Sunday, 23 January 2000
Photos by Jeffry Scott,
The Arizona Daily Star
Kimberly Karima's home on International
Street overlooks the line; the Border Patrol buildup has made
the neighborhood quieter
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Border Patrol vehicle occupies a visible spot
just north of border. Nogales, Sonora, is in background.
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Mexico City native Valentino Perez bides his
time in the lobby of the Hotel Imperial in Nogales, Sonora. He
wants to reach Phoenix.
By Tim Steller
The Arizona Daily Star
The addition of about 100 Border Patrol agents in Nogales last
year helped the border city achieve its lowest crime rate in five
years.
Reports of crimes such as burglary and auto theft hit five-year
lows. There were no homicides, for the first time in five years,
and just 11 robberies.
Local law enforcement officials attribute the improvement largely
to Operation Safeguard '99, an attempt by the Border Patrol to
seal the Nogales border from illegal crossings.
In Nogales neighborhoods that abut the border, hardly anyone hops
the fence and scampers through the yards anymore.
That has led to a greater sense of security for residents like
Luz Verdugo, 78, who has lived about 100 feet from the border
fence on Nogales' east side since 1946.
About two years ago, Verdugo was victimized three days in a row
by a border-crossing burglar. On a Thursday he stole her jewelry,
on Friday he broke in again but was chased away and on Saturday
he stole a car.
The atmosphere began changing in late 1998. That's when agents
installed portable floodlights that point at the border fence
near the house Verdugo shares with her elderly husband and sister-in-law.
Early last year, additional agents began arriving, and one was
stationed less than a block from her house, 24 hours a day.
``Now we aren't very afraid because the Border Patrol is there,''
Verdugo said.
The most renowned result of Operation Safeguard '99 was the shift
in migrant traffic that it caused. As border-crossing grew difficult
in Nogales, people-smugglers and migrants shifted to Agua Prieta,
Sonora, sending an unprecedented wave of migration past Douglas.
As howls of protest began rising from Cochise County residents,
relative quiet settled over Nogales. Apprehensions of illegal
entrants by Nogales-based agents dropped from 138,821 in 1998
to 68,103 in 1999.
The strategy in Nogaleswas to place agents in stationary positions
at the border, in some places just a hundred yards apart, to deter
people from crossing the border in town. Other agents roamed behind
this front line, trying to catch the migrants who made it through.
As more agents were assigned to the station, their border coverage
extended farther and farther out of town.
Now ``solid control'' extends two to three miles outside of Nogales
in both directions along the border, said William Botts, the acting
patrol agent in charge of the Nogales station. Botts expects the
Immigration and Naturalization Service to send him an additional
75 agents this year.
That expectation is questionable, considering that the INS added
only 369 agents last year, when it was funded to add 1,000. But
if the agency succeeds, the Nogales station will top off at more
than 500 agents this year.
While the agents gradually spread their control outside of town,
the strategy caused some problems farther from the border. At
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado Elementary School, migrants began
showing up on the grounds.
Forced outside of Nogales, the migrants who went west would follow
the first unguarded wash, Potrero Canyon, northeast. The wash
funneled them past the school.
But by March or April, the Border Patrol had enough new agents
that it forced the few migrants who chose Nogales even farther
west, funneling them to a point north of the school, said parent
liaison Irene Valdez.
Nevertheless, Coronado has hired an off-duty police officer to
be on the grounds from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, at a cost of $96
per day, Valdez said.
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Those aren't the only drawbacks to having so many green uniforms
around town.
Alberto Aguirre, a 17-year-old resident of West International
Street, said agents stop him just about every day.
``When they don't stop me right here, they stop me down there,''
he said, waving from his home toward the port of entry in downtown
Nogales. ``You ignore them, and they cross your path with their
car.''
One agent is usually stationed a few houses down from the Aguirre
home. Sometimes it's just that one vehicle that crosses Alberto's
path; other times various vehicles converge on the teen-ager,
who said he was born in the United States.
It's that image, of multiple Ford Expeditions surrounding the
solitary Mexican, that bothers Nogales Mayor Cesar Rios. He worries
that such intimidation could hurt the town's commerce, which relies
largely on Mexican shoppers.
``The only thing I always ask them is to treat people with dignity,''
Rios said.
He said that the agents' behavior has improved from past years
and largely upholds that standard. But other problems come from
the occasional misbehavior or mistakes involving new agents.
On the night of Dec. 29, a Union Pacific train was headed north
from the port of entry with a load of new Ford Escorts. The conductor
asked Border Patrol Agent Kevin Martinez to pull a switching lever
on the tracks once the train had cleared the area, said Nogales
Police Chief Jose Luis Alday.
Martinez pulled the lever, but apparently it was too soon. Four
cars derailed, spilling off the tracks and into the adjacent dry
wash.
The agent has disputed whether he actually pulled the lever too
soon, saying he was asked to pull it when the train stopped -
and it had stopped, with a few cars still south of the switch.
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Effects of the buildup have been felt beyond the Nogales city
limits in Santa Cruz County and in Nogales, Sonora.
In the county, the agents deter people from crossing in the central
section of the county's southern border. But perhaps more important,
they are nearby if something bad happens. Sometimes they beat
the sheriff's deputies to the scene.
The buildup also has contributed to the calming of some neighborhoods
in Nogales, Sonora. The city's most notorious neighborhood is
the Colonia Buenos Aires, just east of the downtown port of entry
and up a steep hill.
For years, Buenos Aires has been one of the chief launching pads
for smugglers of people and drugs. Migrants might make their contacts
in that neighborhood, or actually jump the fence there, led by
local smugglers. Drug smugglers would toss their loads over the
fence at appointed times and places.
But now the smuggling can't occur in the neighborhood proper,
because agents are stationed across from Buenos Aires, watching.
``With so much vigilance, it's obvious that the number of people
smugglers has gone down in the urban area,'' said Nogales, Sonora,
Police Chief Francisco Cano Castro.
In Buenos Aires, it also helped that his department opened its
own base in that neighborhood, Cano said.
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