Posted on 05/16/2006 8:34:49 PM PDT by 11th_VA
BY JAY ROOT Knight Ridder Newspapers ALTAR, Mexico - Some towns thrive on manufacturing. Others are known for their fertile soil or tourist attractions.
In Altar there is only one industry of any visibility and consequence: immigrant smuggling.
A 60-mile drive along the back roads to the United States, this dusty town is the last stop on the line, a place to buy water, food and the accoutrement of choice for illegal desert crossers - a backpack.
"Altar is just like a big Wal-Mart for smugglers," said Sean King, spokesman for the Tucson, Ariz., sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, which apprehends many of those who head north from Altar. "They've got booths set up for backpacks that are pre-packed with toilet paper ... shoes that are better to walk in than some of the huaraches they might be wearing - everything you need to come across the border."
There are no holidays in Altar. No "Day Without an Immigrant." No Cinco de Mayo. On any given day, 1,600 people show up from all over Mexico. In April, the high season, 3,000 rolled in every day, according to officials who run the Catholic shelter here.
They are lured to Altar by "coyotes" who charge them $2,000-$4,000 for a chance to cross the most inhospitable stretch of desert on the U.S.-Mexico border. They cram like sardines into $3-a-night flophouses or, for those who can afford it, hotels that charge $30 to $40 for 12 hours.
Before they head north, immigrants often kneel in prayer before a bank of candles and a statue of Jesus in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Then they silently march, 30 and 40 at a time, into vans rigged to hold maximum human cargo.
Metal benches run down the sides and center. Cages at head level secure their backpacks for a bumpy, $15 journey to the desolate outskirts of Sasabe, Mexico, the preferred point of entry and the busiest zone on the border for U.S. authorities.
The lucky ones soon find themselves tending manicured lawns in New Jersey or framing houses in California or Texas.
Others end up dead or, like Fabian Rivera Ramirez, arrested, fingerprinted, injured and back in Altar. Rivera tried to cross three times in 17 days, walking for eight days until his blistered feet ached and bled.
He admitted he veered from the path of legality but, with a kid in college and a mountain of unpaid medical bills, Rivera, 50, said he tried to cross illegally for the first time in his life.
"We don't have a right to emigrate," the Veracruz native said. "But how different it would be if we had a permit. Then it wouldn't be a violation. It would be an opportunity."
The smuggling trade is tightly controlled and highly organized on both sides of the border. Mountains of marijuana flow through here, too, but that trade naturally occurs in the shadows, even though the Fort Worth Star-Telegram spotted an 18-wheeler offloading heavy burlap sacks recently on an isolated dirt road that large trucks would have little reason to use for legitimate commerce.
On the U.S. side, drug smuggling scouts use solar-powered batteries and radios to keep a watch on law enforcement, and human traffickers maintain safe houses throughout southern Arizona, Border Patrol officials say.
In Altar, no one denies the obvious with a straight face: that the 150 or so "guest houses" and nine hotels, the kiosks brimming with backpacks and shoes, the privately run toll road to the border, and the ubiquitous vans marked "Altar-Sasabe" are part of a vast migrant smuggling network.
"Altar has no other economic activity," said Francisco Garcia Aten, human rights coordinator at the Catholic-run immigrant shelter here. "Altar is the waiting room for migrants. This is the last place for migrants to have access to the maximum number of services they need to cross. It's the last piece of civilization they'll see for three, four, five or six days."
Garcia said the toll road to Sasabe is run by a former city official who also owns one of Altar's hotels. Receipts are given out at the toll booth, and officially the road is public, but the money feeds the smuggling network, Garcia said. "Nobody says anything about it," he said.
There is even an informal trade union of smuggling coyotes, according to Hector, a guest house manager who didn't want his full name published. Problems, he said, tend to get handled the old-fashioned way: "The desert has no ears," he said.
Still, nobody here harbors the otherwise popular notion that immigrants pass into the United States with confidence and ease.
People have been streaming into Altar - the gateway to Arizona - since authorities in Texas and California installed physical barriers and increased patrols in the 1990s.
