Waiting for Death in the Desert

On his third day in Windmill Canyon, Fausto Uriarte Tizoc’s water was gone. His throat burned. Even if someone had been within shouting distance, he couldn’t have made a sound.

He put the only liquid available to him, his urine, in his water jug-- and drank.

Over the coming days, the 54-year-old man ate anything he could find: weeds and roots, worms, ants and beetles. He sucked the juice out of succulents. In the mornings, he crawled farther into the canyon and went from rock to rock, searching for puddles of stagnant water.

During the day, he thought of his family as he watched jetliners pass overhead. At night, he listened to coyotes and the wildcats he thought of as “pumas.”

If he survived, he promised, he would light candles to the saints watching over him.

“I thought I was going to die there,” he said June 7 from his bed in a Coronado hospital. “I asked to be forgiven for my sins.”

With scores of migrants dying each year during their illegal crossings to the United States through increasingly treacherous territory, Uriarte’s story is the tale of one who happened to survive.

In the darkness of the early morning of May 29, Uriarte stepped off a bus that had carried him into a desolate stretch east of Tijuana and turned to the north.

The small man with dark, wrinkled skin and hair more white than black had made the crossing over 3,500-foot Otay Mountain many times. It would be a hard journey, he knew. But in a day he expected he’d be back in El Norte and ready to join the line of day laborers looking for work.

He disappeared into the wilderness, trudging over 1 1/2 miles of rocks, steep canyons and tangles of fallen pine trees. Progress was slow and the sun was high when it happened: He stepped on a loose rock and slid. His right ankle snapped, and the pain screamed up his leg. Uriarte tried to get up and found he couldn’t.

He pulled himself into the shade of a rocky ledge and resigned himself to wait--for either rescue or death.

“I wasn’t afraid of death, because I’m of the mind that we all will die somehow,” he recalled. “What I was afraid of was that it would take a long time for me to die. That’s what I feared, the suffering.”

Dozens of people die each year crossing the Otay Mountain Wilderness, an 18,500-acre preserve about 15 miles southeast of San Diego.

Migrants in increasing numbers have decided to cross the wilderness and the deserts farther east since 1994, when “Operation Gatekeeper” had the U.S. Border Patrol tighten access near Tijuana.

Escaping from one risk, however, leads to others--accidents in the slippery canyons, exposure in the winter snow or dehydration and sunstroke in the summer heat.

In May, 14 Mexicans were found dead in the scorched desert of southwest Arizona, where they were walking a 70-mile route known as the “Devil’s Path.”

As many as 1,000 people cross the wilderness area each year, taking what are by now well trod paths, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which administers the area. In 1995, one year after Operation Gatekeeper, nearly 60 people died crossing the Otay Wilderness.

“What else do you do when you’re desperate?” said Doran Sanchez, a BLM spokesman.

Uriarte knows about the deaths along the route he calls “the ugly way.”

“Where it’s very easy and there’s no danger, they’re already stopping the immigrants,” he said. “But by the ugly way, they don’t stop you as much. It’s dangerous. And many people die.”

Uriarte took the risk for the promise of work that pays him up to $80 a day, 10 times as much as he might earn in Mexico.

Since he first entered the United States as a young man in 1968, he has made a life on both sides of the border.

The years of work--at odd jobs around Southern California and in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley --are what built his two-room home in Culiacancito, a village outside the capital of Sinaloa state. That is where his wife and four grown children live.

In May, Uriarte said, he was walking home from a construction job near Rancho Santa Fe when he was picked up by U.S. authorities. Since his green card had lapsed years ago, Uriarte said, he found himself being escorted to the border and into Tijuana.

In the bustling city of workers and migrants, he found a cheap bed to rent. He stayed until his money had almost run out. With the little he had left, he paid bus fare to the remote crossing point. Then he disappeared into the wilderness, carrying only a gallon of water and some bread.

After he broke his ankle, Uriarte passed the days searching for nourishment and talking to God. He prayed to the Virgin Mary, thinking of her as La Virgen Maria del Rosario, as represented in an antique figurine at his home in Sinaloa.

At night, with only a light jacket to warm him, he huddled into a fetal position and shivered in the 40-degree temperatures.

On June 4, the night of his seventh day in the mountains, he received a visitor. A fellow migrant found him but offered little relief. The man left Uriarte a bit of bread, then continued on his way.

By the next morning, alone again and desperate, Uriarte looked to design his own escape.

“It was almost to the point where I couldn’t go on anymore because I was tired, very tired. It was too much to bear. . . . I was going to die suffering.

“I thought, better that I hang myself from a branch so as not to suffer anymore.”

It was at that moment Uriarte saw a man hiking toward him. It was a Border Patrol agent who routinely walks the mountain in search of illegal immigrants.

“Hey, senor! Help me!” Uriarte cried in Spanish. “Come here! Come here! I’m hurt. I’m dying.”

“It was as if God had sent him,” he said.

In a short time, a Border Patrol helicopter roared over the dry hillside and Uriarte was pulled into the air. Craig Dill, the Border Patrol agent in charge of the scene, said Uriarte would have been dead in two more days.

Surgeons worked to repair his broken bones. From his hospital bed in Coronado, a luxurious peninsula community that is a world away from the lives of most immigrant workers, Uriarte patiently recounted his ordeal as a warning for others.

“The most important thing is to tell of the danger that people run . . . by crossing in these parts of the mountains that are so ugly,” he said. “I want to tell them so that this can stop.”

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Associated Press writer Seth Hettena contributed to this story.