Banditios

It was a hot, dark night in the city of Nuevo Laredo, in northern Sonora Mexico, sometime in 1994. We had just left a good restaurant at about 11:30 PM, and were stuffed to the gills with carne asada, tacos, and Dos Equis. A very suspicious-looking man with a walkie-talkie eyed us as we left the parking lot headed for the border a few miles away. He started chatting to someone on the device.

Why did he have a walkie-talkie? Who was he talking to all of a sudden? Was it about us?

We drove down an empty boulevard, four of us. I sat in the back seat, driver's side. A different "guy named Dave" drove the car. Howard sat in the back with me and Bill was in the front passenger seat, half unconscious from the cervesa in his veins.

We were quiet. We had just worked a 12-hour day at the plant and had a three-hour dinner (which is almost considered fast-food in Mexico), so we were very tired.

I was the first to see the police car behind us. It was an old K-car, with two different-colored front fenders and a crooked set of lights on the roof. It fell in line behind us and just drove.

I asked the "other Dave" calmly if he knew how fast he was going. He said he was going 25 MPH. Nobody in the car had any idea what the speed limit was here, but since it was a boulevard, we couldn't possible be speeding, could we?

I did a quick check of the trajectory that Dave was driving. Pretty straight. He wasn't weaving or driving crazy in any way.

We were understandably a little nervous though, because generally speaking, you don't want to get into trouble with the police in Mexico, especially not in a border town. They roll with a very loose legal code, laced with quite a few gray areas. And typically a large part of their salaries come from money they get from giving Americans "tickets" in the field. Every now and then the Mexican Federales, or Federal Police, come in and shut down the police departments of border towns, disarming the entire force if they think they are colluding with the drug gangs.

And we were driving a brand-new Crown Vic with Texas plates.

So we glanced casually backwards occasionally as we drove towards the border crossing at 25 MPH. We were about a mile away.

The police car's lights came on.

I think I heard Howard break the tension first with a hearty "SON OF A BITCH!"

Ok, so try to picture what came next. You are on a very dark street, no lights. No people. Late at night. In a border town rife with drug gangs and corrupt police. To this day I don't even know if these really were police officers.

We pulled over. Two men popped out of the police car and walked toward us, sawed-off shotguns prominently displayed. They were wearing blue police shirts, and jeans. As they approached the car we could smell the distinct aroma of tequila, laced with a little pot smoke.

One of the men opened the driver's door and dragged poor Dave from the car without a word. I was waiting for the sounds of a beating to commence. Instead he dragged Dave across the pavement to the police car and shoved him in the back seat. Meanwhile, we sat and stared at each other wondering what was about to befall us. My stomach went all roller-coaster on me, but I retained my calm.

The other "officer" got into our car, which was still running, and closed the door and drove off with us inside to some unknown destination.

Howard feebly said something like "Officer, if we have broken the law, can we just pay the fine..." to the driver in broken Spanish but he was completely ignored.

This guy drove on for what seemed like an eternity, down gradually narrower and bumpier side streets, across sections of the city in which I would rather not be located even in broad daylight. The police car carrying the other Dave followed us. I thought about him, on his own in the squad car back there...he must need new underwear by now.

Eventually we came to a stop on a very secluded and dirty side street. I remember looking up and seeing walls topped with broken glass and overgrown with gnarly trees, made fearsome and surreal by the glow of the police car lights, which were the only source of illumination anywhere nearby.

We were told in "Spanglish" to get out of the car. We complied of course, because, what the hell else could we do?

They told us the driver, Dave, was drunk and speeding. When Dave protested that he was only going 25 MPH, we were told that the speed limit on that big boulevard was 25 kilometers per hour, not miles per hour. He said Dave needed to go to jail, and would be tested for alcohol.

Now, if you know anything about Mexican jails, you will have just shuddered a big fat shuddery shudder. An adventurous acquaintance of ours had recently gotten in a bar fight in the same city and was thrown in jail. He had been a little cocky, and resisted arrest. They pummeled him a bit, and tested him for alcohol with a used needle. he was then thrown in a cell with thirty other people, mostly drug gang members who couldn't come up with the proper "look-the-other-way" money for the police. As he crouched in a dark corner late at night, keeping his back to the wall, a guard walked in, strode over to the only other American in the cell, and just beat the hell out of him, for no apparent reason. Then he left. Needless to say, this guy wasn't going to make any more waves.

This story was fresh in our minds as we lived this nightmare.

At this point I had a very interesting thought that has intrigued me to this day. I think something in my brain clicked into survival mode, because I briefly entertained the notion that if we were all to run in separate directions, and someone were to trip Bill, at least some of us would survive. Bill was an incredibly ornery and annoying guy, not very much liked by anyone anyhow. Certainly he would take the fall for us in an honorable fashion. We would even drink to him in years to come, remembering his thoughtless sacrifice.

No, that wouldn't be nice to do, even to ornery Bill. Besides, that kind of thing only works in movies.

The next half hour or so is a little sketchy in my memory. I remember, not thinking, but knowing I was about to die. These men did not seem like your average everyday banditos. They seemed to have something against us, and the way they waived the shotguns in our faces with drunk twitching fingers on the trigger, shouting obscenities at us in Spanish, I couldn't really see how this could end well.

Well, whatever else they were, they were certainly banditos. They searched us, took everything of value we had, then went through our car and took computers and leather jackets and electronic planners and every last cent and peso we had.

Then for a while they seemed to be in disagreement as to what to do with us. They argued for a short time. Personally, I was rooting for the "Let's let them go" option, as opposed to "Let's shoot them in the head and leave them here".

You can guess the end of course, because I am writing this and not decomposing in a Mexican sewer. They let us go after a few terrifying more minutes of scaring the bejeezus out of us for fun.

We drove to the border quietly. We really didn't want to say much until we made it back to our hotel in Laredo. We knew that when the adrenalin wore off we would all count this night as one of the scariest of our lives, no matter what else happened to us henceforth.

We didn't even have the money to pay the border crossing fee. After explaining what had happened to us though, they graciously let us pass, for free.

After all of that trauma, the really crazy thing was we had to cross the border again the very next day for more work at the plant in Mexico.

We left early and ate in Texas.