Ensenada, Baja California.– The fugitive could have been anywhere, so Ivan lowered his voice.
“We know he’s probably armed,” he told members of his team.
They had stopped in a parking lot near the cruise ship terminal, a semicircle of undercover Mexican police officers, guns hidden in the waistbands of their jeans.
If anyone asked, they were just friends on their way to the beach on a cloudless morning. But behind his sunglasses, his eyes darted between possible suspects. They were looking, as usual, for an American.
“Another guy who thinks he can create a new life in Mexico,” Ivan said.
The information had come from the United States Marshals Service in the case of Damion Salinas, a 21-year-old man accused of killing a person after an accident in Fresno, California.
But intelligence was weak. Salinas appeared to have crossed the border into Mexico. He could be working as a barber in Ensenada. Or he could be in Tijuana. Or at any of the expat hideouts along the rocky shoreline. The authorities had lost track of him more than a year earlier.
The policemen knew this feeling well. Their cases almost always began the same way, with the feeling that the gringos could be anywhere.
There are plenty of them: Americans on the run from US law enforcement who have sneaked into northern Mexico. They include fugitives on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, serial killers, billionaires accused of securities fraud.
Here in Baja California, there is a small state police unit—10 men and two women—assigned to catch them. Officially, they are the International Liaison Unit. But they are known by another name: the Gringo Hunters.
Pursuing American fugitives in Mexico might seem like the punch line of an unwritten joke, an inverted xenophobic stereotype: Donald Trump’s “bad men” in reverse.
This is, after all, the Baja California peninsula, a dagger of land jutting into the Pacific, with deserted beaches and sprawling cities that encourage anonymity. Among your most popular tourism campaigns? “Escape to Baja.”
The unit now traps an average of 13 Americans a month. Since it was formed in 2002, it has arrested more than 1,600. Many of those suspects were inspired by one of America’s oldest clichés: the troubled outlaw who wanders into sepia-toned Mexico hoping to disappear. forever.
“I’m going to Mexico,” says Susan Sarandon in “Thelma & Louise” after her character kills a man.
“Way down to Mexico way,” Jimi Hendrix sang. “No executioner is going to – is not going to put a rope around me.”
Iván knows the stereotypes, all the ways life imitates art in Baja, because every other day he apprehends versions of the same misguided fugitive.
“We find them everywhere,” he said. “And almost always, they have no idea that we are looking for them. They think: ‘We are in Mexico. We are free at home’. ”
Here is an incomplete list of where Mexican officials have found American fugitives:
In spas. Hanging from parachutes. In remote mountain cabins. On fishing boats. At a nightclub called Papas & Beer. In drug rehabilitation centers. In trailer parks. Attending bars. In cars with prostitutes. At Carl’s Jr. parking lots.
Some were on crystal meth. Some had had plastic surgery and acquired new names that they couldn’t pronounce. Some were found dead.
There were former Playboy models, Catholic priests, professional athletes, C-list celebrities, former Marines.
So when the Damion Salinas case crossed the Gringo Hunters desk, it seemed pretty straightforward. Then again, there were only other cases.
It was the end of March. The unit had been busier than at any time in its history. As crisis-ridden politicians in Washington argued over whether there was a border, the Gringo Hunters felt crime was spreading in the opposite direction.
“Honestly, I think it’s all the drugs in there,” said Moises, the liaison unit commander. Like other members of the unit, he spoke on the condition that his last name not be revealed so he could continue working undercover.
In its office, the unit maintains a whiteboard with the month’s apprehensions tallied by name, date and title. In the first three weeks of March there were eight charges for drug trafficking, two for homicide and one for pederasty.
The Salinas case was another that seemed to reflect something rotten on the other side of the border. On August 16, 2020, Salinas reportedly arrived at the scene of a traffic accident involving his girlfriend. Several people argued over who was responsible for the accident. Within minutes, authorities say, Salinas pulled out a handgun and shot 36-year-old Joshua Thao at point-blank range.
“He never saw it coming because he shook the killer’s hand thinking everything was fine,” the victim’s sister told a local television news reporter.