MAGAN'S WORLD:IN A BAR near the University of Arizona in Tucson a few weeks ago I met a man called Dan Millis who had found the body of a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador in the desert last year. Two days later, while out on the same trail, leaving jugs of water for other migrants, he was charged with littering by the US Fish Wildlife Service.
He fought the charge on the grounds that humanitarian aid is not a crime, but his appeal was over-ruled. It appears that the US federal and district courts indeed regard it as a crime – in fact, going to the aid of any sick or injured migrant can be classed as aiding and abetting.
The hip, yoga-and-cycling- obsessed city of Tucson is 100km from Mexico, yet the border overshadows everything here. La frontera is the elephant in the closet. Every night a fresh assault of Latinos brave the Sonora Desert in the hope of making it across.
It’s one of the deadliest deserts on earth, not because it’s hotter than the Sahara or the Gobi but because the allure of what’s on the other side is so potent.
Over the past decade nearly 2,000 men, women and children have died trying to sneak into Arizona. There are fences to climb, a river to swim and vast stretches of mountainous desert to cross.
But still they come – and just since October 50 have died. It’s impossible not to think of them as you go to sleep, the hundreds who will be risking their lives that night.
The odd thing is that most of the territory between here and Mexico belongs to neither the US nor Mexico: it’s tribal land belonging to the Tohono O’odham Nation. I met a member of the tribe, Ofelia Rivas, who told me that for her there is no border. Her father was born on one side and her mother on the other. She still crosses back and forth regularly for ceremonies and family celebrations.
She told me how one night she was coming back from an all-night dance ceremony with her daughter and grandson when she was stopped by police and asked if was she Mexican or American. She told them she was neither; she was Tohono O’odham. The border guard put a gun to her head and said he’d deport her unless she co-operated. “How can you deport me?” she said to him. “This is all my land – both sides.”
She laughed as she told the story, but there was fear in her eyes, too. Later that night she would be driving the two hours back to her border home, possibly encountering not just hostile official patrols but also some of the right-wing vigilante groups that have taken to patrolling the border as private militia squads.
She had driven up to Tucson that night to speak at an ecological event, but it seemed the students, in their cut-offs, goatees and piercings, had little interest in what she was saying. Most were drunk or focused on the band playing loudly next door.
She disliked being among people drinking firewater, she said, but it was important to try to get her message across. The border was destroying life on the reservation, particularly efforts to keep the culture and language alive. A huge military-style concrete wall built right across their land had cut family yards in two.
A pretty young environmentalist in a low-cut dress saw that Rivas was losing her audience and began to show the students poignant images of disorientated deer and wildcats wandering back and forth along the wall, trying to find a way through. This got their attention, especially the photo of a rattlesnake trying to climb the wall.
manchan@ireland.com