The New York Times Magazine 45coyote in Cubulco. He told Tomás that Rober-
to had been caught by the Border Patrol. When
Roberto’s father, Lucas, saw the coyote in the
street around the same time, the coyote told him
the same thing.
Tomás, who speaks some English, called Cus-
toms and Border Protection in the U.S. He was
told that there was no record of a Roberto Prim-
ero Luis in custody, but that there was another
man with the name of Primero. Tomás and Caty
knew it was possible Roberto had been given
phony identifi cation. They decided, hopefully,
that Roberto might be using a pseudonym. They
waited two more weeks.
When no further word came, Tomás called
the coyote and persuaded him to pass on the
phone number of the Mexican coyote who had
taken Roberto to Altar. Whether the number was
genuine, Tomás couldn’t know, but he called.
The man who answered said yes, he had handled
Roberto. But Roberto had not been arrested; he
had been kidnapped. He gave Tomás a phone
number that he said belonged to the kidnappers.
Tomás called it. The man on the other end said
he had Roberto. He was willing to release him
and get him to Nashville, but Roberto needed
medical attention fi rst. The price for everything
would be 28,000 quetzals, or about $3,600. Tomás
was skeptical but agreed. He and Lucas drove to
the border of Guatemala and Mexico and gave
the money to an intermediary.
He never heard from the supposed kidnapper,
nor the supposed coyote who had put them in
touch, again. The coyote in Cubulco disappeared
and turned off his phone.
By now it was July, and Roberto had been
missing for a month. Caty and Lucas made the
four-hour drive to Guatemala City, where they
went to the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs. The offi -
cials there had heard nothing of Roberto and
suggested contacting the Guatemalan Consulate
in Tucson. They did, relaying Roberto’s person-
al information and a physical description. July
turned into August.
Though the route of Roberto’s group had
changed, its endpoint was the same: Twenty
miles north of the border, they would near the
town of Sells, on the Tohono O’odham reserva-
tion. They would emerge in a remote stretch of
State Route 15 and be picked up and driven to the
outskirts of Phoenix. From there, Roberto would
be taken to Nashville.
The Tohono O’odham reservation is one of
the largest in the country; it occupies 62 miles
of the border and is larger than the country of
Lebanon. Yet it has about only 15,000 residents,
making it one of the least- populated places in
the U.S. After riding with Vasa vilbaso and Her-
nandez, I went to the reservation to see Ophelia
Rivas, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation
whose home is a few hundred feet from the
border. The Tohono O’odham’s original lands,
which long predated the border, and for that
matter the countries it separates, extended
well into Sonora. (The tribe’s name translates
as ‘‘people of the desert.’’)
Like most Tohono O’odham, Rivas has family
in the U.S. and Mexico, and it used to be that
they would go back and forth, on horseback or
by wagon, later by truck. This is no longer pos-
sible. A vehicle barrier now extends along the
line. Gone are the Tohono O’odham farms that
used to grow from the alluvial fans here; gone
are the Tohono O’odham cowboys who used to
ride herd north and south. Even as the suburbs
and bedroom communities of southern Arizona
have expanded, the Sonoran Desert has become
a more barren, and dangerous, place.
As Rivas and I looked out to the east onto
a pair of hills on whose ridges she played as a
girl, a Border Patrol truck went up an unpaved
road into the saddle between them. The Trump
administration had tried to persuade the tribe to
allow it to extend pedestrian fencing across the
reservation. The tribe objected, and the admin-
istration agreed to instead install a series of the
new surveillance towers. The truck was headed
to the base of one of these towers, which was still
under construction.
For as long as she could remember, Rivas told
me, migrants had come through her family’s
land. But, she said, ‘‘we didn’t recognize them
as migrants. We just thought of them as people
coming across.’’ They started coming in great-
er numbers in the late 1990s, as ‘‘prevention by
deterrence’’ took eff ect, and it wasn’t long before
the Tohono O’odham felt besieged.
The chairman of the tribal government, Ned
Norris Jr., attributed this to federal policy. ‘‘I
believe that the government knew exactly what
they were doing,’’ he said. ‘‘They were going to
force that migrant activity somewhere, and in my
opinion, they forced it onto the Tohono O’odham
Nation.’’ With more migration, he said, came
more crime. ‘‘Suddenly our folks were being
carjacked. They were being held hostage in their
own homes. They were being threatened.’’ The
Mexican criminal organizations had infi ltrated
the reservation, he said. Members of the tribe
were recruited.
Just as bad, Norris went on, was the toll that
lost and sick migrants had on the tribe’s already
threadbare services. They were treated gratis at
the hospital. The Tohono O’odham are supposed
to be reimbursed by the federal government,
according to Norris, but it is millions of dollars
in arrears. When migrants die on the reservation,
the Tohono O’odham must pay Pima County for
the medical examinations. Half of the police’s
man-hours are given over to migrants.
Rivas and I left her home and descended
a sandy track to the border. Once, when shewas a girl, she told me, a man turned up in the
yard, haggard and worried. He had been trav-
eling north with his wife and daughter, who
had stopped, exhausted. He had continued on
to fi nd help. Rivas’s grandfather hitched up a
wagon and took the man back into the desert
to retrieve them.
Standing on the borderline, we looked onto a
palimpsest. Stretching east to west was the new
vehicle barrier, composed of hulking steel posts,
not as much of an eyesore as the pedestrian fenc-
ing outside Sa sabe but hideous enough. Running
parallel to that was the ‘‘old fence,’’ put here long
ago, a waist-high line of barbed wire rusted into
quaintness. Between new and old was a small
grave site, a circle of sun- bleached stones. This
was where Rivas’s grandfather and the migrant
had buried the man’s wife and daughter, whom
the desert killed.On the morning of Sept. 9, a Sunday, Caty was
at church with her mother when she received a
call from the Guatemalan Consulate in Tucson.
A Guatemalan ID bearing Roberto’s name had
been found on a body retrieved from the desert.
The offi cial told Caty that this didn’t mean the
body was Roberto. The medical examiner was
determining if the fi ngers on the body could
be printed.
Two weeks later, the offi cial called again. The
fi ngers had yielded prints. They had been run
against the Guatemalan government’s fi ngerprint
database. There was a match.
At the airport in Guatemala City, Lucas and
Eufemia were taken to a waiting room where
Roberto’s remains would be off loaded. There
they met three other families. The plane from Los
Angeles containing their children was supposed
to arrive at 6 a.m. but was delayed by fog. While
they waited, Lucas and Eufemia fell into conver-
sation with Augusto and Cecilia Mejia, who were
there to retrieve their son, César. It was the fi rst
time Cecilia had ever been to an airport.
César, too, had died in the desert, she told
Roberto’s parents. She said they didn’t know
why César had gone north. He’d had a good job
at a tile factory, a new wife, a house. Lucas con-
fessed that he felt the same way about Roberto.
He said, ‘‘He was young and had no reason to
go to the U.S.’’
The fl ight was four hours late. When the long,
rectangular cardboard coffi ns containing the
remains were fi nally brought into the waiting
room, Cecilia asked if she could open César’s. She
wanted to make sure it was him. How could she
be sure? She hadn’t seen him in so long. Augusto
told her they would wait until they got to the
funeral home.
Cecilia asked an airport employee who was with
them how often the bodies of migrants arrived.
‘‘Every day,’’ he told her.
At the same funeral home, in Guatemala City,
the coffi n containing Roberto was opened. In itBorder
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