-
Baboquivari Peak on the edge of the Tohono O’odham Reservation near Tucson -
A cruiser from the Tohono O’odham tribal police sits on the Arizona side of the San Miguel Gate, one of five crossings that tribal members and illegal immigrants use to enter the United States -
Harriet Toto, Tohono O’odham Nation -
DIANE SYLVAIN -
David Ortega, Mexican-born member of the Tohono O’odham Nation
Tohono O’odham Nation, Ariz.
— A
five-strand barbed-wire fence is all that separates the
United States and Mexico in this remote southeastern corner of
America’s second-largest Indian nation.
On a warm
Sunday afternoon in early January, no one from U.S. law enforcement
is checking documents as people move back and forth at a crossing
— really, just a steel cattle guard in a gap in the fence
— known as the San Miguel Gate. There are no signs of Mexican
border officials keeping tabs on the gate. Tohono O’odham
tribal police are nowhere to be seen.
On this day, in
fact, the only suggestion of government control is a Border Patrol
officer, posted several hundred yards north of the gate. The
officer does not stop a High Country News
reporter in a Chevy Suburban (a vehicle prized by the border
area’s smugglers) from driving southbound, on the dirt road
leading to the gate.
Officially, only members of the
Tohono O’odham Nation are allowed to pass through the San
Miguel Gate. But no signs warn non-members against crossing. The
biggest obstacles to traversing the border at the San Miguel Gate,
it seems, are the six-inch gaps between the steel rails of the
cattle guard there.
And once you’re in Mexico, the
party begins.
Vendors from the northern Sonora towns of
Altar, Caborca and Sasabe sell tortillas, white cheese, sodas,
water, beer and tequila from the sides of vans and backs of pickup
trucks. A Yaqui musician strums his guitar and squeaks out a tune
on a harmonica, entertaining six O’odham folks jammed into a
sedan, downing quarts of beer and eating tamales.
For
decades, O’odham tribal members have used the San Miguel Gate
to enter Mexico and shop at the weekend flea market rather than
face a lengthy drive to purchase traditional foods (and, for some,
liquor, which is not sold on Indian lands) off-reservation. The
mood at the bazaar is light-hearted and friendly, at least until an
Anglo reporter approaches and tries to strike up a conversation.
The vendors are eager to sell their wares, but they are reluctant
to talk about what else goes on at the market, particularly when
the sun goes down.
“This place is out of
control,” says Francisco Bennett, leaning against the side of
a pickup truck from which an old man is selling food and beer out
of a cooler. Bennett says he’s been coming to the bazaar for
years to shop, party and socialize with his O’odham friends,
who live on both sides of the border. Years ago, he says, families
with young children would gather for the day and stay well into the
evening.
But those relaxed weekends are long gone.
Bennett, who lives a few miles away in the ranching
hamlet of Newfield, on the U.S. side of the border, says that now
he won’t even come to the area at night. “There is
smuggling of people, drugs, whatever,” Bennett says.
“It’s very dangerous.”
For years, the stamped-down and trashed desert
south of the San Miguel Gate has served as a final staging area for
smugglers of both human beings and narcotics into the United
States. Evi-dence of the crossing’s extra-legal use is
everywhere.
Signs provide stark warnings to desperate
would-be immigrants about crossing the Sonoran Desert, where
snakes, scorpions, searing summer heat and sub-freezing winter
nights are only a few of the lurking dangers. Two 55-gallon plastic
drums filled with water are perched on stands just a few feet south
of the border; a third drum, a reserve, sits upright on the ground.
Nearby, a blue plastic wreath is draped over a steel cross with
remnants of burned candles at its base. It serves as a sobering
testament to the 342 men, women and children who perished
attempting to cross through the Tohono O’odham Nation between
2002 and 2006.
Border Patrol officials say some smugglers
simply drive or walk through the San Miguel Gate, hoping to
penetrate far enough into the U.S. to deliver their goods, whether
human or narcotic. Others fan out across the desert for miles on
either side of the gate, slipping through the barbed-wire fence at
the border and either bushwhacking their way across the desert or
navigating serpentine trails through the Baboquivari Mountains, six
miles to the east.
One of five such informal crossings
along the 75-mile international border that marks the official
southern boundary of the Tohono O’odham Nation, the San
Miguel Gate stands in sharp contrast to border crossings in urban
areas of Arizona. (At Nogales, Ariz., for example, a 15-foot-high
steel wall divides the two countries.) For decades, these cattle
crossings have provided the O’odham direct access to the
tribe’s traditional lands — lands that once stretched
far into Mexico, reaching Hermosillo to the south and the Sea of
Cortez to the west.
