A Touch of Evil

On Wednesday, March 23, 1994, Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was in La Paz, Baja California, about to fly home to Mexico City when he got the phone call ordering him to go to Tijuana. Tijuana, the Lost City. TJ, as the Border People call it, Tia Juana say the gringos. Sin city, poor city, city of dog races and discos, gray skies and trash, Tijuana crowds against a twelve-foot-high iron wall that runs along the no man's land north of the border up and down canyons, across fields and marshlands, more canyons, more fields, until finally, at the small park that faces Tijuana's Bullring by the Sea, a public toilet, and the La Michoacana ice cream shack, it slopes down a hill of sand and into the water where it slices right through the waves. People jump the wall, people burrow beneath the wall, they bash big holes in it. Every night, hundreds of people bolt through the no man's land, darting from the searchlights of the helicopters, the headlights of the Border Patrols' Ford Broncos, the infrared nightscopes, and the shouting, billy-club-wielding agents. Interstate 5 to San Diego posts warning signs showing not cattle, but running people, a little girl with pigtails flying. Sometimes they make it, some times they don't. Sometimes they get robbed or raped. If they make it into the United States, they will wash dishes, pick lettuce, sew blue jeans, cut grass, lay bricks. Theirs is quite a story, well told in many books. Among the best of them