Thread: ‘Battle at the border’

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‘Battle at the border’
By STEPHANIE INNES
Arizona Daily Star Writer
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 12:06 AM PDT


When he was 16, Gonzalo Llamas left his home in Zacatecas, Mexico, and illegally crossed the border by paying $20 to use an American citizen’s passport.

Though the passport holder was older and balding, Llamas made it across and began his new life cleaning restaurants for $9 a job.

Now 50, Llamas is a U.S. citizen and owns a construction company in San Diego. And he wants the border sealed. The reason? Violent crime.

“You have your good people and your bad people,” he says. “I’m really open-minded for people to make a better life for themselves without causing problems to anyone. But with a few bad ones, we all lose. You have to have some control.”

It’s a common perception along the border — more security means more safety. But along with tougher enforcement has come a spike in violence against those who police the international boundary.

Assaults on U. S. Border Patrol agents, including rock-throwings, doubled from 2004 to 2005 as the number of agents increased by 4 percent, and now are occurring at a rate of more than two a day, federal data show.

As security tightens, smugglers dig tunnels under fences, disguise themselves as members of the Mexican military, and, in general, become bolder, authorities say. Around Yuma, they’ve thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails and fired paintball guns and real firearms at agents.

In response, agents are firing non-lethal pepperballs. They also use their firearms, though U.S. Customs and Border Protection won’t disclose how many illegal entrants have been killed by federal officers.

“It’s a battle at the border,” says Tyler Emblem, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol’s Search, Trauma and Rescue unit in the Yuma Sector. “It’s not like five years ago. When we showed up, they would run. It’s making it harder for these smuggling organizations to make a living, and we are the enemy.”

Last month, a Border Patrol agent in Yuma shot and killed a Mexican man U.S. officials say threw softball-sized rocks at agents. The FBI is investigating.

Data from the Tucson-based human rights group Coalición de Derechos Humanos says 11 illegal entrants since 2003 have died of gunshot wounds while crossing the Mexican border into Arizona, but the records do not indicate who fired the shots.

Aside from brazen smugglers, it’s difficult to predict what will happen to crime and violence in the United States if the border is sealed. Some worry more fences will create social unrest. Others say fences and other security measures have dramatically decreased overall crime rates in areas such as San Diego and El Paso, though such border-tightening strategies also can move crime to more remote areas with less security.

That’s what some say has happened in Arizona during the last decade, as heavier patrols in California sent drug trafficking and violent crime to remote areas, such as the Tohono O’odham Reservation and Organ Pipe National Monument. Ranger Kris Eggle was shot to death at the monument by a Mexican drug smuggler in 2002.

Since Eggle’s death, the National Park Service has spent $18 million erecting 30 miles of vehicle barriers in Organ Pipe. The monument has doubled its law enforcement staff, the Border Patrol has increased its presence and the National Guard also has provided help.

Still, one-third of the monument remains closed due to public-safety concerns. Researchers in most parks along the border now must be accompanied by park personnel or agree to a buddy system and must check in with park officials daily.

Farther east, in Cochise County, Sheriff Larry Dever says his deputies now expect a fight when they see smugglers, who often are armed with high-capacity assault weapons with orders to protect their cargo at all costs.

The smugglers operate under the watchful eye of scouts equipped with sophisticated observation gear, Dever told a U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee this year. Failure to deliver is not acceptable and many who fail are executed, he says.

“Their way of doing traditional business, in this case smuggling, has been disrupted, and they take a hit financially,” Border Patrol spokesman Todd Fraser says. “Their response is that they become increasingly frustrated and turn to violence to get their smuggled loads through.”

San Diego

In San Diego, crime rates dropped significantly after border security in the area tightened with Operation Gatekeeper in 1994.

Per-capita aggravated assaults, burglaries, robberies and murders now are less than half what they were in 1993, San Diego Police Department records show. The Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector says Operation Gatekeeper reduced crime by 82 percent.

Yet others question if border security was responsible for the drop. San Diego Police Department spokeswoman Monica Muñoz, for example, says it would be inaccurate to assume lower crime in her city had anything to do with border security.

“It’s because we’ve been so strenuously involved in community policing,” she says. “Nobody here would tell you our drop in crime is due to the border fence. A good number of people we arrest are not Mexican nationals.”

Also, the plummeting crime rates in border cities such as San Diego, El Paso and Laredo in the last 10 years mirror a national trend — crime rates dropped across the country in the same time period, notes Pedro H. Albuquerque, an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M International in Laredo. He studies border violence and has compared murder rates on both sides of the line.

His research shows falling crime rates in border cities more likely are due to a mix of better border security, improved policing and bigger budgets for local police.

Not only are crime rates dropping in border cities, they actually are lower than in most U.S. cities. The murder rate in Laredo in 2001 was 4.4 per 100,000 people, for example, while the average for U.S. cities in 2001 was 5.6 per 100,000.

Nuevo Laredo’s was 15.4, says Albuquerque, who based his information on FBI crime reports and coroners’ statistics in Mexico.

“Basically, law enforcement on the Mexican side is not efficient. They don’t enforce the law. But the American side has been quite successful in keeping groups out,” he says. “There is some exaggeration that living in these cities is like the front line of a war, and that is not really happening.”

With the border tougher to cross, criminals tend to stay in Mexico. When violence spills over, it usually stays in certain spots and among certain people, says Jorge Santibáñez, president of a university-based think tank at Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana.

“It’s not a social violence,” he says in Spanish. “It continues to be a sectorized violence.”

Lochiel, Ariz.

Some ranchers and farmers in open border areas like New Mexico say they worry about their safety, but dozens of residents interviewed along the international line say they don’t live in fear.

Those facing the most danger are in law enforcement and illegal trafficking, residents say. Their advice: Don’t look for trouble and you won’t find it.

“If you did mess with them, I don’t know what would happen, maybe you would get shot,” says Ramon De La Ossa, 61.

De La Ossa is the youngest of 12 children who grew up on the De La Ossa ranch in Lochiel, Ariz., a remote community east of Nogales that until 1983 had its own official port of entry. A chain-link fence now divides Lochiel from Mexico, but there’s a hole in it.

During the week, De La Ossa lives in Tucson and works as a barber. On the weekend, he works at the family cattle ranch in Lochiel. He and his wife want to retire to Lochiel within three years, even though it’s become a popular route for drug smuggling.

“I act like I don’t see them, that I don’t notice their transactions, and I keep going,” he says.

After years of hard work in the United States, Gonzalo Llamas feels much the same. He says the border has changed, especially near Border Field State Park, the westernmost tip of the border. He keeps his horse at a nearby ranch.

“Before the fence went up in 1994, it was just a barbed wire fence lying on the ground. We’d go over and eat tacos in Mexico,” Llamas says. “Now, the border has become a place for criminals. I mind my own business. I stay on this side.”

Star reporter Brady McCombs contributed to this story.

The fence is Americans way of "drawing a line the sand".

Step over it and your life will be incredibly miserable.

Stay home and fight for your nations and your people.

Your hope for a better life no longer rests in entering the United States illegally.

And Shame, Shame, Shame to anyone who told you otherwise and Shame, Shame, Shame on you for believing them.

Now gather up our family, pack up your possessions, get your money and go home. Otherwise you risk being separated from your family, having all your possessions confiscated, and your money used to pay the costs of detaining, incarcerating or deporting you.

GO NOW IN PEACE WITH ALL YOUR STUFF AND FAMILY.