Unlike the U.S., Mexico does not
formally recognize traditional O’odham territory with
reservation status and provides no special services to tribal
members. As a result, for the several thousand officially enrolled
members of the O’odham tribe living in Mexico, direct access
to the United States — and the medical, educational and
social services it provides — is essential.
For
approximately 28,000 U.S.-based O’odham members, many of whom
continue to follow traditional ways, unfettered migration into
Mexico — to perform sacred ceremonies, to visit summer homes,
to hunt and to collect herbs and plants — is a cherished part
of life.
And O’odham in both countries, of course,
have cross-border family ties.
But increased border
enforcement in major urban areas along the border —
particularly in San Diego and El Paso — has funneled drug and
human smugglers to ever more remote locations. The Tohono
O’odham Reservation now lies in the heart of the
second-biggest trafficking corridor for drugs and illegal
immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border, according to Border Patrol
officials. (Only Nogales, with its major port of entry for
commercial vehicles, exceeds the reservation as a smuggling
conduit.)
And with the smuggling come huge negative
impacts.
Illegal immigrants not only face a dangerous
trek through the desert; they must also deal with the possibility
of being robbed, abandoned, beaten, kidnapped, raped, or murdered
by their smugglers or rival smuggling organizations. And violence
is on the rise; today’s smugglers often carry high-powered
handguns and assault rifles. “In the past, most of the people
that you arrested for smuggling were your ma-and-pa types,
smuggling relatives,” says U.S. Border Patrol supervisory
agent Jesus Rodriguez. “It’s no longer that. It’s
organized crime.”
Narcotics smugglers have also
zeroed in, and the lure of quick cash has enticed many
O’odham, who are, in general, mired in poverty and have few
on-reservation job opportunities. More than 100 tribal members were
arrested on narcotics-related charges in 2003 and 2004, and
relatives of tribal leaders are in prison after drug convictions.
Smuggling is also having a devastating environmental
impact on the Sonoran Desert, where the O’odham have made
their home for centuries. Thousands of vehicles — many stolen
from Phoenix and Tucson — have been loaded with drugs and
migrants and then driven across countless miles of the fragile
desert that makes up most of the O’odham Reservation, which
is about the size of Connecticut. A startling fact: More than 1,400
wrecked or abandoned vehicles were towed off the reservation in
2005.
—-
Stepped-up efforts by the Border Patrol and the
recent deployment of hundreds of National Guard troops to the area
have further increased environmental damage that, tribe members
say, will take decades, if not longer, to repair.
The
Tohono O’odham Reservation’s wide-open U.S.-Mexico
border is both a link to tribal tradition and an enabler of modern
social ills. To limit those ills, and with the blessing of tribal
government leaders, the Border Patrol and National Guard have begun
construction of vehicle barriers that will eventually span the
reservation’s border with Mexico. The barriers, which
resemble the tank traps lining the beaches of Normandy during World
War II, will allow people and animals — but not the cars and
trucks that ferry illegal immigrants and drugs — to cross.
But the tribal leadership opposes the Secure Fence Act of
2006, which calls for construction of a barrier that will vary in
design depending on the terrain. In most of the desert it will be a
solid steel wall similar to barriers near San Diego and other urban
areas. In desert areas where the border crosses washes, the barrier
will be a chain-link fence. In other areas, it will have a buffer
zone between rows of fencing. An all-weather road would run
parallel to the wall.
The proposed barrier would follow
700 miles of the border from Texas to California, including 75
miles of the Tohono O’odham Nation. The fence, tribal
officials say, would prevent the free flow of O’odham across
their traditional lands, as well as restrict migration of animals.
“We would like to reduce, really reduce, the flow
of what they call illegal aliens,” says Harriet Toto, an
executive assistant to tribal chairwoman Vivian Juan-Saunders.
“At the same time, we want our people to be recognized as
members of the (Tohono O’odham) Nation and be free to come
back and forth as they have for centuries.”
But if
one thing has become clear on the reservation, it is that the
situation now is not anything like it has ever been.
Caught in a crossfire between smugglers and government forces, the
O’odham have watched their once-tranquil home in
America’s desert outback become a nerve-wracking police
state. Helicopters hover, Border Patrol all-terrain vehicles carve
up the desert, police routinely pull over tribal members searching
for contraband, and smugglers bang on the doors of residents,
demanding supplies.
