At the U.S. Border, the Desert Takes a Rising Toll
Let us consider why this situation exists.
We have heard the President and other politicians spew the nonsense about illegal aliens doing the work American's won't do when, in point of fact, it is not that Americans won't do the jobs, it is that Americans and resident aliens would expect decent wages and reasonable working conditions. Americans routinely do jobs that the President and many politicians could never imagine doing. Many of these jobs require hard work, involve lots of sweat and danger. These are the so-called "blue collar" jobs that built our country and keep it running. However, when the President and the other "usual suspects" on Capitol Hill" spew their promises of a Guest Worker Amnesty Program, they provide ample incentives for many more illegal aliens to take the ultimate gamble and run our nation's borders. Similarly, the creation of "Sanctuary Cities" encourages more illegal immigration. You cannot dangle a juicy steak in front of someone who hasn't eaten in days and not expect him to try to get his hands on that food!
My dad, of whom I think often and speak about on occasion, was a construction worker. He was a plumber. He and his colleagues helped to build our country by constructing houses, office buildings, warehouses, airport terminals and aircraft hangers at airports. He and his buddies built the World's Fair in Flushing Meadow Park more than four decades ago. He often came home filthy, sweaty and exhausted. My dad was and remains to this day, my hero! He succumbed to lung cancer when he was just 57 years old. In addition to being a 2 pack of cigarettes-a-day smoker he had been exposed to asbestos during the Second World War when he found a medical condition rendered him unsuitable for the military (he had suffered a double hernia), he picked up his tools and worked at the shipyards in New York and Louisiana, repairing our navy's battle ships that returned for repairs after getting shot up in the war.
He and his buddies felt he needed to contribute in one way or another to the war effort to defend our nation.
My dad and his buddies personified the "can do" spirit that made America the nation it is today.
And now we have the greedy corporations in collusion with all too many politicians on both sides of the political aisle who could apparently care less about Americans who actually have to work for a living to support their families.
The immigration lawyers would love nothing better than to see a massive amnesty program for illegal aliens. Their goal is a simple one and easy to understand. As the "Forty-niners" who lead the gold rush in California in the mid 1800's would say, "There is gold in them there hills!" These lawyers look at the illegal alien population the way a negligence lawyer looks at a neighbor with a broken leg, they see clients! Clients that would pay them huge sums of money for services rendered.
The so-called advocacy groups never complain about the meager wages and illegal, indeed, often unsafe working conditions that illegal aliens tolerate in order to secure illegal employment because they too see money and power in the huge numbers of illegal aliens. Think about it, when was the last time La Raza or some other such organization picketed an unscrupulous employer and demanded reasonable wages and lawful working conditions for the illegal aliens working in those huge factories? These organization know damn well that the only reason that illegal aliens are in demand is because of the wages and conditions that they are willing to accept.
Often labor unions similarly ignore many of these issues to make certain that their ranks swell and their revenues from dues increases by supporting illegal aliens at the expense of the jobs and conditions of the very members who built those union, law abiding United States citizens and resident aliens!
And now we should consider the greatest travesty of all, the governments of Mexico and the other countries that send our nation the bulk of the illegal aliens. For years the Mexican government has encouraged their own citizens to ignore our nation's borders and go to the United States to seek illegal employment under what are often dangerous and demeaning jobs. As the saying goes, "Follow the money!" Last year more than twenty billion dollars was wired from the United States to Mexico. Last year, more than forty-five billion dollars was wired from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean primarily by illegal aliens. Two years ago, according to the World Bank, 10% of Guatemala's GDP was accounted for by the money wired to Guatemala by citizens of that nation who are working in the United States illegally.
I would suggest you click on the link below to review a report prepared by the World Bank. This report focuses on the significance of remittances, that is to say, money wired from the United States to Guatemala. Page 7 contained a paragraph that I will call your attention to. I want you to consider the definition of a "coyote" which is the street term for an alien smuggler:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTAML/Resources/US-Guatamala.pdf
The language is absolutely outrageous! To repeat it, "....a portion of the remittance goes to pay the coyote, the person who helps an undocumented migrant cross the U.S. borders, if the migrant has used such a means of migration."
