TIJUANA, Mexico (CN) — On a January night in Tijuana's Zona Norte, the Enfermeros Tácticos del Bordo, or the Tactical EMTs of El Bordo, organized their supplies for the shift ahead: clean syringes, penicillin and antibiotic injections, bandages, gauze, medical scissors and over-the-counter painkillers.
The group gets its name, El Bordo, from the system of sewage runoff canals that flow through the city. It is a place where many struggling addicts have set up shop, living inside dry tunnels amid ghostly graffiti-covered walls.
Zona Norte, a red light district predicated on American vice, and its surrounding El Bordo canals, are a 15-minute walk from San Ysidro, the busiest border crossing between Mexico and the United States.
"The homeland begins here," reads the Federal Highway 1 sign into Mexico.
Marck Rivera, the leader of the Enfermeros Tácticos, works as a waiter and clears out properties as his day job. Up to four times a week, his team of volunteers does night patrols of drug hot spots where users live on the street. On this night, his team consists of seven young people.
They practice widely-accepted harm-reduction tactics, such as distribution of clean syringes to help prevent the spread of HIV amongst intravenous drug users, administration of penicillin and antibiotics to people who may be suffering from bacterial infections and treatment of other physical ailments and wounds.
In front of a chain-link fence surrounding the parking lot of an American big-box store, dozens of people were on the sidewalk in makeshift tents and cardboard boxes.
Some were eating soup distributed from a family out of their van; some were shooting up fentanyl, a drug that has uniquely affected the border region in Mexico. Two young men prepared their needles with fentanyl and plunged themselves into oblivion. They lay down on their backs, their feet towards the moonlit sky.
One of the young men, Luis Felipe from Baja California, has been in and out of drug rehabilitation centers for years.
"But then I kept falling, and here I am," he confessed, his face silhouetted by a street lamp.
Suddenly, the team surrounded a man writhing in pain, calling out to them. One volunteer pointed a flashlight at the man's back, exposing a swollen infection.
"These kinds of wounds here in Mexico are called 'welts,' but medically they're called abscesses. This gives him a fever and prevents him from getting up, from working to earn money. He's been lying here for about three or four days now. He could get sick with something, and if the ambulance comes, they won't take him," observed Rivera, gesturing to the man.
Rivera explained why he performs these trips at night and not during the day.
"During the day, my brother here may be doing well; he could be out and about, but then it's harder to find him," Rivera said, taking out his medical scissors to snip open the pus-filled abscess, while one of his team members held the man's hand.
"This white stuff is the bacterial colony, that's what I have to remove. It's a worm-like white pus. If I don't remove it, the pus will grow back again. It's a pus factory, all of it," explained Rivera, in between singing a children's song.
Though Rivera's goal for patients is long-term rehabilitation, he expressed regret over the most extreme cases — those who may not be able to find help in the long run.
"Often, patients like this one, in a few months, might be classified as patients for dignified death protocols, which means they begin to suffer in the street due to an illness that may be too far gone. They're no longer being taken by the ambulance, the hospital won't admit them, because they're considered a lost cause, and they have to prioritize other emergencies. So, the only thing left for me to do is take them to an anexo, or a shelter, so they can try to detox or, if not, die a dignified death," said Rivera. "Everyone deserves to die under a roof, just like everyone else."
