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Arizona Dream.
Text: Rene Flores (Radioactive Radio San Diego)
Pictures: Carly Celso (SD Indymedia/ Radioactive Radio San Diego)
Cochise County, Arizona.
A thin, back country road in perhaps the driest area of the continent is the battleground for one of the most bitter fights of our times. Separated by a simple fence that is all too easy to miss for the untrained eye, the Mexican state of Sonora and the US state of Arizona witness an embittered fight over undocumented immigration that transcends the national arena and has become a hot spot on international relations. The Mexican side of the fence remains deserted. On the American side of the fence, several Border Patrol trucks are parked on the hills. Binoculars on hand. Waiting in silence, their thoughts being interrupted by occasional radio transmissions. Big American flags mark the outposts of the Minutemen Project volunteers. The outposts, set up every half a mile, are mostly manned by middle aged males who carry handguns, speak on military code, and greet each other according to their Vietnam regiment. They also wait outside their trailers. Expecting too much of a desert that grows more desolate day by day as the Arizonan summer slowly takes its toll on life and movement. To deter boredom, once in a while they chatter about their yellow vested neighbors, “the anti-American commies,” the ACLU legal observers who also wait on the hills by their rainbow bumper stickers for a human right violation to occur. The Sheriff of Cochise County, who regularly attends Minutemen meetings, sends his men along the dusty, red road several times a day. More clouds of dust are raised by the constant influx of reporters and documentary makers who have swarmed the region since April 1st, the day the Minutemen started to camp by the border to “protect it” against “illegal aliens, terrorists, and drug smugglers.” But at night, silence returns to a desert that existed long before there were fences and walls.
As we pulled over in one of the biggest Minutemen camps, a certain commotion stirs the Minutemen. “The first Minutemen is coming! He’s the founder!.” Jessica Lee, a Tucson based journalist who is guiding our California team explains it all. “Jim Gilchrist, one of the founders of the MMP, is arriving at the camp.” Gilchrist immediately gets off his car to greet the “journalists from California.” As a person aware of the power of media, he promptly shakes all of our hands and prepares to answer our questions. As we get closer to the fence, he points at a hole that somebody cut off on the barb wire. “This is why we are here. This is the reality that the politicians in Washington do not want to see.” As camera flashes start to pour in, he closes the fence by turning the wire around. “Welcome to the United States of America. Thank you for speaking English.” Then, he looks at my camera and naturally gravitates towards it.
“We have sealed the border except by perhaps 2% or 5% not sealed” claims Gilchrist. “We’ve proved the point, our physical presence by the border takes care of half the problem. The other half the problem is internal law enforcement. And we’ll deal with that later under another minute man project, which will be all white collar. It won’t be at the border at all, it’ll be all internal activism. We’ll be after unscrupulous slave traders, exploiters of economic refugees that come through this fence being exploited by the people who want to pay them dirt cheap wages and put an American out of work. Now you have an unemployed American or another American working for dirt cheap wages and you have an illegal alien or economic refugee working for dirt cheap wages, and the employer, the slave master if you will of the 21st century laughs all the way to the bank. So, we are going to nail his fanny butt good. No pun intended on those words.”
I asked Gilchrist his opinion on Mexican culture and if he had any Mexican acquaintances. He said that he was a bit disappointed that the Minutemen only had a couple dozen “American Mexican” volunteers, but that he understood that since they were standing by the Mexican border this could be a sensitive issue for them. “This is not about Mexico, is about enforcing the law. If we were up in the Canadian border, I could guarantee you that half of our base would be American Mexicans.My son in law, married to my daughter for nine years, is Mexican. He sides with me but he is American Mexican. His parents immigrated to Texas, I mean his grandparents… he’s all American, he’s an Air Force Veteran, has no interest in going to Mexico, has no loyalty to Mexico, his loyalty is to the United States. This is not a racial issue; it is a rule of law issue. .”
Gilchrist considers himself a political “hybrid,” “a conservative on family, God, and country,” but also a liberal “who will attack corporate enterprise very easily when I see abuse like the slave master that we’ve created in this century… I have no respect for companies like Tyson Foods, processing companies that have put so many Americans out of work because they want to make an extra buck.” He is resentful both at the incommensurable power of economic and political elites which constantly undermine democracy and economic equality and at the constant influx of foreign peoples who are reluctant to assimilate into the Anglo American society and choose to keep some of their cultural heritage and that are changing the “America he envisioned when he was a child.”
