Belated Honors for Celebrated Border Unit

Sixteen years ago, they were lauded as heroes in the media, scoffed at by some fellow police officers, and resented by a handful of high-ranking police administrators.

On Friday, eight of them were honored at a Police Department awards ceremony with a plaque and a handshake.

The officers--now San Diego Police Department sergeants and detectives--are former members of the Border Area Robbery Force, an undercover unit of predominantly Latino officers who dressed as migrants and roamed the dark border canyons as human bait--waiting for the robbers and rapists who to this day prey on those headed north in search of a better life.

The controversial unit, chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh’s nonfiction book “Lines and Shadows,” lasted 18 months beginning in 1976 and was disbanded for reasons that some say range from extreme stress on officers and their families to Police Department politics and pressure from the Mexican government.

“It was way past time,” former unit member Sgt. Ernest Salgado said of the award.

While the ceremony was brief and simple, for members of the former border team it represented an end to an experiment that deeply touched each of their lives.

“It is kind of like a closure to the whole episode. It felt good,” said Sgt. Joe Vasquez, who wrote to Police Chief Bob Burgreen early last year, pointing out that they had never been honored.

“I was sitting there one day at an awards and promotion ceremony, and the current border team got its award. And I was just thinking, ‘We never got one. I wonder why?’ ”

Burgreen responded with a letter last August, saying an award was on its way.

“They were never honored and they should have been,” Burgreen said before the ceremony Friday, crediting the unit for launching the effort to protect migrants at the international border, where thousands of men, women and children cross weekly.

Some have come from deep in Mexico’s rural interior and as far as Central America, carrying all their valuables with them and risking it all at the hands of practiced crooks who prowl the border’s rugged terrain.

“It was the most dangerous police job I have ever seen,” Burgreen said. “Very hazardous doesn’t even begin to say it. We have continued to advance our techniques and our cooperation with Mexico to the point where we are now. It all started with them.”

The men volunteered to transform themselves nightly from hunter to hunted, donning the ragged clothes of migrants purchased for them by the department at Goodwill. Their reasons for joining ranged from empathy for migrants, to a craving for excitement and an almost reckless reach for some mobility in a police force that offered little to Latino officers at the time.

The undercover task force made more than a hundred arrests, Burgreen said. Two officers were shot and a third was grazed by a bullet, but none were seriously wounded. Their targets didn’t fare as well. Seven were shot during the group’s 18-month tenure, according to former group Sgt. Manny Lopez.

The group began with nine San Diego police officers, along with two U.S. Customs agents and two U.S. Border Patrol agents on loan from the federal government.

On Friday, some of the men who served on the force made famous by Wambaugh’s chronicle recalled the dangers, the stress, and the closeness among the unit’s officers and families that the 18-month experiment engendered.

For Detective Tony Puente, the most moving moment came when he and two other officers saved a 13-year-old girl from rape.

The officers even broke a few rules to do it, lunging through a hole in the fence into Mexican territory to intercept three rowdy men who already had the girl’s pants down to her knees.

About 20 migrants were huddled under a bridge near the border, just watching, Puente said.

“These people cowed back. They were scared. The girl was yelling for her mother to help her. The chief had told us never to go into Mexico but we jumped through the fence and ran over there,” he said. “I chased one of them a quarter of a mile into Mexico before I realized what I was doing.

“The mother got down on her hands and knees and started kissing our hands. It was really moving,” he said.

Empathy for the illegal immigrants came naturally to most of the unit’s men, Puente said.

“Most of us are only grandparents away from Mexico,” said Puente, whose mother’s parents are from the state of Zacatecas.

But what really motivated Puente and many of the other men was the desire to move up in a department that Puente said offered no choice assignments to Latinos.

“At that time there was very little movement for Hispanic police officers,” said Puente, who had worked as a patrol officer for seven years when he volunteered for the undercover team. “I thought if Hispanic officers could do an outstanding job, things would change.”

Puente, who was the most senior officer in the unit, encouraged other Latino officers to volunteer.

“We were thought of at the time as just a bunch of crazy Mexicans doing something nobody else would do. They didn’t care that people out there were being raped and killed,” Puente said. But as reports of the shootouts and intercepted assaults reached other officers and county residents, opinions began to change, he said.

The tough job also paid off for the unit’s members. When the team was disbanded, most received promotions, Puente said.