First of all, the World Bank fails to note that we are talking about aliens who enter our country in violation of law. Second and perhaps even more significantly, the report provides a deceptively innocuous definition for what a coyote or alien smuggler truly is. In the late 1970's I became a member of the first Anti-Smuggling Unit of the investigations branch of the New York District Office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York. During the course of our investigations my colleagues and I quickly came to the conclusion that alien smugglers were criminals of unparalleled viciousness. They would treat the aliens that they smuggled across our nation's borders as cargo and would often beat and rob the aliens. They would often demand that the aliens carry drugs with them as they violated our borders. Young women were often gang raped and threats of violence against the families of the aliens they smuggled across our borders kept most smuggled aliens from talking about the identities of these pernicious criminals.
In the jargon of illegal aliens, the smugglers are called coyotes and the smuggled aliens are referred to as pollos or chickens. These words were picked for a reason. Coyotes eat chickens.
When I traveled to Arizona a couple of years ago, I met with ranchers whose lands have been over-run by alien smugglers. They showed me the so-called "rape trees" where smugglers would often toss the panties of the young girls that they raped as a sort of grotesque trophy attesting to their brutality. In fact, it is common for young women who intend to seek the assistance of smugglers to begin taking birth control pills several months before they set out for the United States to prevent themselves from becoming impregnated if and when they are raped!
Meanwhile, the World Bank uses terminology that makes the smuggler or coyote sound as though they are half tour guide / half social worker! The World Bank report makes it clear that some of the money being wired out of the United States goes to pay the smugglers for "services rendered!"
The plight of the poor of Latin America and other countries around the world is horrific! Make no mistake about it. Poverty is so pervasive around the world that according to the United Nations, roughly on billion human beings are so poverty stricken that they do not have access to safe drinking water! That is poverty on a scale that we, as Americans, cannot begin to fathom. Our nation cannot solve world poverty by having all of the world's poor enter the United States because we would then have to admit more than half of the human beings on our planet!
I am saddened by the poverty to be found in Mexico and other countries but, frankly, Mexico is one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America, consequently the world. The problem with Mexico is not a lack of resources but rather a crisis of corruption that is aided and abetted by our government. Ten percent of the population of Mexico now is believed to reside in the United States. Most of these aliens are being exploited by their own government, by alien smugglers, by unscrupulous employers, by unscrupulous landlords that cram as many as 20 adults in an apartment that was designed for a family of 4, by many immigration lawyers, by so-called advocacy groups and others.
Meanwhile, America's working poor and middle class are getting hammered even as illegal aliens are getting exploited. There is real tragedy on both sides of the border.
The concept of fairness that used to be a hallmark of the value system of the United States has gone the way of the dodo bird and has become extinct. Today, our country subscribes to the concept of "might makes right!" The might in this situation is the huge sums of money that buy politicians. It has been estimated that by the time We the People get to vote for the next president of this nation, more than one billion dollars will have been spent on the campaigns! This is absolutely staggering!
If a police officer is discovered to have accepted a cup of hot coffee or hot cocoa while standing on his beat or directing traffic on a freezing cold winter day, it is to be anticipated that internal affairs will be all over him (her)! Politicians, on the other hand, not only accept but solicit huge contributions but somehow this is acceptable! Isn't it amazing that the powers that be are convinced that you can buy a cop for the price of a cup of coffee but that politicians will keep their moral compass even when they accept God knows how many thousands if not millions of dollars in contributions?
Politicians have one main job: getting elected or getting re-elected. This takes ever increasing amounts of money. As fewer Americans vote, groups that can promise to deliver blocks of votes take on increasing significance in the process. We the People have been abdicating our responsibilities to not only vote in elections, but to contact our elected representatives and become engaged in the political process. Those whose goal is the elimination of our nation's borders have been paying attention. They are committed to achieving their goals while the average American watches sporting events on television or goes shopping at the mall. Many Americans will tell you that they are too busy working to get involved, but if you ask them who won last night's baseball game in their hometown, many will not only tell you who won, but they would be able to tell you who hit the three run home run that put the home team ahead!
A year ago last May, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens stepped out of the purported "shadows" along with their supporters to contumaciously chant, "Yes I can!" (in Spanish, mostly). We the people went to work or stayed home. .
Many Americans do not even know the names of their senators or Congressional representatives. No less than the future of our nation and our way of life is on the line as our borders are being left wide open, not only to those who will take the jobs Americans won't be able to afford to do, but to terrorists and criminals.
As I have stated on other occasions, the generation that won World War II has come to be referred to as the "Greatest Generation." If We the People fail to wake up and get involved, we may gain a new title for this generation. History may remember us as the "Last Generation!:
Democracy is not a spectator sport!
