The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [87]
Agent John Bergkretter designed a lifesaving tower. It was an engineering marvel. Thirty feet tall, with a crown of aluminum reflectors hanging like fishing lures and flashing in the sun, each tower has a beacon that flashes every ten seconds. Visible day and night. Each tower is powered by a solar panel and a battery. On the pole, there are signs with illustrations, in Spanish and English.
Like Nahum Landa’s testimony, it’s a kind of found poetry:
ATTENTION!
You cannot walk to safety from
this point! You are in danger
of Dying if you do not
summon help!
If you need help,
Push red button.
US Border Patrol
Will arrive in 1 Hour.
Do Not Leave This Location!
The towers are raised in such a fashion that walkers can see them from a distance, and each leads to the next. Ultimately, the towers will lead from Mexico to the I-8 corridor.
Each tower costs six thousand dollars.
Environmentalists tried to stop them: towers would ruin the landscape. Critics railed against the towers, like they criticized the Samaritan groups out rescuing walkers, or the humanitarian outfits placing bottled water and canned food in marked locations for them, and still, conservative pundits try to get their constituents to believe the American Taxpayer, that mythical and handy beast, is funding lifesaving towers foisted on them by the lily-livered INS, which, by the way, allowed hijackers to blow up New York. Instead of closed and secure borders, “orange freeway cones,” comfort stations, and expensive light towers.
Wrong.
In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained, and paid for out-of-pocket by those bleeding-heart liberals, the Border Patrol agents themselves.
In Arizona, critics are more direct. Immigration protests have a homegrown cowboy feel to them. Toxic materials appear in jugs that look like drinking water. Humane Borders’ water stations are vandalized, the three-hundred-gallon tanks broken open so they run dry. Small groups of Mexicans are found tied and shot in the head.
The Border Patrol is sentimental, though, and they keep building towers.
On June 14, 2002, the beacons got their first test. A group of three walkers was overwhelmed by the 107-degree heat. At 9:48 in the morning, they hit the panic button. Old boys from Wellton were on the road in seconds. They were at the tower in twenty-four minutes. Like the Wellton 26, these walkers had left a group behind—seventeen more walkers were tracked and bagged by the cutters. It took one hour from button-push to rescue.
In the year after the Wellton 26 lost their way, Tucson sector racked up deaths in the hundreds. Yuma sector managed to reduce the season’s death rate to nine.
Consul Flores Vizcarra says it isn’t the desert that kills immigrants. It isn’t Coyotes. It isn’t even the Border Patrol.
“What kills the people,” he says, “is the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border.”
Firebrand lawyer and human rights activist Isabel García is the spokeswoman for Derechos Humanos, and cochair of the Arizona Border Rights Project. She is seen as a beacon in her own right. She has battled the Migra for long hard years. Towers? The Border Patrol’s lifesaving tactics are “like throwing a child in the ocean and then throwing in floaties afterward. It’s not sufficient, and we think it’s disingenuous to say they’re making it safer. Our border policies are the direct cause of those fourteen deaths.”
And, “For the U.S. to attempt to put all of the blame for these deaths on one individual or two individuals or three individuals really sidesteps their responsibility in this.”
Mendez could have used her on his team.
During this whole event, the rescue, the trials, and the aftermath, an average of one person a day died somewhere on the border, trying to get those last few miles toward the big American lights.
Perhaps, ultimately, what is so remarkable about the Mexican border is not how many of Them have come across, but how many of Them have not. It is not hard to