Arizona border town wants wall of protection : Residents of tiny Naco see the proposed steel barrier as a way to block a wave of violence, crime.

When Gerald Eberwein talks about a proposal by the U.S. Border Patrol to build a high, solid-steel wall along the Mexican border here, he bristles with anger and enthusiasm.

“Why isn’t it up yet?” asked the 58-year-old retired police officer. “We need it. The Mexican wall will stop Mexican bullets.”

Like many residents of this tiny, dust-blown town in southeastern Arizona, Eberwein is trying to live in what some liken to a war zone.

One night several months ago, Eberwein, a Vietnam War veteran, was eating a sandwich in his kitchen when he heard a familiar sound: machine-gun fire.

He said he crawled to the phone in an adjoining room, called 911 and tried to convince the operator that there was shooting.

“Here, listen!” he shouted, holding up the phone. The rear of Eberwein’s house looks out across 60 feet of shrub to the border. A police car in pursuit of drug smugglers was roaring along the dirt road that parallels the fence on the Mexican side.

The operator asked the color of the car being chased.

“Do you think I’m stupid enough to get up and look out the window when someone is firing a machine gun? I told him I could describe the tiles on my floor because that’s where my face was,” Eberwein said.

Residents here say that falling asleep to the rat-tat-tat of drug shootouts in Naco, Mexico, is becoming increasingly common.

So are home burglaries on the American side, carried out by bold cross-border thieves. In some places entire sections of the international fence have been cut away, leaving holes large enough for a truck.

The wall is intended to take back control of the border from the criminals.

“This is a transit area for drugs coming north and stolen vehicles going south,” said Border Patrol spokesman Steve McDonald. “Our motivation is to enforce U.S. immigration laws that are being regularly violated and attach some integrity to the border.”

The proposed wall would stand eight to 10 feet high and extend for 1 1/2 miles on both sides of the U.S. port of entry. It would be built of quarter-inch-thick steel panels used by the military as portable aircraft landing mats.

McDonald said a mile of wall would take three to four months to build. Construction in Naco is expected to start by January.

A similar Border Patrol proposal in two other Arizona border towns has aroused community opposition.

Nogales Mayor Jose Canchola says a wall would have a devastating effect on relations with the city’s neighbors in Nogales, Mexico. “To build a wall you can’t see through and serves no purpose other than to tell people we don’t want you, doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.

The City Council in Douglas, Ariz., also opposed the idea recently in a non-binding 4-3 vote.

In Naco, Ariz., population 800, such dissent is scarce. Jorge Valenzuela, a leader of the Naco Community Assn., says he believes the difference is that Naco is an unincorporated town without its own police force.

It is patrolled by a thinly staffed sheriff’s department responsible for all of Cochise County, which sometimes means long delays before calls are answered.

“We had a debate about the wall with some people from Douglas, and they said we were racist, white-supremacist bigots,” said Valenzuela, 40, a technical writer. “How can they say that? We’re 90% Hispanic.”

Libby Wells, a longtime Naco resident, agrees: “We’re not anti-Mexican, we’re anti-raider.”

Support for the wall is strong in part because of a string of terrifying robberies that began in January and continued into the spring.

A gang of intruders, wearing ski masks and carrying assault rifles, burst into six homes in the area around Bisbee Junction and Naco, bound victims, robbed them and fled into Mexico in the victims’ cars.

The raids have stopped, and two men have been charged in the crimes. Life has returned to normal, although that is a relative term in a town that, before World War II, was recognized by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as home to the world’s only bulletproof hotel.

Burglaries have become so frequent that residents refuse to leave their homes unwatched for longer than a few minutes. Eberwein’s house has been hit three times in the past month. To get groceries, he makes quick 7 a.m. dashes to the local Safeway, figuring that the thieves are still asleep.

“We’ve never been broken into, but we feel like we’re living in jail,” said Barbara Dominguez, who has lived in Naco with her husband, Joe, for more than 40 years. “Our back yard looks like a concentration camp.”

Valenzuela said he believes that the wall will funnel the drug runners and raiders to areas farther from town, making them cross open desert to get to and from Naco, and will prevent thieves from tossing goods to confederates across the border.

But until it is up, Valenzuela, who on five occasions has chased thieves away from his car, says he will continue to investigate every nighttime sound.

“I can’t take a chance with the two kids in the house,” he said. “I have to get up, get my cordless phone and my pistol. I have a shotgun now too. . . . I think you’ll find that everyone in town is armed.”