Lead, follow or get out of the way!
-michael cutler-
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September 15, 2007
At the U.S. Border, the Desert Takes a Rising Toll
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLDSASABE, Ariz. — “I can’t breathe,” Felicitas Martínez Barradas gasped to her cousin as they stumbled across the border in 100-degree heat. “The sun is killing me.”
They had been walking for a day and a half through the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, the purgatory that countless illegal immigrants pass through on their way from Mexico to the United States.
Ms. Martínez was 29 and not fit. A smuggler handed her a can of carbonated energy drink and caffeine pills. But she only got sicker and passed out, said her cousin, Julio Díaz.
There, near a mesquite tree a little over 10 miles from the border, Ms. Martínez died, her eyes open to the starry sky, her arms across her chest and Mr. Díaz, 17, at her side.
Gone was her dream of making enough money in the United States for a house for her four young children in Mexico.
“She was very set in her ways,” said a sister in Mexico, Ely, who had tried to persuade Ms. Martínez not to leave. “Once she decided to do something, there was no stopping her.”
The Border Patrol has reported a large drop in the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border with Mexico this year, the consequence, the agency says, of additional agents and the presence of National Guard troops. Yet the number of migrants dying while trying to cross here in Pima County is on pace to set a record, according to the county medical examiner.
Pima County, which includes the Tucson area, is one of the busiest areas for illegal crossings along the 2,000-mile border. The medical examiner’s office handled 177 deaths of border crossers in the first eight months of this year, compared with 139 over the same period last year and 157 in 2005, the year the most such deaths were registered.
The death of Ms. Martínez in July illustrates a primary reason that immigration scholars, the Border Patrol and government officials in the United States and Mexico believe people continue dying at such high rates: As they increasingly avoid heavily patrolled urban areas, they cross with little or no knowledge of the desert, whose heat, insects, wildlife and rugged terrain make it some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.
Like Ms. Martínez, who had worked cleaning houses in Mexico, many crossers arrive from central and southern Mexico, which is cooler and wetter than Arizona and where people are less familiar with the desert and its perils.
Before entering the Sonoran Desert, she had completed a three-day trip to the Mexican side of the border, part of the marathon trek from her lush, verdant subtropical village of Tepetlán, a four-hour drive northeast from Mexico City in Veracruz state.
Her cousin, Mr. Díaz, said they stayed in a room at the border with 15 other crossers and were each given two cans of tuna, a bag of tortilla chips, and six liters of water — a gallon and a half — by a smuggler before setting off for the desert.
The growing death toll here in recent years follows a Border Patrol clampdown in California and Texas. The goal was to drive migrant traffic away from cities like San Diego and El Paso and into the remote desert on the assumption it would act as a deterrent. But while there is no way of knowing its overall effect, the strategy is serving at least in part as a funnel for untold numbers of migrants.
The Government Accountability Office, in a report last year that analyzed Border Patrol statistics, said the annual number of reported deaths of border crossers doubled to 472 between 1995 and 2005, with the majority of those deaths in the desert near Tucson. The report suggested the agency has undercounted deaths because of inconsistent classification.
Border Patrol officials say that as the agency continues to add agents, as recently authorized by Congress, they will be better able to patrol the toughest areas of the Sonoran Desert. It said commanders recently met to finalize better methods to count migrant deaths.
“We are well aware of the perils of crossing the desert,” said Lloyd Easterling, an agency spokesman. “That’s why we are trying to get people to places to deter people from crossing to begin with.”
At the Mexican consulate in Tucson, a map is adorned with yellow and blue pieces of tape, for females and males, marking where migrants have died. Ms. Martínez is yellow No. 114.
Jerónimo García Ceballos, a consular official, maintains the map and devotes much of his work to identifying the dead and arranging for their bodies to be returned to Mexico.
Mr. García’s office is adorned with posters with slogans like “Don’t leave your life in the desert; your family asks you not to,” an example of the public service announcements that both Mexico and the United States Border Patrol have used along known migrant trails.
Ms. Martinez had telephoned home as she hopscotched across Mexico with Mr. Díaz. They rode in a smuggler’s sport utility vehicle to Xalapa, took a bus to Mexico City and then another, three-day bus trip to Altar, a ragged town that is a major staging area for migrants 50 miles south of the border.
