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Opportunity--and death--await migrants at the U.S. border
A cactus-lined trail of tears in Arizona's desert is marked by the bones of those who fail. This year has been exceptionally deadly.


By Stephen Franklin
Tribune staff reporter

By Stephen Franklin
Tribune staff reporter

August 24, 2005

ALONG THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER -- In the breathtakingly beautiful Sonoran desert, the clutter is stunning.

Everywhere there are baby bottles and torn women's shoes and ripped backpacks and empty water jugs and crumpled prayer books and dusty heaps of clothes left behind by migrants overwhelmed or driven mad by the merciless 100-degree-plus desert heat.

The cactus-lined trail of tears also is increasingly marked by the bones of migrants such as Jane Doe No. 32, who apparently died in the desert some time ago and whose few remains have been unidentified for more than three weeks at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson.

In the weakest and most dangerous link on the U.S.-Mexico frontier, migrants are dying in record numbers despite stepped-up life-saving and surveillance efforts by the U.S. Border Patrol, and a newly launched publicity campaign by Mexican officials that warns that a trip across the desert can turn migrants' American dream into their worst nightmare.

The Border Patrol reports that this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, already has seen more migrant deaths along the U.S. southwestern border in about 10 months than in any year since government record-keeping began in 1998.

So far, 389 have died, 227 of them in Arizona. The Arizona toll last fiscal year was 177.

The main reason for the spurt in deaths is that the federal government has made the crossing elsewhere so much more difficult with walls and surveillance efforts.

Much of Arizona's 350-mile frontier is protected by three strands of barbed wire, and there are areas the Border Patrol can reach only via helicopter or on horseback.

Arizona also has been plagued by record-level heat that helped boost the surge in migrant deaths to 68 in July in Pima County--a one-month record for the county.

And smugglers, faced by greater challenges, have upped their fees, sending larger groups across the desert and relying on low-paid, inexperienced teenage guides, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

Reeling from the costs and burdens of migration and drug trafficking, the governors of Arizona and New Mexico recently declared states of emergency, saying they had to take the situation into their own hands to help towns and agencies overwhelmed by the crisis.

Pima County's medical examiner, Dr. Bruce Parks, said he could use some of the $1.5 million that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano set aside to help four border counties and state law-enforcement agencies deal with the problem.

Just outside of Parks' office is a large refrigerated truck that he rented recently at a $1,000 a week to hold the overflow bodies. By his estimates, caring for a record number of dead migrants could cost his office $200,000 this year.

Napolitano and the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora on Friday announced stepped-up plans to combat border-related crime, saying they were prompted to act in part because their respective national governments have been slow to help.

The migrant death toll in Arizona probably is higher, say human-rights and immigrant advocates, but there is no government system to tally all the numbers.

The Border Patrol has increased its contacts with other agencies that keep such figures, but its main job is patrolling the frontier, not record-keeping, said Mario Villarreal, an agency spokesman in Washington, D.C.

"It is so frustrating to hear the stories again and again and to feel you can do nothing," said Enrique Munoz, who oversees the handling of migrants' deaths for the Mexican Consulate in Tucson, and who often visits the border to urge Mexicans not to risk their lives crossing the desert.

"We thought the desert would be a good deterrent, and we were wrong," John Fitzpatrick, a Tucson-based Border Patrol official said at a meeting last week of residents from a small community near the border.

Border Patrol officials also quickly point out that it's the smugglers' choice to break U.S. laws and to take migrants into dangerous areas.

Indeed, no Mexican migrants died in the Arizona desert seven years ago, but in this calendar year 116 have, according to Munoz. Scores of others, largely from Central America, also lost their lives there.

The desert can be a killer even when migrants travel with enough water. It broils even healthy people who climb the steep mountains and descend into valleys in walks that can last several days if they lose their way. That is why the major cause of death is heat stroke, Parks said.

And then there is the greed of the smugglers, known as "coyotes."

More than ever, the coyotes are bringing across up to 150 migrants at a time so they can collect more money. Often they abandon large numbers of them after crossing the border, say Mexican officials. The smugglers prefer teenage guides, because they can pay them less or give them drugs as part of their wages, Mexican officials say.

Beside smuggling humans, coyotes also push drugs across the border.

"We explain all of these problems to our migrants, but they don't understand," said Elizabeth Garcia Mejia, who heads the Nogales office of Grupo Beta, Mexico's immigrant protection service, in Sonora state. Mejia, a surgeon, said she joined Grupo Beta to help migrants.

At the Nogales border crossing where the Border Patrol daily returns hundreds of Mexicans caught trying to enter the United States, she recently sponsored a photo display of migrants who had died in the desert or were smugglers' victims.

One man last week told Mejia about witnessing a gruesome murder in the desert.

"When you hear about a 14-year-old raped and killed, it is so hard to hear," she said, and paused because she was crying.

Such stories haven't stemmed the flow across the border. A dozen men who were starting out one broiling afternoon last week in Sasabe, a Mexican border town, were undaunted by the idea of encountering bodies or other migrants left behind by coyotes.

Some said they cross regularly and are accustomed to seeing such things. Two had been deserted only a few days earlier by a coyote.

"We face death because our need is so great," said a heavyset man headed for farm work in Washington state.

Because they had no faith in coyotes, they said, they were traveling on their own.

Another migrant, named Brenda, also tried to cross without a coyote last week.

Brenda, 31, who has lived in the U.S. on-and-off for 15 years, said she went to Mexico to visit her ailing father, and then came back into the U.S. by sneaking through a hole in the fence in Nogales.

On the way north she was caught by a Border Patrol road check, throwing her into a panic over what would happen to her four children in Phoenix, three of whom are U.S. citizens. Her sick 3-month-old especially worried her.

"I just want to cry. I feel so desperate," she said at the Border Patrol's processing center in Nogales, where about 1,000 migrants pass through daily. Most are returned to Mexico within hours of being caught.

The minute she was let go, she planned to take a route to the U.S. that had terrified her: She would be nailed into a wooden box and carried across, secreted in a van.

"I have to go back, and I think the box is the only way," she said.