Thread: Despite signs border crime falling, fear remains

Despite signs border crime falling, fear remains
Law spurs some Arizonans to join militias for protection
By SUSAN CARROLL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
July 30, 2010, 11:56PM

HEREFORD, Ariz. — Eugene Kambouris sat on the back patio of his ranch home near the Arizona-Sonora border with an old friend and fellow veteran, watching the thick, gray storm clouds roll closer.

The coming storm had ruined their plans for a sojourn to the foothills of the nearby Huachuca Mountain, one of their favorite haunts to watch for illegal immigrants and drug runners.

Instead, Kambouris and Harold Hubbard, an 82-year-old retired veterinarian known as "Doc" to his friends, watched the storm come in over the San Pedro Valley and lamented a federal judge's decision this week to block key portions of SB 1070, the state's immigration bill.

Kambouris, 66, shook his head with disgust. He knew Jack Krentz, the fifth-generation rancher from Cochise County whose slaying in March helped fuel the momentum to pass SB 1070. The killing remains unsolved, but locals have attributed it to drug-smuggling cartels.

Now, Kambouris fears the same will happen to him.

"Hopefully it won't be me or Doc or somebody else I know," Kambouris said. "But it's coming."

A busy sector
This stretch of border in southeastern Arizona, a patchwork of protected public land and ranches and towns, makes up part of the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, the busiest in the nation in terms of arrests and drug seizures. The San Pedro Valley near Kambouris' home has long been a popular corridor for illegal crossings.

Kambouris and Hubbard said they've spotted illegal immigrants coming north through their land for as long they can remember, and they just called the Border Patrol to come get them.

But things have changed, they said.

"It's gotten real bad in the last year or two," said Kambouris, who has lived there for 15 years, swatting at a fly.

"It's more violent, but it's not just that," Hubbard said. "It's all controlled. The people smuggling and the drug smuggling are all controlled by organized crime."

Fear overblown?
Fear of cartels and a frustration with the federal government's response to illegal immigration has prompted some locals, like Kambouris and Hubbard, to join militias and border watch groups and to embrace measures like SB 1070.

On Wednesday, a federal judge barred the state from enforcing key portions of the law, including a provision that would have required law enforcement to check the immigration status of all people stopped or arrested if they had reason to believe they were in the country illegally.

But other residents down here in Cochise County say the fears are overblown, that the border is more secure than it's ever been.

Crossings in the Tucson sector, which includes Cochise County, have dropped dramatically in recent years. In 2001, the Border Patrol apprehended 449,654 illegal immigrants in that sector. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, agents recorded 241,673 apprehensions in that same stretch of border. There were seven slayings reported by the Cochise County sheriff in 2005 and four last year. Since January, there have been two killings, including that of Krentz.

Joan Werner, owner of Atalanta's Music & Books in Bisbee, a historic copper mining town in Cochise County, said politicians share a lot of the blame for the perception of widespread violence on the border.

Gov. Jan Brewer said in June that most illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs, a charge critics slammed as alarmist and racist.

"Fear sells," Werner said.

"The border is more secure than it's ever been in my lifetime," said Werner, who has lived in Bisbee for 37 years. "It used to be a one-strand barbed wire fence or nothing."

She said she doesn't worry about armed insurgents taking over this corner the state.

"All these little right-wing militias coming here armed, that scares me a lot more," she said.

'Gun in every room'
On Thursday night, the wind chime on Kambouris' back patio clanged faster as the first drops of rain started to fall on the roof of his patio. He and Hubbard said the Cochise County militia, started in 2001, refers about 3,000 illegal immigrants a year to the Border Patrol, but does not force confrontations with illegal immigrants.

"I lock my door during the daytime now, for crying out loud," Kambouris said. "I've got a gun in every room."

Hubbard said he was thinking about moving back to Wyoming, as he led his golden retriever, Scooter, back to his house three doors away, out of the rain.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/spe ... 33312.html

Bisbee is a tourist town. It is like NYC East Village tucked into a picturesque mining town. They aren't going to tell you about the Bisbee Bandits, not the historical ones but the contemporary ones - that come across the border and rob the unsuspecting wealthy tourists. They are "armed insurgents."

This is like when you are in a crowded area and you feel an urge to turn around and look in a specific direction. You don't know why. You just do it. And then you see someone staring at you giving you the evil eye. There is no way that we have to explain how we knew to turn and face that person that we did not even know was there. So don't let their inability to measure a reason for the fear let you be dissuaded from the truth for a minute. We all know it is the calm before the storm. We wish it weren't so but it is so.

While the number of crimes may be decreasing, it appears that crimes are increasingly violent.