Illustrations by Michelle Garcia Carlito held one end of the rope, Omar the other. The three of us wore orange vests to seem official. Sebastián, our lookout, hid behind some bushes. “¡Here comes one!” I picked up my shovel and dug out some of the dirt we’d dumped in one of the potholes covering the road. Omar held up a gloved hand, signaling for the car to slow down and stop. Things had gotten more difficult for us recently, with the news warning of false checkpoints, where men dressed in military or police uniforms stopped vehicles under the pretense of government-sanctioned searches, forced all the passengers out of the car, and then drove off to have the car scrapped or sold. There was talk of rapes and beatings when the passengers failed to comply, and sometimes those things did happen. But we weren’t like that—we wouldn’t have known what to do with a car if we had managed to steal one. We wanted drivers who were willing to spend money to get dirt off their …