A long, hot ‘season of death’

BACK AT HOME, the TV news has been speculating over what sort of weather catastrophes the summer months might bring to an already battered Gulf Coast. But here, in this grimy desert town 65 miles south of the Arizona border, no one has to guess about what sort of horrors are in store. They’re already happening.

Triple-digit temperatures mark the annual, inevitable spiral toward the scorching heart of what’s called the “season of death” -- the time of year when the death toll of those trying to cross the border soars along with the mercury. Ever since the Clinton administration initiated (and the Bush White House extended) an enforcement blockade of border cities such as San Diego and El Paso, funneling migrants into ever more perilous and isolated desert routes, the body count has skyrocketed tenfold in a decade.

Last year, a record 500 deaths were recorded along the Southwest border, more than half of them in Arizona. This year’s total is already on track to be the same or worse; as of late May, the U.S. Border Patrol had tallied 210 deaths since Oct. 1, a 20% increase over the previous year.

This town of 15,000 people has become a major launching pad for many of the unauthorized immigrants who provide fodder for these grim statistics. I arrived with a group of journalists in an air-conditioned van, with six bottles of water per head for the two-hour trip each way. Outside, the temperature was 112 degrees.

I had been here before, in January, and I knew the migrants coming the other way on the road travel in much different conditions. Paying as much as $2,000 each to their smugglers, they’re loaded 25 or more at a time into battered, windowless vans that carry them along a two-hour, brain-shaking ride on a rutted dirt road. The vans come and go as quickly as the shuttle cars into Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

Just short of the border, the migrants unload, fan out and disperse into smaller groups. By nightfall they’re following their “guides,” trekking on foot two, three, sometimes five days or more, attempting to penetrate the geographic and political membrane that separates them from the promise of something better. Through the winter and spring, as many as 3,500 a day made the trip up this road. More than 100,000 a month.

But it’s one thing to make the crossing in January or even March, when the temperature barely tops the 70s. It’s quite another at this time of year, when walkers need, by most estimates, a gallon of water an hour -- but can’t possibly carry that much because each gallon weighs 8 pounds. And yet, when we arrived at Altar’s central plaza, there stood the usual clumps of migrants ready to make their contact and head for the border. Traffic was down from earlier in the year. But local authorities said it was still running as high as 750 people a day, 5,000 a week, 20,000 a month, right through broiler temperatures and in spite of the flame-tipped shut-the-border rhetorical gusts blowing from Washington.

“This town is the waiting room to go north,” Altar’s ex-mayor, Francisco Garcia, told us as we visited the church-sponsored migrant shelter he now manages. We sipped on ice-cooled grape Kool-Aid as he predicted that proposed new fences and citizen-soldiers north of the border would do nothing to tamp down the flow, nor the deaths. “What all this will mean is simply more lists of names, more statistics,” he said. “However many people are dying now, there will just be more. As they try to shut off the flow from here, it will not stop. It will just move into even more dangerous mountains and deserts.”

We headed for the flophouses where migrants crash on the floor or on wooden slat bunks -- stacked four high -- as they await their moment to cross. The one I went to was a hellish tenement a few blocks from the main plaza where about 25 people were staying. If there were that many in this one sweltering hellhole, how many were there in total among the other hundred or so “guest houses” in the town? It was hard to fathom so many people would be willing to walk for days through the scorching desert, brazenly defying dehydration and death.

Difficult to fathom, that is, until you actually start talking to the migrants. Five young men from Oaxaca stood bare-chested in the oven-hot hovel for which they paid $4 each to sleep on a wooden bunk. Tonight, they hoped, they would find a coyote to get them safely across the border for about $800 a head. “We’re going to a rock mine in Oklahoma,” said one of the young men. “I worked there for two years and made $400 a week. Back home we can make only $60.”

Others tell me they are going to Georgia, New Jersey, California, Florida. They all know people roast and bake easily this time of year in the desert. They all have shared stories about the “soldiers” they hear are arriving on the other side. None of them are deterred. “Our need is great,” said a dark-skinned young man from Chiapas.

The day before, in Tucson, we heard the same notion in more clinical terms from UC San Diego demographer Wayne Cornelius. “Statistically insignificant” is how he described the effect that the increased enforcement schemes of the last 15 years, as well as widespread awareness of the danger of crossing, have had on the actual flow of migrants from the impoverished south.

With the Mexican rural economy in freefall, and with wages 10 times higher in the U.S., massive immigration would continue unabated -- no matter the barriers nor the temperature. Meanwhile, a new study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms the overwhelming number of border deaths are from heat exposure

As we got ready to depart Altar in the afternoon, we rejoined another group of reporters that had split off from us. They had gone to a different flophouse a few blocks away and had now returned, some of them visibly shaken.

They had also found a small crowd of migrants readying to cross. Among them, a 19-year-old newlywed couple from southern Mexico and their 7-month-old infant. My colleagues asked the young parents if they really knew how hot it was. Did they know how much water they would have to carry? How many days they would really have to walk? And did they really want to risk the life of their baby? After so many questions, my colleagues told me, the couple just hung their heads and stared at the floor.

There were no answers to be had. This imperiled young family was only the latest among millions just like them to have been swept up in a global economic tsunami far from their control. In his startling “The Devil’s Highway,” an account of the deaths of a group of 14 migrants in the Arizona desert in 2001, writer Luis Alberto Urrea perfectly captured the tragic cycle that marks each summer on the border:

“It is then that lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, strawberries are all ready to be picked. Arkansas chickens are ready to be plucked. Cows are waiting in Iowa and Nebraska to be ground into hamburger, and grills are ready in McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s and Taco Bell for the ground meat to be cooked. KFC is waiting for its Mexican-plucked, Mexican-slaughtered chickens to be fried by Mexicans. And the Western desert is waiting, too -- its temperatures soaring, a fryer in its own right.”

Before we headed back north, we sat under shade tarps in the main plaza. The Coca-Colas were cold and plentiful. The lemon- and mango-flavored popsicles we bought helped quench the pounding heat and got us ready for the dry ride home.

Just north of us in Tucson, the county medical examiner also had heat on his mind. His office recently bought a 55-foot refrigerated trailer truck. He’s using it to store the bodies of migrants that have now overflowed his morgue.