“I would tell her it’s not too late to come back, I would work to pay off the smuggler,” said Ms. Martínez’s father, Vicente Martínez Ortega, recalling his telephone conversations with her along the way.
From Altar, they were driven toward the border in a van, Mr. Díaz said, and once they got close, they began walking. They headed along a known smuggling route toward Route 86 in Arizona, where migrants are often picked up and eventually carried to points across the United States.
Mr. Díaz said they were assured it would be a day or so of walking but Border Patrol agents say from the border to Route 86 is more like a three- or four-day walk.
Ms. Martínez’s last call home came a couple of days before she died. “She said, ‘Daddy, I’ve reached the border,’ ” Mr. Martínez said.
Tepetlán, a village of 1,800 people on a high plateau in the southeastern flanks of the Sierra Madre Oriental, has shrunk in population in recent years as scores of its citizens head “al otro lado,” to the other side, as the United States is called.
Family and friends there said Ms. Martínez had chosen to believe, like many others who try to cross, that nothing ill would come to her.
Her younger brother had successfully made a similar journey eight months before and found work at a factory in Georgia, but said he had told his sister of the exhausting, broiling march in the desert and warned her not to do it.
“I told her work here is hard and sometimes there isn’t any,” her brother Vicente, 24, said in a telephone interview from Georgia, where his job helps support his parents, wife and two young children in Tepetlán. “But she thought everything would come out all right.”
Her father had crossed several years ago in San Diego, scrambling away from Border Patrol agents tracking him and his group with helicopters and floodlights. He found field work in California and Nebraska and sold ice cream pops in Chicago before tiring of the climate and intermittent work and returning home to harvest coffee in Tepetlán.
Mr. Díaz, too, had made the trek just a year before, but said he was caught by the Border Patrol and immediately deported.
The Martínez family lives modestly in a two-room house in Tepetlán. It sits on an unpaved road where rural scenes naturally unfold: men riding burros, boys playing with a captured armadillo, and fish and fruit vendors hawking wares from battered pickup trucks.
Ms. Martínez had worked cleaning houses in Veracruz and at the airport there for a year but she found it hard to make enough money to care for her children, ages 6 to 13.
Her personal life, too, had been turbulent for years. Family members describe her as somewhat rebellious and headstrong.
She had dropped out of high school at 14, was married and pregnant by 15 and had left the father of her four children last year, after several fights.
She had remarried and was looking for ways to make big money for a new house.
Ms. Martínez had heard that Mr. Díaz was planning to make another try, through a smuggler who was a distant relative, and borrowed money from a lender in town. The cost would be $3,000, half paid up front, half after a successful crossing.
But it was not. Around 11 a.m. on July 6, Border Patrol Agent Kelly Kirby got a call about a young migrant reporting his cousin possibly dead in the desert. Every time a call about a migrant in distress comes in, Agent Kirby says he hopes for the best but knows to expect the worst.
Mr. Díaz said Ms. Martínez died just before sunset the night before. He cried and was scared, he said, and built a fire, hoping to be spotted.
He set off in the morning to find help, eventually flagging down a passing Border Patrol agent.
Agent Kirby responded and with Mr. Díaz’s help quickly found Ms. Martínez.
She was wearing jeans and a blouse. Foam around her mouth was evidence of a seizure. Though she had only walked about a day and a half, her physical condition and the insufficient water and food she had consumed made her susceptible to a desert death.
“She did about as much as she could to not make it,” Agent Kirby said.
When Ms. Martínez’s body was returned to Tepetlán, the coffin was brought into the house for a wake. Her father opened the lid and looked at his daughter’s face.
“I had to look, to see her,” Mr. Martínez said.
Mr. Martínez, with the help of a friend who is a mason, is completing work on a tomb, which includes a sculpture of the town church where Ms. Martínez’s mother took her for a blessing before she left for the United States.
Watching the work on the tomb from a distance one afternoon in late August, Mr. Díaz spoke of his life since his cousin’s death and the possibility of another attempt to cross.
“Not right now,” he said, “but who knows, later on?”
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Kelly Kirby, a Border Patrol agent, walking to the site where he found Ms. Martínez’s body.
Audio Slide Show (Click on "Visit Author's Website")
A Fatal Crossing
Vicente Martínez Ortega in Tepetlán, Mexico, at the grave of his daughter Felicitas Martínez Barradas, who died in July in Arizona trying to cross the border.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times