More Violence, One Less Man to Fight It : Border: Thieves have become bolder about preying on would-be crossers. Tobi Cancino stood up to them and paid with his life.

His friends say that Miguel Angel Cancino Rios, better known as Tobi, was a kind of border good Samaritan, intervening on behalf of prospective victims targeted by the thieves who prowl the no-man’s land that is the U.S.-Mexico border strip in San Diego.

“He liked to help people,” recalled Alex Campos, a close friend who says Cancino, a Tijuana resident, sometimes roomed with him in his home in the San Diego border neighborhood of San Ysidro.

“He hated to see people get robbed or hurt out there,” Campos said, gesturing to the border canyons, whose many paths pass immediately by Campos’ driveway. “Tobi hated to see that.”

Last Monday, Cancino, a former car-wash employee and canyon vendor, played the role of border benefactor for the last time. A thief shot him several times in the head and neck in an incident that friends and a witness say occurred after Cancino told several robbers to leave a group of immigrants alone.

Cancino was the fourth and most recent fatality in a bloody two months along a heavily traveled, approximately 2-mile segment of the border, just to the west of the giant Port of Entry at San Ysidro. The violence has the area’s entire community--from undocumented border crossers to vendors to smugglers--jittery about their well-being.

“No one’s safe here now,” said Miguel Angel Ponce, a chunky smuggler who says he has guided groups into San Diego for two years and was alongside Cancino when he was shot.

The two were drinking beer, singing and talking, Ponce said, when the two assailants passed by and one gunned down Cancino after Cancino told them to stop robbing a nearby group of immigrants.

“I’m scared. We’re all scared now,” Ponce said as he stood on a hilltop, about 50 yards from a cross marking another fatal border shooting that took place April 15. A group of half a dozen border crossers waited for him alongside the cross.

Violent thieves have long prowled the canyon-studded border zone, where hundreds of vulnerable would-be immigrants, many carrying their life savings, gather each afternoon, staging for the move north. Many are frightened and unfamiliar with the area; women and children are increasingly represented among them.

Darkness provides convenient cover for criminals, many of whom are glue-sniffers and abusers of other drugs, police say. The robbers usually work in groups, often encircling 15 or 20 crossers at a time. Apart from murder, common crimes reported include rape and robbery. Assailants are usually armed, often with pistols.

But, despite the area’s violent reputation, border crossers and authorities say the past two months have been particularly bloody--especially in the hillside area to the west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

That rugged strip has emerged as perhaps the area’s most concentrated zone of undocumented crossing since U. S. authorities installed stadium-type lighting last year along the flood-control levees of the Tijuana River, a move that prompted many of the migrants who once crossed in the levee area to move west.

The thieves--known as bajadores (literally, “downers,”) or bajapollos (“chicken-downers,” after the pollo, or “chicken” sobriquet widely applied to undocumented border crossers)--have followed the westward shift. And, with more people crossing--U. S. immigration authorities say arrests of undocumented foreigners have increased by more than 50% in San Diego during the past six months--the numbers of thieves appear to have grown commensurately.

“We’re traveling in a group because it’s safer,” explained Josue Hernandez, 18, one of eight Mexican teen-agers en route to Los Angeles who were waiting for darkness near the spot occupied by a memorial to the felled good Samaritan. “The bajadores carry pistols, knives. We only have our hands to fight them,” said Hernandez, who wore a shirt around his head to protect him from the afternoon sun.

One of the most recent victims was a 13-year-old boy, identified as Roberto Camunas Cortes, who was shot in the head on the evening of March 12 at a site near the Tijuana River levees. Robbery is suspected as a motive in that and the other border slayings, police say, although no suspects have been arrested.

Two of the four recent murders occurred along the hillside crossing zone, amid the clumps of sagebrush. The other two took place near the levee, which has long been a trouble spot but is a place where thievery is believed to have decreased since U. S. authorities installed the high-powered lighting last fall.

San Diego police say they have bolstered patrols in the border area because of the violence. A uniformed, six-member Border Crime Intervention Unit regularly makes rounds through the zone.

“From what I’ve observed, there has been an increase in violent crime along the border recently, and we are taking steps to correct that,” said Lt. Bill Brown of the San Ysidro station, who declined to elaborate.

In the view of Roberto Martinez, a longtime immigrant advocate, San Diego police should be doing much more to stem the crime problem against the border crossers. However, he and other activists caution that patrols must be deployed in such a way as to minimize shootings by the police and U. S. immigration agents, who critics say have wrongly shot migrants in the past, mistaking them in the darkness for thieves--an allegation heatedly denied by city and federal officials.

“The police need to be out there doing something, but not shooting innocent people,” said Martinez, border representative for the social-action arm of the Quaker Church. “Right now, the violence is the worst that I’ve seen it in a while.”

Quantifying the extent of the crime problem in the border zone is problematic, prompting a reliance on anecdotal evidence. Most criminal acts, particularly robberies, are not reported to U. S. authorities, officials say.

And, although the bodies are an accurate measure of the homicides, San Diego police last week could provide no separate, recent homicide figures for the border canyons, since those are usually grouped with other homicide statistics.

During 1985 and 1986, considered the busiest and most violent years along the border, thieves killed 15 people along the border in San Diego--nine in 1985 and six in 1986, police say.

Many of the homicides remain unsolved, among them the four most recent slayings. Suspects often flee to Mexico, and witnesses continue on to the United States or return south. Many witnesses are afraid to talk. And, in such a heavily traveled area, authorities say it is almost impossible to properly screen crime scenes for evidence.

“These cases are extremely difficult to investigate,” said Sgt. Jim Duncan of the San Diego police homicide squad. “The bandits can pretty much do as they please. It’s really a kind of no-man’s-land down there.”

On a recent evening, a group of about 15 people en route to Los Angeles said they were robbed by four cholos, or street youths, carrying pistols. The thieves took all of the group’s cash and jewelry. One thug hit a man on the head with the butt of his pistol, but no one else was harmed, the victims said.

“I’m still shaking,” said Donitiola Avila, a 25-year-old woman who was among those robbed. She spoke about half an hour after the robbery as she and the others crouched on a hillside overlooking Monument Road in San Diego.

Half a mile to the northwest, a handcrafted wooden cross and faded flowers mark the spot where Miguel Angel Cancino Rios was gunned down last Monday. The spot is situated between a stream of raw sewage and a graveyard for junked vehicles, many of them formerly used in the human-smuggling enterprise.

“Rest in peace, Tobi,” says the cross’s inscription, hand-lettered by two friends. He was 21.

* PROTEST AT BORDER

A group gathers to call for an end to border violence and to protest the “Light Up the Border Campaign.” B9