“We are really going to be a nation ruled by law rather than at the whim of a mob of illegal aliens coming from foreign countries, who have a lot of influence or, a rule of tyrants like a lot of politicians that we have in office who really are so disconnected from their electorate that we have to come out here and plead for enforcement of the laws ourselves. Something that we would rather prefer not to do. We would rather be going to Tahiti on a vacation. Or Mexico.”
Jazmin Morelos, a 20 year old woman from Tijuana, spent almost an hour talking to one of the MMP members before his shift change. She described to him the dire situations that most migrants face back home; the lack of opportunities, the scarcity of jobs, and the impossibility of supporting a family. After some time, the Nebraska man told her that he had never heard of such conditions before and that if he were under the same circumstances “he would probably also take his children and attempt to cross the desert” as migrants do.
Jack, an armed middle aged man from Louisiana who transports chemical substances down the Mississippi River for a living, explained to me that he was not a racist. For after all, “we all bleed red. We all are human beings with needs and desires.” As we were leaving the camp, he came to me to warn me about the Arizona Guard down in Douglas. The Arizona Guard is an openly racist militia which has announced that the Minutemen are “responsible citizens” but that it “takes an army to do the job” of “sealing the border.” They consider the MMP to be a failure and will set up their own operations on the border in July after the Minutemen leaves. According to Jack, the Arizona Guard has tried to contact them several times but every time they know it’s them, they hang up the phone. “We want nothing to do with them. They are not good people.”
When asked about macroeconomics, Gilchrist concedes that he hasn’t read “the words of Nafta and Cafta to realize the full consequences, the precise consequences, but what I get out of it from what I’ve read is that its almost a conspiracy between the political powers and economic powers around the world to have a global corporation, in other words, probably something like a new world order, one global powerful corporate enterprise. Instead of countries we will have corporations that have all appearances of a country, the borders will be there on a map but will not exist other than being a line on a map We will exploit the poor from Mexico and the new poor in the US, new poor in Europe and in Asia. And those new poor will be indentured slaves of a very small percentage of incredibly wealthy trillionaires, which is the way they want it and as along as they have that kind of economic power they literally can control police forces, armies, navies. Sort of what they are doing now. It is now in the embryo stage, in 20 years it will be a reality... The congress is there to represent us but really is oppressing us."
When it comes to economics, Gilchrist’s solution to inequality does not differ that much from a liberal analysis, “we have to take from the rich to give to the poor and create a middle class. If you create a strong Middle class, you a have a very strong low crime country. It works every time. As our middle class shrinks, the crime rate will increase. Our respect for law and order will diminish. We will again be a nation of slaves, citizen slaves, and illegal immigrant slaves run by corporate enterprises without a conscious who are again just as morally cheap as the politicians that they contribute to. Who keep passing laws and ignoring enforcement of the laws for the benefit of the slave traders and themselves.”
“If they are so concerned about the abuses of capitalists and bankers,” responds Ray Ybarra, the head of the ACLU in Douglas, Az, “why don’t they take their guns and binoculars and go to the headquarters of those businessmen instead of camping out in the border hunting down defenseless immigrants. They are essentially putting the blame on the victims. It is too easy for the vigilantes to target vulnerable people of color.”
Ray Ybarra, a Stanford law student, is leading the ACLU effort to observe and document the Minutemen actions at the border to prevent any human rights abuse. Ybarra, almost by himself, had to convince and organize a hesitant ACLU that initially had decided not to get involved in the issue, fearing violence and not being able to protect its volunteers.
There have been some documented abuses besides the one the mainstream media decided to pick up about the immigrant detained by a couple of MMP and who was forced to wear a demeaning t-shirt. Ybarra himself has filed assault charges against the MMP.
Ybarra is a Douglas, Az native, member of a prominent local family which has decided to come out on the issue, a decision that according to other locals who understand the ins and outs of border life, might be even dangerous for them.
