Thread: Igniting a new kind of desert storm

Igniting a new kind of desert storm

http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/257063

Is dropping water bottles to migrants humanitarianism or an inherently political act?

Sep 16, 2007 04:30 AM
Augusta Dwyer
Special to the Star

EL PASO, TEX.–It is a warm Saturday morning in late August as Armando Alarcon brings his single-engine Cessna up into a hazy blue Texas sky, heading through the mountain gap that gave El Paso its name, along a border whose paradoxes have always framed his life.

The vast urban sprawl comprising the neighbouring cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, falls away as Alarcon, 39, and his co-pilot, Armando Garcia, fly toward the New Mexico desert, where thousands of Mexican migrants cross into the U.S. every year in search of work.

The desert crossings are one of the biggest sources of polemics in the United States, but Alarcon and his group of volunteers, called Paisanos al Rescate, or Countrymen to the Rescue, don't have a lot of time for the politics of immigration. They are simply trying to save lives, dropping bottles of water to people straggling through the stifling heat, or radioing for a pick-up if they need to be rescued.

"Some people say, `Hey, you're doing a good thing,'" says Alarcon in his West Texas accent. "Some people say, `You're wasting your time.' Some people say we're encouraging people. We don't encourage anybody, and we think, if you can save one person, it's worth it."

Alarcon, a Gulf War veteran and father of three, began the group four years ago, when he was still learning to fly his recently purchased, 30-year-old Cessna.

"My instructor kept nagging at me," he recalls, "because I wasn't paying attention to the aircraft. I kept looking out the window. We started doing some manoeuvres and that's when I could swear I saw somebody. That's when it hit me. I'm going to fly out there and just look for people."

At first, Alarcon would simply buy bottles of water at his local Wal-Mart and cover them in bubble wrap, but these would often burst upon hitting the hardpan of the desert floor.

Another volunteer came up with the idea of inserting the bottles into small army-surplus parachutes usually used for night flares. "Five bucks each, off the shelf," says Alarcon, who pays for them, the water and airplane fuel with his own money or donations.

The precious bottles of water also carry instructions: Raise one hand if you're okay, raise two hands if you are lost and want out.

Cruising at about 150 metres, the pilots circle and check for a response, calling in the Border Patrol if someone signals that they want to be rescued. Below us, the earth unfurls like the surface of an unruffled pond, speckled with the algae of mesquite bush and yucca, pooling around the black islands of long-extinct volcanoes.

Here, the border is no more than a barbed-wire fence, a chalk line of lighter brown traced straight across the continent. This is where the cheapest of guides, called coyotes, leave their clients to make the 56-kilometre journey to Deming, N.M., and points beyond.

Others cross on their own, heading for seasonal fieldwork in Arizona or New Mexico. A white Border Patrol van meanders along the all-but-deserted highway this morning, attempting to stop them .

Mexicans have been crossing this border in ever increasing numbers for decades, absorbed into the powerhouse of the United States economy, earning money to send back home.

Ironically, undocumented immigration has risen steeply since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, as the expected benefits to the Mexican economy failed to materialize, small-scale agriculture became untenable and uncompetitive workplaces shut down by the thousands.

An estimated half a million Mexicans a year are leaving for the United States, the billions of dollars of remittance money sent home acting as a kind of credit, unavailable to them from Mexico's banks for new homes and small businesses.

Back in Juarez, 29-year-old Ricardo Barbón, a peasant farmer sharing 10 hectares of land with his father in the state of Guanajuato, explains how he had been detected by U.S. immigration authorities two weeks earlier near Albuquerque, N.M., picking chillies.

"In Mexico, you earn less than 100 pesos (about $10) for 12 hours of work," he says. "In the United States, you can earn as much as $100 (U.S.) a day. Imagine!"

He tried his luck, crossing the border twice and losing his way in the desert for three days the first time, in order to save enough money to build a house. He wasn't sure if he would try a third time.

"I fell in love with the United States," he enthuses. "There are laws, people show respect, the streets are clean. If I could just have the opportunity to work, to go out to buy food without being afraid, yes, I would go back."

