Cleanup of border crosser mess
By Mitch Tobin
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
HEREFORD - On Earth Day 2003, volunteers took a tiny, first step toward repairing the environmental damage caused by illegal border crossers along the San Pedro River.
The trash collection and fence-mending marked the first uses of $695,000 that the federal government is giving to land agencies in southeast Arizona to help them cope with the human traffic's ecological fallout.
"The money we did get to clean up is not enough, it's not even close," said Patrick Call, chairman of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors. "But it's an amazing amount of money and we're glad to get it."
Call said Cochise County, which covers 4.5 percent of the U.S.-Mexican border, has become the "county of choice" for illegal border crossers.
Illegal border crossers have shifted to the San Pedro and other public lands in Southern Arizona as the Border Patrol has beefed up its presence in Douglas and Nogales.
The federal funding is an outgrowth of a 2002 congressional study in which land managers in southeast Arizona said they need $62.9 million and 93 more employees to repair damage and protect workers and visitors.
"The reason we are here is the failure of the federal government to take care of the problem to begin with," said Bernadette Polley, an aide to Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., who requested the study and helped secure the $695,000 for the land agencies.
On Tuesday, volunteers had their hands full with trash, much of it left by smugglers and illegal border crossers during their trek north.
Boots. Backpacks. Phone cards. Tuna cans. Toothbrushes. Sanitary napkins. Love letters written in Spanish and sealed with lipstick kisses. A baseball cap with Chinese characters. And everywhere, water bottles.
As volunteer Tom Arnold picked up plastic jugs beside a railroad track that is a popular corridor for illegal entrants, he joked about how rich he'd be if he sold water in the nearby border town of Naco.
"Tomorrow it'll be this way again. That's the shame of it," said Arnold, who retired from a financial company in Los Angeles and moved to the area in 1997. While hiking in the Huachuca Mountains, Arnold said he's seen scouts for drug smugglers with cell phones and has taken to carrying along a .38-caliber pistol, though he's never had to use it.
The trash is unsightly, but from an ecological standpoint it is illegal-entrant-caused wildfires that pose the biggest threat to the San Pedro and the surrounding mountains, said Holly Richter, the Nature Conservancy's Upper San Pedro River program manager.
Ten days ago, a 1,450-acre wildfire started along the San Pedro, right at the border. Initially, authorities blamed the blaze on an illegal border crosser seen running from the area. But a BLM firefighter, Daniel Quintana, said Tuesday that the cause remains under investigation, though it was likely arson.
In 2002, firefighters in Southern Arizona battled at least eight wildfires thought to have been caused by border crossers, according to an Arizona Daily Star analysis last fall. The 68,413 acres burned included the 112-acre Thorn fire along the San Pedro and the 2,189-acre Oversite blaze in the nearby Huachuca Mountains, which started March 1 while there was still snow on the ground.