World: The Desperate Ones

"You get hundreds of peons arriving here every day, dreaming of getting rich on the other side. They get as far as the fence. You see them looking through like street urchins staring through the gate at some fancy party at a rich kid's house."

—Ernesto Barberi, manager of the Baja Inn,

Tijuana It was just before midnight when the helicopter spotted a group of people scrambling over the hills just east of Chula Vista, Calif. The big bird, working its spotlight, moved back and forth over an area lined with ragged footpaths as U.S. Border Patrol wagons sped to pick up the Mexicans who had just entered the U.S. illegally. On the edge of the canyon, Tilmon Gregg, 44, the Patrol's shift supervisor, spotted a man rising out of the scrub brush, hands over his head. Gregg searched him swiftly and took him into custody. Near by, Gregg's team found two more men, a woman and four young children, one a five-month-old baby, huddled together. Because of the children, the group was taken to the border gate and released immediately rather than held overnight for processing.

That scene could have taken place any night of the year along a strip of the U.S.-Mexican border near Tijuana that stretches 16 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Although illegal aliens enter the U.S. almost everywhere along the 2,000-mile border—some still swim the Rio Grande, from which the term "wetbacks" originates—the Tijuana area is a major trouble spot. Authorities estimate that 3,000 illegal entries take place every night along the strip; only about one-third of the people who attempt the crossing are caught. The problem is getting dramatically worse. In 1968, for example, 26,206 Mexicans were arrested for illegal entry near Tijuana; by last year the number had risen to 321,938. "On a normal night," says Gregg, "that hillside is crawling with people."

To stem this tide, the Border Patrol unit at Chula Vista has only 40 men working in the area north of Tijuana. They respond to radio calls, when electronic sensors planted in culverts or along canyon paths are activated, or wait for the chopper to announce that it has spotted a group of "wets," or "undocumented workers," as official jargon calls them. Most of the Mexican aliens are poor, frightened and docile people whose only crime is seeking to find work and a better life in the U.S. But occasionally there are smugglers and other criminals among them. The refugees are frequently targets of bandits on both sides of the border who rape, rob and sometimes kill their victims. Two areas on the American side, Spring Canyon and the aptly named Dead Man's Valley, where the worst bandits lurk, are so dangerous that even the Border Patrol rarely ventures into them. "We used to send teams down there," says Gregg. "They'd hear shots and women screaming every night."