 On May 15, 2001, 26 men from rural Veracruz entered "el Camino diablo," the deadliest stretch of desert in North America, heading for promised jobs in a Florida orange grove. Their guide, Jesus "Mendez" Ramos, predicted the crossing would take three hours. Instead, the men wandered in blistering heat for five days, realizing too late their coyote was not a real guide but a desperate, deluded, gangster-wanna-be. "The Devil s Highway," based on Luis Alberto Urrea s acclaimed book, weaves several true stories from both sides of the border with characters whose fates collide over five, harrowing days. We meet DON MOI, the recruiter for the shadowy system that delivers poor workers to the U.S.; RAY MUNOS, an assimilated, Mexican-American, Border Patrol Agent, torn between two cultures; retiring AGENT ELLIS, a cynical tracker of "illegals" who has an uncanny ability to "read" the desert; ISOBEL URREA, a Mexican Consular official, who discovers the terrible truth of the men lost in the desert and tries to save them before it s too late; GIBRAN LANDA, a Veracruz farmer with a shady past, who becomes the reluctant leader of the lost men; CELIA, a stripper in a border town, whose bleak life is enlivened by her affair with a flamboyant "coyote"; and finally, and most memorably, JESUS MENDEZ RAMOS, the naive guide with the banda haircut, recruited from a brick factory, looking to impress a girl he loves, beginning a fatal walk he s not qualified to make. As the story lines intersect, and the tragedy unfolds, we are forced to consider the shared delusions of people on both sides of a tortured border and embrace the humanity we share with those who pursue their dreams by entering the killing ground known as El Camino Del Diablo.