But according to the ACLU, the Minutemen activities are not legal. The Minutemen attempt to detain undocumented immigrants by claiming is a citizen’s arrest is “not justified” because the misdemeanor has to be committed in their presence and has to amount to a breach of peace. “It appears the Minutemen will be stopping individual’s miles away from the border and never witness anyone cross an international line.... Even if private citizens were to witness an individual crossing an international line in the middle of the desert, this misdemeanor would not amount to a breach of the peace.”
For Jim Gilchrist, the Minutemen is not here to detain anyone. “Our philosophy is shaped after the New York City Angels. Observe, report, let law enforcement do their job. Do not interfere. We are not arresting anyone.”
“If I’m walking around the desert” responded an ACLU volunteer, “and a group of heavily armed individuals surround me, I probably will feel intimidated, unable and unwilling to freely leave. That constitutes an illegal detention.”
“We haven’t had more occurrences,” explains Ybarra, “because immigrants have heard about the Minutemen and are not coming through this area anymore. That’s one of the reasons so many Minutemen have left so soon, out of boredom.”
The Ybarra family of Douglas, Az constitute a rare occurrence in this border community because they are probably the only natives becoming involved in this issue. Most people around here do not usually take sides. Most people involved (Border Patrol agents, Minutemen, ACLU volunteers, Press) are from out of town, and even out of state.
“The border communities,” reveals a Douglas native, ”are mostly apathetic about the immigration issue. In a sense, that’s all they know. It is the way things are and have always been. Many do not really take a stand. It is mostly outsiders who have set up this circus. The only locals getting involved is the Ybarra family who is strongly coming out to defend the migrants, even at their own risk. It’s really like an artificial situation right now, since the Minutemen arrived.”
Aware of possible pr issues, the Border Patrol assigned 150 more agents to Cochise County since the MMP arrived, in an area where the Border Patrol is already ever present, the law of the land. “It just would not look good,” she explains, “if the Minutemen start catching immigrants and it takes the Border Patrol hours to get there. They are trying to save face.”
A journalist based in Tucson agrees. “Here at the border things are not that simple. Sometimes, a certain ranch is looking for more workers. Then the INS announces they will play golf on Sunday. The Coyotes understand this, and in a week the ranch has enough workers for the season. Sometimes the INS announces which trails they will patrol. They all are part of this ecosystem.”
“Those folks at Tombstone (where many anti-immigrant groups thrive) are not immersed in the border life. They are hours away from it and do not really understand it. Douglas (Arizona) and Agua Prieta (Sonora) are different. There’s a constant flow here, going back and forth. The border is just a wall that divides a single city, populated by the same families. It’s a feel of continuity.”
In Agua Prieta, Sonora some civic leaders are organizing a boycott against the Minutemen, whom they describe as “immigrant hunters” and “civilians snipers.” Don Jose is the owner of an ice cream parlor in downtown Agua Prieta. He supports the boycott and describes the type of relationship this Mexican community of 150,000 has with its Arizonan sister of 20,000 in familiar terms.
“We are the same families. I have cousins and friends on both sides of the fence. My wife goes shopping there everyday. Actually, right before crossing the border into Agua Prieta, you will see all these shopping carts on the side. Douglas businesses depend on Mexican money. When we have had bad times, their businesses have closed down. And that’s what we want to say with this boycott against the Minutemen. You need us, but how come you just want to take our money but do not want anything to do with our people?.” A group of young girls dressed up in quinceanera attires stop by the ice cream parlor looking for relief in a hot April day. As Don Jose holds their money on his hand he adds, “maybe this is the only language they will understand. Dollars and pennies. This boycott is to prevent Mexican people from shopping in Douglas, but this is not against Douglas businesses, we just want them to put pressure on their authorities to stop these vigilantes.” The customers leave and Don Jose becomes more outspoken. “Listen, I often complain about insecurity, but that doesn’t mean I will go around Agua Prieta, gun in hand, arresting people on the street. There are authorities for that, with the proper training. What the Minutemen are doing is vigilantism.”
Some Arizona ranchers would disagree. They often complain that the constant flow of migrant workers is upsetting the delicate balance of an already fragile ecological environment. Their ranches are often trashed and polluted by migrant workers. They claim that it is hard to keep livestock when their fences are constantly being torn apart by “coyotes and drug smugglers” and that since their land value has plummeted they would not be able to sell their properties. On top of that, there have been reports that migrants sometimes barbeque their calves and chickens.
