Smith: An Arizona Perspective

3 days ago 34

How would you feel if five government agents suddenly surrounded your car and said they were going to search it?

I was thrilled. For fifteen years, I have been crossing the border into Mexico – maybe two hundred crossings – and never has anyone shown any interest in whether or not I or the other drivers were taking weapons into Mexico, the weapons that have made the cartels more powerful than most police forces there.

This encounter took place on April 20, Easter Day at the entry to tiny Sasabe, Mexico, and the agents were with the US Customs and Border Protection.

In the early stages of President Trump’s demands that Mexico do more to control the movement of drugs, especially fentanyl, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested that there were two actions we could take – control the movement of weapons and reduce the demand for drugs. Is the checking for weapons actually going to happen?

On January 31, I crossed at the Santa Teresa port of entry and two agents asked me about weapons. Naturally I assumed that this was a new policy of ours, prompted by Sheinbaum’s comment. Not so as I learned via a number of subsequent crossings.

So this Sasabe experience was a first and hopefully not the last, I thought as the five Customs and Border Protection agents – four men and a woman – rumbled through my car and even checked under the spare tire

Was this for real or were these agents just bored given the almost total lack of traffic there? After all, Sasabe was the scene of tremendous cartel violence several years ago and almost everyone in the town fled. I only saw at most twenty people, plus ruined houses, shuttered buildings, many stray dogs and even a few horses roaming the streets. There were numerous small shrines including one of La Santa Muerte, the alleged protector of the narcos on the south end of town.

Arizona offers another perspective on these border issues and on this trip I also had a chance to visit Nogales and then go out in the desert south of Tucson with Alvaro Enciso, the man who has placed hundreds of crosses where migrants have died.

Several thoughts.

First, the border has been pretty well shut down. At the Border Patrol checkpoint near Arivaca, about half way between Tucson and the border, the agent stopped me to say how bored he was and kept up a conversation until another car arrived several minutes later.

All the migrant shelters in Nogales, Mexico have closed except for the very impressive Casa de la Misericordia which was housing about 55 migrants when I visited on April 21. This has been true in El Paso for many months and in Deming, New Mexico and Palomas, Mexico as well.

Sister Lika is the Director of La Casa de la Misericordia and it is the best organized of the many shelters I have seen with an ample kitchen and dining area, a library with books for different age groups, class rooms also for different age groups with their art work on the wall, a shop where a young man was making guitars, a play area for kids, and separate housing areas for men, women and kids. Lika herself ( Alma Angelica Macias Lika) is also both an artist and a musician.

Although Nogales is a bustling city of about 317,000 people with a booming industrial sector on its south end, it still has a strong underlying cartel influence according to Lorenzo Sandoval, my cab driver. One example is the Santa Muerte church right in the middle of downtown. There is also an area by the highway south of town where there are numerous Santa Muerte shrines or capillas, more than when I was last there. A young man named Alejandro was cleaning them.

Fortunately, there is no cartel infighting and the city seems relatively safe.

On April 22, we went out into the desert with Alvaro Enciso to repair several crosses he had placed years ago and add some new ones. Enciso migrated to the US from Colombis many years ago to get a better education, ended up in the Army, served in Vietnam, went to college on the GI bill, then worked for the US government before eventually moving to Tucson as an artist. He makes the crosses himself and estimates that he has now placed more than 1,500, mostly in Arizona but also on the edge of El Paso.

Arizona is obviously closer to home for him and he has tremendous support from the Pima County Medical Examiner as well as the non-profit Tucson Samaritans. There is a network of support in the Tucson area that I haven’t seen in New Mexico or Texas.

In short, I saw the possible beginning of a gun control program, a border that is largely under control, a shelter that is a model for migrant shelters, the underlying but momentarily calm cartel presence, and the heroic work of a man who came here as a young migrant and is committed to paying respects to those who died on the way.

Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by Morgan Smith, a writer who travels to the border at least monthly to document conditions there and to assist various humanitarian programs. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author. Smith can be reached by email via: Morgan-smith@comcast.net.