But there are hurdles of a different kind here, Garcia said. First immigrants have to get past police shake-downs on the Mexican side, then avoid roving bandits who operate out of Mexico but prey on crossers a few hundred yards north of the border. If immigrants get beyond those barriers, thousands of Border Patrol agents, with electronic sensors and helicopter support, await them.
"They surrounded us. We couldn't get around them," said Octaviano Nieto Jimenez, 32, who was detained by the Border Patrol this month, then released back into Mexico. "They're arresting a lot of people." He's planning another attempt in the coming days.
Those who don't get busted risk dehydration and death. While its geographic isolation and lack of border fencing have made southern Arizona the crossing point for half of all illegal immigrants to the United States, the region has also become an immigrant graveyard.
Nearly half of the 473 immigrant deaths in 2005 occurred in the Tucson sector, which runs along 261 miles of international border from New Mexico to the Yuma County, Ariz., line. Summer temperatures can reach 130 degrees in the Sonoran desert, where snakes, scorpions and cactuses thrive but people drop like flies.
"No person can carry the right amount of water or enough water or enough food to make that four- to five-day journey to get out there," said Gus Soto, spokesman for the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which oversees the Sasabe, Ariz., corridor and is the busiest in the nation by far. "They're resorting to actually drinking their own urine sometimes. We're finding people that are in such bad shape that they're actually going into renal failure."
On a recent outing with the Border Patrol, an agent made a routine desert 911 call to the radio dispatcher: "He appears to be dehydrated. He's lying facedown on the ground. He's conscious, but he's been throwing up," the agent reported.
A helicopter ambulance was called to take the immigrant to an Arizona hospital, officials said.
In Altar, the single public hospital does not accept injured or ailing immigrants, a task that falls to a mobile clinic run by the International Red Cross, said Gerardo Cardenas, a paramedic who works there. The unit treats a thousand people a month on average.
In the Red Cross trailer, Cardenas has seen the birth of a baby and tended to countless pairs of bloodied feet. He once treated a man who was lassoed and dragged through town behind a horse - a victim, the paramedic said, of some of Altar's "bad people."
Cardenas listed the most common maladies of immigrants treated in the trailer, most after a failed crossing attempt: "Dehydration. Foot blisters. Animal bites. Insect bites. Bone fractures."
Despite the risks, immigrants from all over Mexico, but in particular southern states such as Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, keep coming.
Sometimes it takes multiple attempts and detentions before people make it through. One man who stayed at the Catholic shelter needed 28 tries.
Hector, the flophouse manager, personifies the sometimes irresistible lure of the United States. A mechanic who spent 26 years in Los Angeles, Hector said he lies awake at night obsessing over the life he lost. He is driven by the uncontrollable desire to rejoin his children and grandchildren, all of them living on the other side of the border.
Despite being deported for life for multiple immigration violations, Hector said he will soon try to cross again.
"I know I do something wrong," he said in fluent, if heavily accented, English. "I don't care if they put me in a state prison or a federal prison 20 times. I try to cross the border one way or the other. I want to die in the United States. I don't care if I'm illegal. I don't care what (President) Bush or the American people say."
---
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION BY THE NUMBERS
1.2 million: Number of illegal immigrants apprehended in the United States last year
439,000: Number of illegal immigrants apprehended in Tucson, Ariz., sector last year
14,000: Official population of Altar, Mexico
3,000: Number of daily migrant arrivals in Altar in April 2006
473: Number of deaths of illegal crossers to the United States in 2005
41: Percentage increase in marijuana seizures in Tucson sector so far this year
$3: Toll on major smuggling road from Altar to Sasabe, Mexico
SOURCES: Tucson sector, U.S. Border Patrol (fiscal year figures), and Centro Communitario de Atencion al Migrante Y Necesitado of Altar
Why doesn't anyone ask why so many want to flee mexico? Climate, resources, work force; should be a first world country but...
No problem, national guard bus service will be up and running shortly.
In their minds, they're not fleeing Mexico, they're taking it back. The US population just doesn't know this yet.
We don't have a right to emigrate," the Veracruz native said. "But how different it would be if we had a permit. Then it wouldn't be a violation. It would be an opportunity."
