On American soil, Daniel Algarate Martínez, a Border Patrol agent, gripped his rifle, staring at the truck that approached on the other side of the divide. A coyote howled in the distance. The truck, loaded with logs, raced past him, past Mingas, and kept on going.
“I wonder what he has under that wood,” Agent Algarate Martínez mumbled.
The path to the Mingas gate is a circuitous and sorry dirt trail of unpredictable dangers brought by the desert, the remoteness and the illicit drug trade. It is on the eastern edge of the Bootheel in New Mexico’s southwest corner, in Hidalgo County, where the border juts down and Mexico stands briefly to America’s east, one of the most remote spots in the roughly 2,000 miles where the countries meet.
The closest Border Patrol station is about 60 miles away, an eternity in a region where most roads were cut by ranchers’ tractors and cattle hooves. The closest agents are much closer these days, though, stationed for days in outposts deep in the Chihuahuan desert, so close to Mexico that the lights of its farms are the often the only noticeable sign of human life.
The agents sleep in bunk beds, sharing meals in a communal kitchen next to lounges where TV sets are tuned to ESPN. Water comes from wells. Diesel tanks hold fuel for the vehicles. Dormitories, command centers and holding cells occupy modular buildings encircled by floodlights and chain-link fences, a setup modeled after the military’s forward operating bases in Afghanistan.
Ramiro E. Cordero, a special operations supervisor for the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, which is responsible for 268 miles of borderland, including the Bootheel, said the bases were an essential element in the agency’s quasi-military strategy of “gaining, maintaining and expanding.” They provide a presence in isolated areas where building brick-and-mortar stations would have been impractical.
There are two of them in New Mexico, on the eastern and western flanks of the Bootheel. Camp Ramsey, where Agent Algarate Martínez is sometimes stationed, opened in 2009. Camp Garza opened in November — the ripple effect of a rancher’s killing in Arizona, most likely by a drug smuggler.
Though the number of apprehensions of illegal border crossers has continued its steady decline, the number of drug seizures has remained constant all along the American Southwest, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, justifying the Border Patrol’s expansion into such remote areas. Arizona already has five such forward-operating bases, with three more to open this year.
In the El Paso sector, the number of detained illegal immigrants fell to roughly 10,400 last year from 122,000 in 2006. Agent Cordero said that half of them were captured in the Bootheel region, where, unless a migrant got lost while trying to sneak into the United States through Arizona, those who get caught are likely to be carrying bundles of marijuana.
Dispassionately, Agent Algarate Martínez, 37, who is from Zaragoza, Spain, said, “This is dope country.”
There are four to six agents assigned to each shift at Camp Ramsey: morning, swing and midnight. They each stay there for five days and five nights, and they each patrol alone, looking for signs of people where people are not expected to be. It seems like an exercise in futility — agents scanning the rocky, dusty ground for human footprints amid the footprints of cows, bobcats, wild pigs and mountain lions from inside their Ford Raptors, but mostly by foot.
Agent Algarate Martínez drove to Mingas to check on sensors that had been tripped in sequence, following the type of northward pattern typically traveled by smugglers. He found no one and figured it must have been a false alarm, which is not uncommon.
Dinner at Camp Ramsey that night was burgers cooked on the grill by an agent; he dropped a plate of them on the communal table, and then shuffled to his bed to catch some sleep before his shift began at midnight.
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