The undercover team grew out of a long battle fought by one man.

Wambaugh’s tale opens with a lumbering U.S. Border Patrol agent, living on the top floor of a sleazy, mildewed San Ysidro hotel, drinking away memories of his own personal family tragedy while he began to focus on another--the migrants’ nightly plight.

That man was Dick Snider, who as a San Diego Police Department lieutenant years later single-handedly created the Border Area Robbery Force, holding his own press conferences to publicize statistics of victimized migrants.

In an interview Friday from his home in the Missouri Ozarks where he has retired, Snider spoke fondly of the men who took up his cause.

“That was the best group of men I have ever known in law enforcement. Most claimed they had personal, selfish reasons for doing what they did. But I don’t think that is true,” said Snider, who still keeps in touch with the men who carried out his plan.

But a slight irony and a hint of bitterness lurk in Snider’s voice when he is asked to talk about his team’s demise.

For some, the unit clearly fell victim to politics.

Sgt. Manny Lopez, now a private detective, headed the unit.

“I was at meetings every week, justifying the existence of the task force,” Lopez said. There were several factors leading to the disbanding, he said. The danger to the men was one. Then there was political pressure from Mexico, embarrassed at the number of Tijuana and federal police who were caught robbing migrants by the border task force. And then there was the internal politics at the department.

“We generated a tremendous amount of publicity. Some administrators became very jealous of it. They were constantly trying to do away with (the unit),” Lopez said.

Family stress, however, was clearly a strong contributing factor.

The wives of some of the group’s members recalled the stress that kept them on edge for 18 months but also created personal ties among the families that have lasted 16 years.

“There were long hours. Long nights. Phone calls in the middle of the night that we didn’t appreciate telling us they weren’t coming home,” recalled Susan Salgado, the wife of Sgt. Ernest Salgado, who was honored Friday. “They went into it blindly,” she said, not knowing that the tactics would evolve and become more dangerous. At first the idea was for the men to hang back in the canyons and surprise criminals, not serve as potential victims.

Most of all, the wives recalled the televised “news flashes.”

“They would just flash on: ‘Unit member shot at the border. News at 11.’ And we would have to sit there and wait, not knowing who had been shot or how bad. It was pretty scary,” Salgado said. “At the same time, it brought a lot of closeness among us. All of us had babies at that time.”

The experiment’s end in 1976 was welcomed by Dene Puente, wife of Detective Tony Puente.

“I was very glad. I thought it was incredibly dangerous,” said Puente, who lobbied to get the men bulletproof vests and the night vision devices she said they were promised when they volunteered to do the job--and never received.

“I think it has taken far too long to honor them. They were just out there in the dark, by themselves,” she said.

The police chief at the time, William Kolender, was clearly concerned about the effect on the men and their families, Tony Puente said.

“He would come to our homes on weekends. He would look at us. He would have a beer with us. And he would say, ‘This job is too dangerous. There are too many people getting hurt. I don’t want to bury one of you guys,’ ” Puente recalled.

Today, there is a new team of officers patrolling the border, but some things are clearly different.

What Wambaugh called “the invisible line between two economies” is now a 10-foot high, steel-mat fence. And police tactics on both sides of the border have changed since the men led by Lopez roamed the blackened border canyons dressed as migrants in the 1970s.

Also honored Friday was Lt. David Bejarno, credited with refining the Police Department’s current incarnation of border crime busters--the Border Crimes Intervention Unit. Established in mid-1989, the unit was the successor to a joint Police Department and U.S. Border Patrol unit that died under pressure.

That city-federal team, which operated from 1984 through January, 1989, shot 44 suspects, killing 18. It was disbanded after allegations that lawmen wrongly killed Mexicans.

The current team is faring better. They cooperate with a similar team called Grupo Beta, set up on the Tijuana side to combat crimes against migrants as well as official police corruption.

Despite the changes, the violence still thrives along San Diego County’s border strip.

“Politically, it didn’t influence a damm thing. It didn’t solve any problems. Because even here in the hinterland we get the news from time to time,” Dick Snider said.

While most agree the violence has not subsided, in Manny Lopez’s opinion, the undercover team reduced chances of deadly shootouts.

“We were dressed as undocumented aliens, so we had the element of surprise. We could position ourselves much better. We were involved in seven shooting incidents, much less than if we had been in uniform,” he said.