“But how can you compare a chicken with the life of a human being?” asks Jesus, a former migrant guide (coyote) and current business owner in Agua Prieta, Sonora. Jesus became orphan at age 6 and had to support his four brothers by himself. He crossed the border for the first time when he was 11. He knows every single trail from Brownsville to San Diego, which areas to avoid, what to bring.
“The most dangerous thing out there for an immigrant is not the Migra (INS) or the desert, but the ranchers. If they get a hold of you, you might not make it alive. Nobody will find out about it.” As he bakes hamburgers and tacos for late night customers he describes the long journeys across the desert that he led years ago. He characterizes the Chinese as the best clients for they pay the most money, while the Central Americans usually have less resources and if caught they are deported back to their countries unless they have a fake Mexican I.D. According to Jesus, it takes about $1200 to go across through Agua Prieta. But the guides (coyotes) only keep a small fraction of it ($100) even if they risk their own lives, for behind them there is always a “money man” who invests the money for the enterprise and keeps most of the rewards. The rest of the money goes for the driver on the US side who picks up the immigrants and takes them to a city. Since that is the riskier job in terms of jail time, he takes the biggest cut. When asked about the desert, Jesus becomes silent knowing that sometimes silence is louder than words. “I’ve spent two weeks without eating or drinking... Drinking whatever water we could find.”
“With all the vigilantes out there, the Mexican authorities are doing an operation in Agua Prieta so immigrants no longer come here to cross. They go down to Altar, which is a longer journey across the desert, perhaps 3 or 4 days, if the coyote knows the route.”
Jesus stops as a group of middle aged men enter his establishment. The tallest one asks for 20 burritos and a few sodas. Jesus can recognize a border crosser when he sees one. He adds a gallon of water courtesy of the house. The men look as tense as the Sonoran night. They are eager to hear our conversation but avoid any eye contact as if they were already hiding behind cacti. Their eyes offer a mix of courage, fear, and vertigo. A chicken leg remains untouched in my plate, deeply fried and becoming colder by the minute.
The men say goodbye nervously, and promise to come back in the morning for their breakfast. As they leave, Jesus continues, “sometimes they come back with their shoes full of blood. Nobody was made to walk in the desert. Especially coming from the South.”Jesus relates the story of a group of Mayan immigrants, from the heart of the Guatemalan jungle, who were abandoned by their guide in the desert because they wouldn’t listen to him. “They couldn’t speak Spanish. Only their Indian tongue. Some didn’t make it back. They had never seen the desert.”
“The most intense thing that I’ve seen, something I will never forget,” Jesus says in a painful voice,” is a Mother leaving his son in the desert.”
“Sometimes, there’s a pregnant woman who gets behind or you become injured and cannot walk any longer. During those times, you want to be picked up by the Border Patrol. But if they find you, they might not pick you up for they prefer to go after the ones who are still walking, ahead of you. It is a way to punish you.”
Many locals feel ambivalent about the Border Patrol. In an area of scarce jobs and low economic activity, sometimes it’s the only good paying jobs around. At the same time, some resent their omnipresence and their alleged abuses.
“Currently, our group is investigating abuses by the Border Patrol” relates Walt S. a local Arizonan activist. “From illegal detentions to harassments. An elder Native American woman who has been very outspoken against the Border Patrol abuses was visited in their home by BP agents who handcuffed her, despite her suffering from arthritis, detained her for a few hours, and then just left without charging her with anything. Pure intimidation tactics. Around here, they feel they are the law of the land. ”
I told him that the first night we were in Douglas, AZ we saw some Border Patrol agents arresting an individual by the border. One of us took a picture from inside our moving vehicle. Almost immediately, a BP truck started to follow us around town. Tailgating us as we made left and right turns and using his headlights on us. After 10 minutes another truck joined him, but eventually let us go.
A restaurant owner in Bisbee, AZ (about 20 minutes from Douglas) complains that the Border Patrol agents also contribute to the gentrification of the area. “When you have these agents making federal wages and buying two or three houses a pop, prices will not remain stable for long. It is really affecting our community. And now they have announced that 400 more agents will be brought to Cochise County alone.”
He relates the existence of an underground network of people who help immigrants leave the area to avoid detention. “Nobody knows who they are. But it’s like the underground railroad. It is the same fight.”
