here; mothers who go downtown and end up leaving their children behind for a week. . . . It becomes a hotel without being a hotel. We have to permit migrants to sleep here. We cannot throw them into the street. These are our countrymen. We have to fulfill functions of social assistance.”

The station is such a lucrative hub for migrant smuggling that it has become a law enforcement no-man’s-land, according to Arellano and Mexican police officials.

More than half of the reported crime against migrants in Tijuana occurs in the area of the station--robberies, extortion, kidnapings. Smugglers pay talones a commission for clients--between $20 and $50 each--so the latter become both an investment and potential hostages. In some cases when migrants are unable to pay, smugglers beat them and shave their heads and eyebrows.

Although the station is technically federal territory, municipal, state and federal police officers have all routinely accepted payoffs from smugglers and abused migrants, according to a Mexican government official who asked not to be named.

“Perhaps in all of Mexico, it is the most important point for the movement of undocumented migrants,” the official said. “It has been like a cave, a hotbed of corruption. The heads of the smuggling rings had arrangements with authorities; they pay high monthly sums to ensure security for their workers. Any police action there is very delicate because of the interests that are involved.”

The municipal police force abruptly withdrew its officers in mid-April in response to mounting complaints of corruption, Arellano said. Officers now respond when called by the private security force.

Days later, as part of a Mexican government crackdown on corruption and mafias involved in illegal immigration to the United States, special federal police conducted a well-publicized raid at the station. They arrested 25 purported ringleaders. Some were apprehended at Tijuana “safe houses” where migrants had been taken in taxis to stage for the trip across the border.

The raid is described as a first step in a gradual campaign to clean up problems associated with smuggling. But dozens of talones are once again operating in front of the terminal. The private security guards occasionally admonish them but essentially tolerate them as long as they are not overly aggressive.

“As long as migrants keep arriving in Tijuana, we won’t be able to stop it,” said Arellano, who has been the target of threats because of the crackdown. “What we can do is try to control it. We have to impose some kind of order.”

The station has myriad faces, not all of them desperate. There are eight bus companies and various comfort levels to choose from.

With the opening of the Mexican economy to foreign and private sector interests, a new top-line service will begin this summer featuring ultra-modern buses, Arellano said. It will cost 40% more than the current first-class service, which charges about $100 to Mexico City, he said.

Last week, Marta Bermudez Barrios, 32, was among the travelers who sat crowded into rickety plastic seats of a waiting area. She held a first-class ticket to Mexicali. She cradled her sleeping baby son, her legs crossed in designer jeans and leather boots by a sleek suitcase. They were on their way to visit her husband, an engineer whose work requires him to spend time in the Baja state capital.

“It’s always crowded here,” Bermudez said. “I think it’s safe. But you do see a lot of people who are very humble. There is much desperation.”

Bermudez indicated a bedraggled family who had established itself in front of the luggage check-in. There were 14 people waiting in a kind of communal daze; two men, three women, nine children--unkempt boys and girls, most of them barefoot, the smaller ones literally half-naked. The children climbed and wrestled among an expanse of containers that served as luggage; burlap sacks, plastic bags, pails.

One man, with the weary eyes and sun-battered skin of an outdoor laborer, looked apologetic as he hoisted his possessions--which included shovels and brooms tied together by twine--over a counter to a luggage handler.

As the family moved toward the passenger gate, the man gave his name as Ramon Lopez. He described himself as a construction worker. He said his family was returning to rural Michoacan after three years in Tijuana.

“Tijuana has become very expensive,” he said. “It is difficult here. We might come back, we probably will come back. . . . But now we go home.”

Traffic increases about 5% each year, Arellano said, reflecting Tijuana’s surging population. The border city’s expanding low-wage industrial economy has made jobs plentiful, though many serve as a “trampoline” for those hoping to cross the border eventually.

“The average age is between 27 and 29 years old,” Arellano said, referring to a study of arriving passengers. “They are productive people. They want to work. And, unfortunately, 70% of them leave us and go north. The other 30% settle here in Tijuana or work in agriculture” in other parts of Baja California.

The four most frequent origination points for passengers are regions with traditionally heavy migration, Arellano said. They are Guanajato, Michoacan, Guadalajara and Sinaloa.

Maria de los Angeles Delgado watches people carting their dreams through the terminal entrance every day--dreams unborn, dreams destroyed.

The breathless, devout 25-year-old social worker runs a booth in the lobby for Casa del Migrante, a shelter run by the Scalabrini Fathers, an order of Italian priests who serve migrants around the world.

Delgado’s cards depict a map to the shelter and the “traveler’s prayer.” The prayer reads in part: “You, Lord, are always with the poor and you became a traveling companion for we the undocumented, refugees, migrants, or simply those on the path toward You.”

Or the deported. They come to Delgado without money, family or friends. She sends them to the shelter to be assessed, counseled and aided in finding work. When they save enough money, they go home, or try their luck at the border again.

Delgado tries to warn migrants of the dangers.

“There was a woman with six children who came to me,” Delgado said. “She was pregnant, and she wanted to give birth on the other side. But she didn’t have money to pay a coyote, so she wanted to do it on her own. I said, ‘Aren’t you scared, aren’t you afraid they’ll attack you or steal your children?’ She got mad. She said: ‘My children are very sharp, they can take care of themselves. I want to have this baby on the other side, and that’s what I’m going to do.’ ”

The terminal becomes an arena for the extremes of life and death; from expectant mothers to a 28 year-old man with AIDS who died there in December.

According to AIDS activists, the man contracted the disease in Los Angeles. Penniless, physically and psychologically debilitated, he went to southern Mexico in search of relatives but did not find them.

He returned to Tijuana and was denied treatment in a local hospital. He spent his final, agonized days lying on a bench in the waiting area.

On the rocky terrain directly behind the station, a shelter provides food and meals to the poor each day. Casa Beato Juan Diego is run by the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa. The nuns serve all comers, including drunks, drug addicts and some of the beggars who prowl outside the terminal along with raucous taxi drivers and talones.

Delgado watches the sidewalk jungle from her stool behind the glass.

“They scare me,” she said. “They fight among themselves. Sometimes they have killed.”

Outside, Alfonso the smuggler leaned by the wall and bided his time.

Four of his less artful colleagues were badgering three nervous young men from Oaxaca, who squatted defensively with their backpacks against the wall, Indian features beneath baseball caps, studiously ignoring the sales patter.

An exasperated security guard finally drew his baton. He herded the talones away, one floppy-haired man in a leather jacket insistently pointing skyward with two fingers and hissing: “Hey, Los Angeles! Hey, Los Angeles!”

Alfonso acknowledged that his world can be tough. You have to worry about the Border Patrol on one side and the Mexican police on the other, he said.

But he dismissed the recent federal raid as a public relations stunt.

“They said they are going to put those guys they arrested in jail for 10 years,” he said. “Don’t believe it. It can all be fixed with money. Everything gets fixed with money.”

Alfonso also said that smugglers should not be painted with the same brush. He said he empathizes with migrants.

“I know what it’s like,” he said. “I lived in Santa Ana for a while, I worked as a gardener. Then the boss lost his business. That’s why I came back. . . . I’m not out here to steal. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

Then Alfonso excused himself to go back to work.

He slid easily along the wall toward the three youths from Oaxaca. He rubbed his chin, a man with time on his hands. He smiled. He said: “Waiting for relatives?”