Even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. administrations have seen the inflow of Mexican labour as a security problem. Along with beefing up the Border Patrol with military equipment and sending in the National Guard, billions of dollars are being spent on a wall, pieces of which already run through scores of border communities.

And as street protests clamouring for immigrant rights have increased in U.S. cities, Congress was unable to pass President George W. Bush's immigration bill last June, another indication of the enormous controversy surrounding the issue.

An estimated 12 million immigrants live and work illegally in the U.S. Yet if people crossed the border undocumented, it wasn't by choice, argues Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, in El Paso. "If they would have had an option to come legally, they would have taken it," he says.

The current strategy is pushing would-be migrants away from traditional crossing points in populated areas into the deserts and mountains, where conditions are so risky it is believed no one will cross. That strategy, says Garcia, "has failed. Since it started, in around 1993, there has been an increased number of people dying trying to cross the border, from almost none or very few to about 500 people a year," he says. "It's a human crisis."

Another result has been a new and increasingly crucial reliance on a criminal mafia that charges up to $4,000 per person for passage to the United States.

"Before, people didn't need a coyote, because their family members would cross them," says Garcia. "Here during the '80s, you would pay a dollar or two to a guy on the river to give you a floater just so you wouldn't get wet. So the smuggling business actually increased due to this border enforcement."

Alarcon's mother crossed the Rio Grande when he was still a babe in arms, and his brother a year-old toddler, to make a new life for herself in El Paso.

"We used to live close to the airport," he recalls, "so we used to ride our bikes out here and talk to the NASA pilots, and they'd let us sit in their jets. It was awesome for a couple of little guys. That's when I got the aviation bug in me."

After finishing high school, Alarcon joined the army for four years, "just to cruise the world and have fun," he says. His citizenship papers came through in time for him to fly to Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a supply specialist during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

He eventually took a degree in business administration at the University of Texas, El Paso, and went on to live what for many is the American Dream – a good job with the country's largest trucking company, a nice house in the suburbs, and a close-knit family.

Later that afternoon in August, he will be in the stands, watching his 9-year-old son's football match. So as we turn back toward El Paso, he is pleased that we have not seen anyone on the ground this morning. "You know, you can fly all summer long," he says, "and if you don't see one person it's worth it. We don't keep a score."

While he and the other Paisanos don't see what they're doing "as politicized at all," he says, the media often does. "Everybody's been, like `what's your agenda?'"

Yet he will admit that shortly after starting up, "I got the guys together and told them, `take the weekend to think about it, make sure everybody's on board,' because we started noticing that it could get very political what we were going to do."

That same weekend the Border Patrol found the body of an 8-year-old Mexican girl in the desert, abandoned by her smuggler after spraining her ankle. If Alarcon has an agenda at all, it is to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

"We have guys in the group who are right wing and left wing," he says. "Some people like what we're doing and some don't. But hey, that's America."

THERE IS PLENTY OF WATER IN MEXICO. IF THEY WANT TO MAKE SURE THEY DONT DIE FROM DEHYDRATION OR BEING LOST.....ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS NOT CROSS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

If he wants to give them water OK but then it is his duty to report them to the BP and if he doesn't he should be arrested for aiding & abetting.NO EXCUSES !

Instead of flying around in his plane he should be out there helping to build a fence so they will not be able to get into the desert in the first place.

I see absoluty nothing wrong with trying to save lives however he should be reporting all sighting to the Border Patrol.
I've given water to any illegal on my property who wants some and allow them to sit in the shade while we wait for the BP to arrive.

It is wrong that illegals cross our border. We don't want them and they should be forcing themselves on us. Illegals and anchor babies are helping more and more illegals to cross the border every day. Time to send border babies back with they parents.

A Gulf war hero turned traitor. "Ain't that something?"

I can admire Alarcon's agenda -- to save humans -- but he has unwittingly stepped into a politcal time bomb. He should have had more foresight and intelligence. He doesn't comprehend that he is ENABLING the behavior of illegal trespassers. He needs a support group.

I did some research and asked some in touch “friendsâ€

...