[News] NYT--season of death

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Toll Increases for Mexicans Crossing Border
By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: May 23, 2004

OVERED WELLS, Ariz., May 20 - At the bottleneck of human smuggling here in 
the Sonoran Desert, illegal immigrants are dying in record numbers as they 
try to cross from Mexico into the United States in the wake of a new Bush 
administration amnesty proposal that is being perceived by some migrants as 
a magnet to cross.


"The season of death," as Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner in charge of 
the Border Patrol, calls the hot months, has only just begun, and already 
61 people have died in the Arizona border region since last Oct. 1, 
according to the Mexican Interior Ministry - triple the pace of the 
previous year.

The Border Patrol, which counts only bodies that it processes, says 43 
people have died near the Arizona border since the start of its fiscal year 
on Oct. 1, more than in any other year in the same period.

Leon Stroud, a Border Patrol agent who is part of a squad that has the dual 
job of arresting illegal immigrants and trying to save their lives, said he 
had seen 34 bodies in the last year. In Border Patrol parlance, a dead car 
and a dead migrant are the same thing - a "10-7" - but Mr. Stroud said he 
had never gotten used to the loss of life.

"The hardest thing was, I sat with this 15-year-old kid next to the body of 
his dad," said Mr. Stroud, a Texan who speaks fluent Spanish. "His dad had 
been a cook. He was too fat to be trying to cross this border. We built a 
fire and I tried to console him. It was tough."

If the pace keeps up, even with new initiatives to limit border crossings 
by using unmanned drones and Blackhawk helicopters in the air and beefed-up 
patrols on the ground, this will be the deadliest year ever to cross the 
nation's busiest smuggling corridor. The 154 deaths in the Border Patrol's 
Tucson and Yuma sectors last year set a record.

"This is unprecedented," said the Rev. John Fife, a Presbyterian minister 
in Tucson who is active in border humanitarian efforts. "Ten years ago 
there were almost no deaths on the southern Arizona border. What they've 
done is created this gantlet of death. It's Darwinian - only the strongest 
survive."

For years, deaths of people trying to cross the border usually occurred at 
night on highways near urban areas, killed by cars. But now, because urban 
entries in places like San Diego and El Paso have been nearly sealed by 
fences, technology and agents, illegal immigrants have been forced to try 
to cross here in southern Arizona, one of the most inhospitable places on 
earth.

They die from the sun, baking on the prickled floor of the Sonoran Desert, 
where ground temperatures reach 130 degrees before the first day of summer. 
They die freezing, higher up in the cold rocks of the Baboquivari Mountains 
on moonless nights. They die from bandits who prey on them, in cars that 
break down on them, and from hearts that give out on them at a young age.

The mountainous Sonoran Desert, between Yuma in the west and Nogales in the 
east, is the top smuggling entry point along the entire 1,951-mile line 
with Mexico, the Border Patrol says. Through the middle of May, 
apprehensions of crossers in the desert south of Tucson had jumped 60 
percent over the previous year. Nearly 300,000 people were caught trying to 
enter the United States through the desert border since last Oct. 1.

After a four-year drop, apprehensions - which the Border Patrol uses to 
measure human smuggling - are up 30 percent over last year along the entire 
southern border, with 660,390 people detained from Oct. 1 through the end 
of April, federal officials said.

The crossing here, over a simple barbed-wire fence, is followed by a walk 
of two or three days, up to 50 miles on ancient trails through a desert 
wilderness, to reach the nearest road, on the Tohono O'odham Nation Indian 
Reservation, a wedge of desert the size of Connecticut that is overrun with 
illegal immigrants, or on adjacent federal park or wildlife land. Most 
people start off with no more than two gallons of water, weighing almost 17 
pounds, in plastic jugs. In recent days, with daytime temperatures over 100 
degrees in the desert, a person needed a gallon of water just to survive 
walking five miles.

The desert is littered with garbage - empty plastic jugs, discarded 
clothes, toilet paper.


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