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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Mexicans pour into town devoted to getting them into U.S. Mexicans pour into town devoted to getting them into U.S. BY JAY ROOT 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
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#1. To: Tauzero (#0)
By the numbers: 500,000. The number of illegal aliens in United States prisons.
Would this ahole care if I just walked into his house and started to use his stuff? What if my defense was that I just wanted to stay there till I died and didn't care what he had to say? This is such a gross violation of OUR rights.
"I woke up in the CRAZY HOUSE."
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