Thread: Cries From the Border

I thought I would share this...

Cries From the Border

BY LEO W. BANKS

HEREFORD, Ariz.--Last July 6, Mercedes Maharis awoke at 11 p.m. to the roar of a Border Patrol helicopter hovering outside her living room here, two miles north of the Mexican border. It was pitch black outside. The chopper blades pounded so hard that her windows shook as if under artillery bombardment. She opened the door and heard people screaming and running as the chopper herded them off the hill toward three Border Patrol trucks below.
In her nightgown, shaking with fear, Ms. Maharis grabbed her camera and filmed the scene. "I had to film it because nobody would believe it," says Ms. Maharis, 63, a self-described Indiana farm girl. But she also acted out of instinct. Ms. Maharis is a filmmaker, and she incorporated images from that night into a documentary called "Cochise County USA, Cries From the Border," an account of how the ongoing invasion from Mexico has impacted life in one border county.

Ms. Maharis wanted residents to speak for themselves in describing home break-ins, vandalism, horrible traffic accidents and more. One scene shows flowers at a roadside in nearby Sierra Vista, a memorial to five people killed in an October 2004 wreck. Two smugglers fleeing the cops at 90 miles an hour with 19 illegals in their pickup sailed over a median and rammed cars at a stoplight. Three illegals died. So did 75-year-old James Lee and his newlywed bride, Emilia Guthrie Lee, 71, of Huachuca City. Every time she passes that spot, Ms. Maharis says, her heart breaks for that elderly couple, trying to start their lives together.

"Cries" also shows vehicles torched by an illegal alien arsonist who rampaged through the county in 2005. The man, judged mentally incompetent, was sent to the Arizona State Hospital, where his care costs taxpayers almost $200,000 annually.

Meanwhile, Ms. Maharis interviews Cynthia Kolb, who pulled her granddaughter from a meth-house and is struggling to raise her. The girl badly needs medicine and various therapies that Arizona refuses to provide, partly because it has no money.

But the film is no blind screed. It shows everyone's pain, including pictures of illegals lying dead in the desert. They resemble battlefield images--think of Matthew Brady's Civil War photography.

Ms. Maharis had no idea of the extent of the chaos when she moved here from Las Vegas in 2004. A schoolteacher turned filmmaker with three master's degrees, including one in Latin American studies, Mercedes and husband Robert bought a beautiful home atop a precarious road that winds into the Huachuca Mountains. The view encompasses 30 miles of desert under the earth's bluest sky. They thought they'd found Eden.





They didn't realize that a smuggling trail crosses the property, 100 feet from their door, or that the house is sandwiched between two roads used by human- and drug-traffickers. "When I realized we'd settled in a war zone, I was traumatized, unable to sleep for months," Ms. Maharis says. The film became part therapy, part warning call to the nation.
But "Cries," released last summer, has taken Ms. Maharis on an unexpectedly wild ride into the immigration buzz saw. A screening at a library in Bisbee--a mining town turned aging-hippie-hangout--ended in mayhem, with audience members yelling at each other as the credits rolled.

She sent the film to the anti-illegal-immigration Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, hoping he'd arrange a screening before the National Press Club. Even though Mr. Tancredo's staff said the documentary should be seen, the congressman wouldn't personally recommend it because it included the views of an "ACLU propagandist," charges of serious Border Patrol abuses, and endorsement of a guest worker program.

"It's pushing everybody's buttons," says Ms. Maharis.

But at least Mr. Tancredo's staff watched the whole thing. Gerald Kicanas, the bishop of the Tucson Catholic Diocese, showed Ms. Maharis no such courtesy. About 15 minutes into a private screening of the 70-minute film, he summarily stood and left the room, declaring that "Cries" wasn't empathetic to the illegals. Ms. Maharis found herself talking to the open door. "But we are compassionate!" she called, pleading with him to watch the whole film. Bishop Kicanas refused.

"I was shocked he'd dismiss us like that," Ms. Maharis says. "It demonstrated a closed mind. I thought high church officials were supposed to be compassionate toward everyone, but he showed no interest in what's happening in Cochise County to people like us, living in trauma on private property."

In the salons of Cambridge and San Francisco, Ms. Maharis has encountered indifference to her account of border chaos. Screenings there have attracted mere handfuls of people. Her New York show drew exactly one viewer, actor George Maharis, her brother-in-law.





As she prepared to submit "Cries" for an Academy Award nomination, a viewer told her it was too political. Translation: the wrong politics for Hollywood. Especially to the open-borders lobby, the film is deeply subversive. Ms. Maharis knows that playing the politically correct game would've won bigger audiences and media acclaim, and it would've played nicely into the PR machine of street protesters demanding "rights" for illegals.
But she was committed to telling the whole truth. "This isn't a political film," she says. "I'm on the side of suffering people everywhere."

For the Maharises, promotional trips are difficult because they cannot leave their home untended, fearing it'll be ransacked. Illegals have turned their mountainside palace into a prison. That's Ms. Maharis's personal trauma. "This is my home, and I don't want to be driven from my home," she says. "We came here to live our retirement in peace, and if we can't we'll have to leave." But the nation's trauma worries her more, and she's hard-pressed to understand how George Bush's immigration plan will do anything to help American citizens on the border.

"This is uncivilized, and something has to change dramatically," Ms. Maharis says. "This is like a pot on the stove that's going to boil over, and pretty soon. I had to use my skills to make a difference or my conscience wouldn't let me rest."

Mr. Banks is a writer in Tucson.

"I was shocked he'd dismiss us like that," Ms. Maharis says. "It demonstrated a closed mind. I thought high church officials were supposed to be compassionate toward everyone, but he showed no interest in what's happening in Cochise County to people like us, living in trauma on private property."

He doesn't care. Your rights on your property do not count. Illegals rights on your property are more important. It is probably good that he left--too much pressure on his brain while seated. He is obviously in the wrong line of work.

I'm so scared that all of us will end up being able to video this stuff in our own communities no matter which state we live in, if we survive.

Even though Mr. Tancredo's staff said the documentary should be seen, the congressman wouldn't personally recommend it because it included the views of an "ACLU propagandist," charges of serious Border Patrol abuses, and endorsement of a guest worker program.

she was doing pretty good til she endorsed a "guest worker program" -- wonder if she would be willing to use footage of the film without the endorsement