For another Arizona activist the connection is clear. “This is the Civil Right movement of our time. This is it. The question is, will our generation be up to the challenge?” She is part of No More Deaths, an inter-faith effort composed mainly by Methodist and Presbyterian Churches to try to prevent any more migrant deaths. They plan to set up “Arks of the Covenant,”moveable camps in the desert from which search and rescue patrols will originate. They will also set up migrant shelters on the border and “samaritan desert patrol.”
“We know there are macroeconomic reasons why these economic refugees are coming north. Their own economies are being devastated by US foreign policy, the IMF, and global corporations. We know our efforts in the desert won’t solve the problem. We just don’t want any more deaths.”
Jim Gilchrist has bigger plans in store too. In October, the Minutemen Project plans on launching a 14,000 volunteer operation to seal the border from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California. They will have better radio communications and perhaps even “satellite access.”
In a ACLU press conference, Michele Landis Dauber, from Stanford University, offered her own conclusion, “we don’t have to provide an answer to question the Minutemen. We just know that whatever the right answer is, this is not it.”
More information:
Arizona Indymedia
ACLU
http://www.nomoredeaths.org / http://www.nomasmuertes.org
The MinuteMen Project
Special thanks to Jessica Lee with Arizona IMC for her invaluable help.
 e-mail:: reneflores79@hotmail.com
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the best account i have yet seen on this whole issue. not only gave me a little more sympathy with the minutemen, reminding me that nothing is black or white, also increased my understanding of the dangers. that migrants will be forced to walk an extra 3 or 4 days in the desert is truly scary. and it all boils down to the bigger economic picture. i loved this story, will start emailing it immediately. you all deserve a pulitzer. keep it up, indymedia forever.
sasha b
awesome, awesome, this is great and thorough journalism....would never have found anything like this in mainstream media. Incredibly balanced and level headed....one of the best articles I have read on Indymedia.
Kevin M.
Thank you so much for this. Stay safe and keep up the good work!
Elliot D. Crooks
The struggle for folks crossing and being terrorized, coupled with the tradition of racism is one of the central themes of oppressed communities and the apartheid-like structures at present force any media to confront the issue properly. I felt the article and hope that we keep working towards having the organizational base that is necessary to confront this issues head on, with direct action, civil disobediance and radical counter proposal for a dignified existance.
roman
> This is not about Mexico, is about enforcing the law. If we were up in
> the Canadian border, I could guarantee you that half of our base would
> be American Mexicans.
But they're NOT on the Canadian border, are they? That's the point, isn't it? Which border do real-life terrorists cross? That would be the Canadian one, wouldn't it? But Canadians don't annoy white American xenophobes. Canadian "illegals" have no trouble passing as Americans. Most Americans have no idea what a Canadian accent sounds like.
Nationalism is evil. It is too a black-and-white issue.
crazy man
In my opinion, there is certainly an element of Anglo nationalism and/or xenophobia in the Minutemen. If you notice when Gilchrist describes his "American-Mexican" son-in-law, he immediatly makes clear that he is fully assimilated into Anglo culture ("doesn't speak Spanish, has no interest in going to Mexico, has no loyalty to Mexico..."). Basically, that he is an Anglo person with a Spanish surname. That's an acceptable "Mexican," the one that has been colonized.
In the same interview, he complains that assimilation is not taking place as much as before, he longs for the "melting pot" (which means that everybody melts down to become anglicized), and condemns non-Anglo persons for retaining some of their cultural heritage.
The Minutemen leader leans to the left on economic issues, but on cultural aspects he is clearly, in my opinion, for Anglo supremacy and assimilation (well within the right wing).
This is of course an attitude shared in many left wing circles ranging from Union halls to activist groups. We can be "multicultural" as long as we all communicate in English and are under English customs and traditions. Other than that, you can have your cinco de mayo parade.
Rene F
Renee,
I'm wondering if while you were there in Cochise Co. you learned more in specific about any plans for MMP operations in TX? I read what you'd reported, but was wondering if you had any more "specifics" that you could pass on? ANything will be much appreciated, in that there are some groups are trying to get a jump on these groups before they "effectively" spring into their observation posts. Thanks
jeff hutton
jeff
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