Word: border
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moonless night, and Jorge Macias Onate, a Mexican border-police officer, knows he'll be busy as he eases his Dodge Ram along his country's porous border with the U.S. Soon his headlights pick out four scraggly youths preparing to scale the 12-ft.-high steel fence that separates the town of Agua Prieta from Douglas, Ariz. As he slows the pickup, the teenagers scatter like rabbits toward the sagebrush. "Wait! Don't run! We're not here to arrest you," yells Macias. "We want to help you. The problem is on the other side...
Such dangers are especially acute in the remote Sonoran Desert of eastern Arizona. Because of U.S. border-patrol crackdowns elsewhere, the Sonoran section has become the busiest corridor for illegal immigration. So far this year, U.S. officers have caught 350,000 illegals there, up 25% from last year. Officials estimate that more than twice that number got through, to Phoenix and points beyond. As the traffic has mounted, so have the casualties. All told, 154 migrants in the Southwest have died this year from heat exposure, drowning and accidents--a 30% increase over...
...after us, but they can be paid off," says Juan, 14, a smuggler's apprentice lounging in the courtyard of an Agua Prieta hotel that is bustling with people preparing to cross. The youngster collects $50 a head for leading migrants the last few hundred yards over the border...
...sits astride the migration route to Phoenix. He occasionally dons a badge reading RANCH PATROL and jumps in his pickup with an M-16 rifle and 9-mm pistol to guard his spread against trespassers. By his count, Barnett has corralled hundreds of aliens and marched them to the border patrol since last year. "It's a jungle out here," says the cattleman, trudging through mesquite fields littered with plastic jugs and soiled diapers left by illegals. Larry Vance, a utility-company technician, climbs a 30-ft.-high watchtower in his backyard to spot aliens crossing his 20 acres. Says...
...border patrol has responded by pouring in scores of new agents. The greater surveillance has driven up the cost of guided passage to Phoenix to more than $1,000--triple the price a few years ago. But still they come. "The only real solution is in Mexico," declares Douglas Mayor Ray Borane. "Their government needs to address the flagrant trafficking of humans for profit." Indeed, the traffic has been an economic boon for Agua Prieta, whose 1998 population of 120,000 has swelled an additional 100,000. In the past two years, 15 hotels have opened or started construction, primarily...