That's like me saying "It would be so different if they just gave me the lottery money without me having to actually play. Then it wouldn't be chance, it would be opportunity".
What a load of crap that is! Unfortunately for him, the world has rules. I have to deal with them all day, every day. Somehow, I manage.
I dream about winning the lottery, like a lot of people. What would be the response If I walk into the office where they have the Mega Millions (I know, its in a bank) and start asking for money? Will I get thrown out? Arrested?Or will ANSWER start protesting for my rights to the money?
Secure the border first!
Another example of why it is needed now first.
If this is true....
1600 a day ? that's 584k a year...from 1 town ?
if half make it, that's 292k a year...from 1 town.
11 millions illegals (the number being thrown around for years) isn't even close.
We got any of those cold war nukes left?
I will say something that will probably get some flames.
I don't blame immigrants from countries where the monthly wage is a daily wage or some other skewed ratio for them in the US for wanting to come here, legally or not.
There are some here who act like it is immoral of the crossers' part, but if you are in a third world country earning 200$/mo with a couple of kids or what-not, things look different.
The blame for this situation sits 100% with the federal government. This is their legal responsibility, they have absolutely abdicated it over the last several years, and are now acting like they just discovered that there is a border with mexico with lots of illegal crossing.
The point is fedgov WANTED these illegals here, whether for lower labor costs for their constituency (clue- not us), to increase economic activity nationally or housing-related reasons, I don't know. If they didn't this would have been fixed long ago.
Hadn't heard about that before.
Treat their own citizens? How dare we even think they should.
Hypocritical bastards.
How many American citizens that live through poverty, wars, terrorist attacks, corrupt government and stock market crashes have invaded another country's land? Other than the draft dodgers?
I have no sympathy for them. They don't have a Saddam in charge, nor a Castro. They simply don't want to stand up to their government and force change. They are lazy and coming here proves it. Far easier to be a parasite off our welfare system then fix the mess you created in your own land.
At least I can understand refugees from Cuba, with their very life immediately imperiled by a dictator. But those from mexico? No.
"How many American citizens that live through poverty, wars, terrorist attacks, corrupt government and stock market crashes have invaded another country's land? Other than the draft dodgers? "
tell me where the golden work mecca on our border is that would suffice for what the US is to others? there is nowhere to move up from once you are here, and if things are bad here they are not going to be 5x better in canada or wherever you thing americans are going to go to to work. A stock market crash here is nothing compared to the conditions a lot of these folks are leaving behind. Have you ever lived in the third world? Do you realize even the most spectacularly corrupt US administration would just be par for the course or even rather subdued in most third world countries, including mexico?
"Far easier to be a parasite off our welfare system then fix the mess you created in your own land. "
right, you are telling me a peasant in chiapas is somehow 'responsible' for the mess in DF or the country (mexico) as a whole?
fwiw i do think the idea of turning cubans back over to castro if they don't make it is terribly inhumane.
Exactly right.
if my point in the first post wasn't clear, it is as follows:
we are us citizens, we do not control mexico, its government, people, or their end of the border.
the only party accountable to the sheeple is FedGov, Bush, congress, though this is a multi-party issue.
if POTUS bush wanted that border controlled it would have been done so along with so many other changes in late 2001/2002. It clearly could have been fixed or heavily impacted long ago and OUR elected officials willfully ignored it. People here have been screaming (myself included) about the southern border since the 2001 terrorist attacks, it isn't like this is some secret washington just discovered.
Hadn't heard about that before.
That is very common all along the Border. A little over a month ago near here, one of the bandidos shot at Border Patrol, he left the area in a bag.
YES, every citizen of their own country that stands down and does nothing is responsible for the state of their own government. From the richest to the poorest. Novel concept I realize to some...
They are in third world status either because of dictators or because they embrace economic concepts that do not allow their country to grow. Witness what India has managed to do for itself lately.
I have no sympathy, and your excuses do nothing to stir it.
people are responsible for the state of their own lives and own fortunes barring, possibly, fascist dictators and communists. But even they have been overthrown when enough people rise up and risk their lives to do so.
They must've heard W's speech.
i hear your point.
do you think our federal government has ANY responsibility to control our own border?
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