The O’odham
are believed to be descendants of the Hohokam, who
occupied central and southern Arizona and the northern parts of the
Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua from 200 BC to about 1450
AD. Like their predecessors, the O’odham traditionally were
farmers, growing corn, beans and cotton. (Many O’odham, in
fact, are now returning to the farming of traditional crops in an
attempt to stem a diabetes epidemic that now afflicts half of the
tribe’s adult population — one of the highest rates in
the world.)
In Pre-Columbian America, the O’odham
were scattered across the vast Sonoran Desert. The tribe resisted
the early incursions of Spanish missionaries, staging major
rebellions in the 1660s and 1750s. The insurrections forced the
Spanish to retreat to the south. But the tribe’s traditional
lands were sliced in half in 1853, when the U.S. bought southern
Arizona from Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase, creating the present
international border.
The United States created a
reservation for the Tohono O’odham in 1874, by executive
order. The current form of tribal government was instituted in the
1930s and is based in Sells, the Nation’s largest town, with
a population of about 2,000. The 2.8 million-acre reservation is
divided into 13 districts, two of which are adjacent to the
U.S.-Mexican border.
The tribe is genuinely
poverty-stricken, with unemployment hovering around 42 percent, and
with 40 percent of O’odham living below poverty level. The
2000 per capita income of $8,000 is only 33 percent of the American
average and far below the $13,000 average for Native American
tribes.
The tribe’s biggest employers and revenue
generators are three casinos that employ about 1,400 workers, half
of whom are O’odham. The first casino opened in 1993, and
gambling revenue has helped fund modern infrastructure on the
remote reservation, including a new hospital, a nursing home, a
community college, five recreation centers and a museum and culture
center.
Approximately $60 million in casino revenue has
been used to administer and finance post-high school education; so
far, some 3,500 O’odham have received educational stipends.
The recent efforts to improve education and training opportunities,
however, follow many decades of a crippling high school dropout
rate (currently 48 percent).
Though impoverished, until
recently O’odham routinely extended a helping hand to illegal
immigrants crossing their lands. Many immigrants are from
indigenous cultures in southern Mexico and Central and South
America, and the O’odham have felt kinship for them.
“Throughout my whole lifetime, I know we always fed
them and gave them water,” Toto says during an interview at
the tribal headquarters in Sells.
A middle-aged woman who
has spent most of her adult life in and around tribal politics,
Toto recently moved from Sells to a home a few miles north of the
San Miguel Gate. Sells, which offers little more than a grocery
store, gas station, bank and few small shops, is the main
commercial center of the sprawling reservation. It’s also the
center for tribal governmental services that provide nearly 1,000
jobs to O’odham.
Toto says she moved out of Sells
to live in a quieter location. Instead, she says, her new home is
engulfed by the frantic and dangerous world of smuggling. Gone are
the days of a few immigrants casually walking by on their way to
jobs, friends and family in the U.S.
“It used to be
they would take time out and do some chores, clean your yard and
things like that,” Toto says. “But now, they are in a
hurry because of the increase in Border Patrol, and they want to
get out of there, so they have become more demanding.”
What was once a trickle has turned into a flood —
reportedly as many as 1,500 illegal immigrants a day cross tribal
lands — and the onslaught is ruining daily life for many
tribal members. And both the immigration wave and the
government’s attempts to stem it have had enormous
environmental impacts.
“They come at all hours of
the day and night,” Toto says. “They will be pounding
on your windows asking for food and water.”
Nothing
on the reservation, it seems, is safe from being stolen —
clothes, food, vehicles, cell phones, electronics and,
increasingly, bicycles, which allow immigrants to cross the desert
more quickly than hiking would. More than 3,000 bicycles have been
found abandoned in the northern and eastern parts of the
reservation. (Tribal officials say illegal immigrants dump the
bikes after reaching pickup points near Interstate highways 8 and
10.)
But bikes aren’t even the beginning of the
reservation’s trash problem. Immigrants leave personal
belongings throughout the reservation, either when they are
arrested by Border Patrol or as they are picked up by smugglers
taking them to destinations north. The tribe has removed more than
80 tons of trash from 128 sites since September 2004, says Gary
Olson, manager of the tribe’s solid waste management program.
Beyond the 1,500 or so vehicles removed from the reservation each
year, another 200 vehicles have been abandoned in parts of the
reservation so remote that they cannot be reached by tow trucks.
“We know how much we have cleaned up, but we
don’t know how much more we have to clean up,” Olson
says.
