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Fear grips a border crossing
In Southwest, violence may be behind drop in migrant arrests
Monday, February 19, 2007
BY BRIAN DONOHUE
Star-Ledger Staff
ALONG THE ARIZONA-MEXICO BORDER -- U.S. Border Patrol agent Gustavo Soto pulls up his SUV along a makeshift fence of railroad track steel that separates the United States and Mexico and peers across an expanse of rocky desert.

The desert is quiet and empty. And Soto smiles.

Arrests of illegal immigrants along the southwest border have plunged 27 percent during the first four months of the current fiscal year. Federal statistics show arrests dropped from 308,400 in October 2005 through January 2006, to 230,469 in October 2006 through January 2007.

Here in the border patrol's Tucson sector, the busiest corridor for illegal immigration over the past several years, the number of illegal immigrants caught crossing the border has fallen 9 percent.

"We believe they're being deterred," Soto says, leaning against the fence just outside the border town of Nogales. "They're simply not coming to the border anymore."

The number of apprehensions is considered the best indicator of how many people are attempting to cross the border illegally.

U.S. officials credit the drop-off to Bush administration efforts including hiring more border patrol agents, setting up additional cameras and lookout towers and the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

But on the other side, in the Mexican smuggling boomtown of Altar, many see a different reason behind the drop-off.

Migrants preparing to make the desert crossing say fewer are taking the trip not out of fear of being caught by U.S. authorities, but of being killed or kidnapped in a growing wave of violence erupting along the border.

In the latest incident on Feb. 8, three illegal immigrants were shot to death, three were wounded and others went missing after gunmen accosted them in the desert northwest of Tucson, Ariz. Police believe the shootings were the work of bandits. There have been no arrests.

Tougher border patrols in Texas and California first pushed the bulk of illegal immigration into the Arizona desert in the mid-1990s. Now, as tougher enforcement in Arizona pushes immigrants and drug smugglers into narrower, more desolate corridors, officials and experts say smugglers are growing more violent in an effort to control their turf.

On the Friday morning after the attacks near Tucson, Jose Luis Zavala, 25, sat in the central plaza in the town of Altar, 60 miles south of the U.S. border.

Milling about the plaza, there were hundreds more like Zavala, immigrants carrying bottles of water and backpacks, waiting to meet their guides, called coyotes, for the grueling desert hike across the border.

As he has done each year for the last decade, Zavala planned to travel to Colorado to work on a vegetable farm, picking lettuce, spinach and onions and then return to Mexico in December.

Seated along a stone wall, Zavala read the local newspaper, La Voz. A headline read: "Migration going down in Altar; violence against immigrants going up."

"I'm a lot more afraid of the narcos (drug smugglers) than la migra (border patrol)," he said, looking up from the paper.

For Zavala, being nabbed by U.S. Border Patrol agents would be nothing new.

Two weeks earlier, Zavala and his companions were apprehended by agents who found them sleeping under a tree in the desert. As they do with hundreds caught each day, U.S. agents drove him across the border and dropped him off. He returned to Altar to rest up and plan another attempt.

In the 10 years he has been returning each spring for the start of the growing season, Zavala said he has been caught 20 times -- including eight times in 2004 alone.

"They send us back, and we just have to try again," said the married father of two. "I'll get there. We have no choice. There's no work at home."

Altar, a once-sleepy town of 16,000 residents located 60 miles south of the border, emerged as a smuggling center in the late 1990s. By 2000, local officials estimate, up to 4,000 migrants were arriving each day on their last stop before beginning the crossing.

Migrants still arrive each day by the hundreds, but sales have dropped at the dozens of businesses lining the plaza and selling boots, backpacks and water for departing migrants.

At the church-run Community Aid Center for Migrants and the Needy, counselor Marcos Burruel said the number of migrants seeking a place to stay for the night has dropped 20 percent since last year.

"They're taking other routes, farther into the desert," Burruel said.

Another shelter worker, Enrique Celaya, said migrants' fears are being fueled by a series of incidents in which armed bandits, possibly drug smugglers, have stopped vans carrying migrants to the border.

The bandits have beaten the drivers, stolen the shoes of migrants to keep them from walking any farther and then set the vans ablaze, he said.

Accounts of van burnings are repeated again and again in Altar.

Police in both Altar and the border town of Sásabe said they have heard the same reports but have not confirmed the incidents.

Soto, the U.S. Border Patrol agent, said smugglers who are attacked by rivals would be unlikely to report such incidents.

All categories of border violence, including attacks against border agents, are on the rise. And Soto said he would not be surprised if drug smugglers are targeting the immigrants who have attracted unwanted attention to their desert routes.

As Tucson sector patrols have been stepped up to catch more immigrants, agents seized 30 percent more marijuana being smuggled across the border in the first quarter of the fiscal year than in the same period in 2006.

"We do know that violence against (border patrol) agents and migrants is on the rise," Soto said. "As we seal the border, the frustration level is increasing, and that's exactly what we're seeing."