Sergio “Pan Duro” seemed intent on teaching a lesson. The former human smuggler, whose nickname translates literally as “hard bread,” had led a group of Mexican and US humanitarian-aid volunteers on a dusk patrol to the summit of a thousand-foot desert mountain. To the northeast, the lights of Agua Prieta, Sonora, and its conjoined border twin, Douglas, Arizona, shone across the valley floor. Around the group, the outlines of prickly pear and cholla cacti, thorned mesquite and ocotillo could be only dimly perceived. But they were felt, as they repeatedly snagged clothes and raked exposed skin. The US walkers hung close together, pulling aside branches for one another, clutching arms when stones rolled underfoot, offering a hand after the inevitable hard backside falls. Full darkness had descended by the time they returned to the flat, and they wandered lost for a few tense minutes in dense, head-high brush, before Pan Duro appeared with a flashlight and guided them back to camp.

Pan Duro had led thousands of migrants over such terrain into the United States in a locally legendary career as a smuggler, or “pollero,” that spanned twenty years. Traveling by moonlight through dry washes and along treacherously steep and rocky backcountry trails, he had slipped groups as large as thirty past the vigilant eye of the US Border Patrol. After arrest and forced retirement, he worked as an officer at an Agua Prieta drug rehabilitation center. Several times a year, he and a group of patient draftees set up the camp noted in the previous chapter, directly south of the inaugural Minuteman vigil. They conducted miles-long foot patrols, offering water and shelter to migrants from Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere, many of whom were already exhausted and sun-sick from walking. “When I encounter migrants, I know they’re going to suffer,” he later told the US volunteers, noting how many border crossers become lost in the desert, just as they had. “But they also want the American dream” (author interview, July 2005).