Jeannine Pallotto often rides her favorite Arabian horse on desert trails through stands of saguaro cactus and ironwood trees crisscrossed by smuggling corridors.
Mindful of escalating violence tied to a crackdown on the border, though, she knows when to retreat from strangers.
“You never know which ones will pull a gun on you,” said Pallotto, 45, who has lived next to this mountainous terrain northwest of Tucson for four years.
Illegal border crossings are declining because of tougher enforcement, posting an overall 27 percent drop in the four months ending Jan. 31, the U.S. Border Patrol says. All sectors on the southern border, even the nation’s busiest one, based in Tucson, are showing drops in apprehensions of illegal migrants.
But the crackdown has been accompanied by deadlier tactics by the most daring smugglers, who are now charging higher fees to bring Mexicans and others from Latin America into the United States illegally.
In four recent cases, seven people have been killed in Arizona, mostly in seeming smuggler-on-smuggler violence; one case is also being investigated for possible vigilantism. At Ironwood Forest earlier this month, three suspected immigrants were killed after gunmen apparently tried to steal a rival organization’s load of illegal migrants; one suspected smuggler is now in federal custody.
These cases have received attention in the nation’s busiest state for smuggling, but law-enforcement authorities, politicians and humanitarians are concerned that many instances of lesser violence go unreported.
“We have to be realistic that an unintended consequence [of the crackdown] is that the price goes up, and the unscrupulous people who see no value in human life are going to maximize their profit” by trying to hijack rivals’ deliveries of illegal immigrants, said Alonzo Pena, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s special agent in charge of Arizona.
The rise in violence is no surprise to the Border Patrol, a spokesman said.
“We knew that this was going to be happening. It’s one of the side effects of securing the border,” said spokesman Gustavo Soto of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector. “It’s very difficult to say how long this is going to last.”
Mexican officials said drug smugglers and illegal immigrants typically shared the same routes, but a growing turf war among Mexican drug cartels makes them less likely to tolerate migrants, especially as the U.S. beefs up border manpower.
“These are territories that the narco-traffickers need,” said Dario Garcia, who works in Nogales, Mexico, for Grupo Beta, a Mexican federal agency that assists immigrants. “If they see immigrants disturbing that, what are they going to do? They take the routes away.”
Whereas three years ago the deadly shootings among smugglers were sensationally played out on interstates, the deaths now are unfolding on remote dirt roads and terrain–amid, for example, the saguaro and bushy trees of Ironwood Forest, according to Pima County Sheriff’s Lt. Michael O’Connor.
He said authorities have seen “a drastic increase” in the number of border-crossing homicides in the remote desert. So far in 2007 there have been five illegal immigrants who were victims of homicide compared with four in all of 2006, and six each in 2005 and 2004, said Deputy Dawn Barkman. The figures are just for Pima County, which includes Tucson and extends to the border.
“It’s been year after year after year of people who die of exposure. Now we’re recovering bodies who are the victims of homicide,” O’Connor said.
The Border Patrol credited additional agents, more technology such as unmanned planes and the National Guard deployment along the border for reducing illegal immigration, but immigrant-rights advocates blamed the same measures for “militarizing” the border and creating problems.
“Militarization has created tremendous violence here,” said Isabel Garcia, co-chairwoman of an immigrant-rights group called Derechos Humanos, who said she recently secured a restraining order against someone she labeled “a vigilante.”
“The coyotes,” she continued, referring to smugglers, “absolutely love our border policies. Now, no one can cross without a coyote, and they charge [$2,000, $3,000 or] $4,000, and [the policies] have created this tremendous profit-making industry.”
ICE’s Pena counted about 65 cases between April 2005 and July 2006 in which smugglers fought over illegal immigrants through extortion, hostage-taking, or “rip-offs” of rivals’ loads of illegal immigrants. The killings of migrants became a political embarrassment for Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano earlier this month when she visited Mexico City, where Mexican officials called for an “exhaustive investigation” into the assaults on migrants.
Vigilantism suspected
Among the high-profile incidents cited by authorities is the fatal shooting of three migrants traveling in a vehicle with about 17 others through Ironwood Forest, where gunmen tried to intercept it.
“We don’t know what’s exactly going on,” the Border Patrol’s Soto said. “It may be a combination of alien smugglers telling narcotics smugglers that these are our routes and don’t use them, or vice versa.”
The day before the Ironwood shootings, a 46-year-old Eloy, Ariz., man driving a pickup loaded with illegal immigrants was killed after a confrontation with four gunmen in berets and military-style camouflage near Eloy. Because three of the gunmen were white men and the other a Hispanic man with limited Spanish, authorities are looking at the prospect of vigilantism, according to Pena and Pinal County Sheriff’s spokesman Mike Minter.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says Arizona is its most watched state because of immigration-related violence and vigilante activity, said Mark Potok, director of the center’s hate-group monitoring project.
Last month in Phoenix, a suspected smuggler was fatally shot after an argument with other smugglers in a stash house of illegal immigrants held against their will, officials said. Also last month, two men carrying backpacks of marijuana were killed near Tubac, Ariz., in a likely smuggler-against-smuggler battle, authorities said.
Increased drug smuggling forced Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which sits on the border southwest of Tucson, to close 90 percent of its backcountry two months ago, said park Supt. Kathy Billings.
“There’s a big bumper marijuana crop in Mexico right now coming north,” Billings said. “It’s hard to predict why. What our goal is, is that we don’t want to see anyone hurt.”
Public lands, which along with Native American lands make up most of the Arizona border, are being ravaged by smuggling and government patrols, activists say.
“I think the damage has been colossal, and it’s directly related to an across-the-board failure of U.S. immigration policy,” said Daniel Patterson, a former Bureau of Land Management ecologist who’s now southwest director of the whistle-blower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Some migrants giving up
In Altar, Mexico, a staging area for migrants 60 miles south of the border, several men crowded around a peddler on a recent afternoon to read about the recent slayings in Arizona, their eventual destination.
Fausto Pedroza, 34, had traveled three days from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas with the hope of reaching a factory job in North Carolina. Three times, he had boarded vans that shuttle migrants to the border town of Sasabe, Ariz. Three times, armed robbers near Sasabe took his money and ordered him back to Altar. Pedroza had lost about $250 total.
“I think I’m finished,” he said. “I need to go home.”
One van driver, Angel Monreal, wouldn’t even negotiate a price to travel to Caborca, a violent town nearby.
“I don’t go there now. Impossible. It’s too dangerous,” he said.
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Apprehensions of illegal immigrants
From Oct. 1, 2006-Jan. 31, 2007, by Border Patrol Sector
PERCENT CHANGE FROM SAME PERIOD IN PREVIOUS YEAR %%
San Diego 36,340 -5%
El Centro 16,064 -9%
Yuma 14,681 -62%
Tucson 92,028 -9%
El Paso 22,027 -40%
Marfa 1,748 –31%
Del Rio 6,414 -61%
Laredo 15,662 -23%
McAllen 19,771 -45% %%
Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Chicago Tribune
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Michael Martinez reported from Arizona and Oscar Avila reported from Mexico.
mjmartinez@tribune.com
oavila@tribune.com