Increased enforcement by the Border Patrol has also
harmed the desert, as ever more wildcat roads are cut through the
southern part of the reservation. “A lot of time they (Border
Patrol officers) make their own roads and go wherever they want to
go,” Toto says. “Our people feel it is disrespectful to
go into areas where they are disturbing archeological sites.”
The tribe, she says, wants the Border Patrol to increase
enforcement efforts at the immediate border, rather than spreading
its resources across the sprawling reservation, which spans three
counties in southwestern Arizona. “We would prefer that the
Border Patrol and National Guard stay at the border and send
(migrants) away before they cross over,” she says. “We
really feel strongly about this. Eventually, if the immigration
doesn’t stop, tribal leaders might support construction of
the wall.”
—-
It is unlikely construction of a
full-scale border fence will occur anytime soon on the Tohono
O’odham Nation. The Secure Fence Act signed by President Bush
on Oct. 26, 2006, authorizes partial funding for the
“possible” construction of 700 miles of fencing and
barriers along the border. The Congressional Research Service
estimates the entire barrier would cost $50 billion.
A
separate Homeland Security Department law authorized spending an
initial $1.2 billion for border fencing. But that law also
withholds $950 million until Congress approves the
department’s plan for spending the money.
In
January, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the House
will reconsider the border fence, and Democratic committee chairmen
are holding up the $950 million in funding until Homeland Security
presents its comprehensive border-security plan. There also are
bipartisan calls for reviewing the wall. The two Republican
senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Kay Bailey-Hutchinson,
advocate revising the fence plan.
Last fall, the
Department of Homeland Security awarded the Boeing Co. a contract
to construct a series of 1,800 towers equipped with cameras,
sensors and computer links — part of a plan for a $2.8
billion “virtual” fence that would monitor the U.S.
borders with both Mexico and Canada. Homeland Security Director
Michael Chertoff has said that an eight-month, $67 million test of
such a virtual barrier along a 28-mile stretch of border south of
Tucson and east of the Tohono O’odham Nation will be
conducted before any permanent fence is constructed.
There is nothing virtual about the
problems the Border Patrol faces on the Tohono
O’odham Nation. As it tries to stop the flow of illegal
immigrants and narcotics into the U.S., the agency must also take
into consideration the unique cross-border orientation of the
O’odham. “These are the normal migration and normal
historical paths that the O’odham have used for
centuries,” says Gustavo Soto, a public affairs officer for
the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which includes the
reservation.
O’odham with tribal identification
cards will continue to be allowed free access across the border,
regardless of citizenship status, Soto says. There is, however, no
written agreement between the tribe and federal authorities on
allowing unfettered passage or on maintaining the informal border
crossings. “That is an unofficial agreement we have with the
Nation,” Soto says.
The likely delay and possible
scrapping of the border fence constitute welcome news for
traditional O’odham, who strongly oppose a fence that would
restrict movement of people and animals, says Ofelia Rivas, a
leader in the O’odham Rights Cultural and Environmental
Coalition. Traditional O’odham, she says, are very concerned
that they will be prevented from crossing through checkpoints at
the border if a wall is built. Many O’odham who were born in
Mexico are not recognized as American citizens, Rivas notes, and
cannot obtain passports, even though they are enrolled members of
the Tohono O’odham Nation.
“A lot of people
don’t have birth certificates,” says the 50-year-old
activist, who holds a degree in fine arts from Northern Arizona
University. “I was born at home, and I don’t have a
birth record.”
Before Sept. 11, 2001, Congress was
poised to pass legislation that would have made all enrolled Tohono
O’odham members, including those who live in Mexico, U.S.
citizens. But the bill died in the aftermath of the terrorist
attacks at the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Fifty
miles west of the San Miguel Gate is another cattle-guard crossing,
at Maneger’s Dam, the reservation’s westernmost gate.
Located about 20 miles south of the village of Gu Vo, the gate is
in an area that has been hit hard by drug smugglers. The Sierra de
Santa Rosa to the west and the Mesquite Mountains to the east
provide cover to smugglers, who frequently pass through the area.
Police say the mountains disrupt radio transmissions, a fact the
smugglers know and exploit.
Several graves are located
immediately next to the border. A cement monument marking the
international boundary lies about 25 yards south of the barbed-wire
fence. The five-foot marker is wrapped in barbed wire and defaced
with graffiti.
David Ortega is an O’odham who is
tied both to the ways of his people and to the broader American
culture. The dual affinity shows in the way he dresses: A feather
often sprouts from the back of a black ball cap emblazoned in gold
with the letters “USMC.” His ties to both cultures also
show in his life experience.
Every year, Ortega says,
gazing across the border at tribal lands stretching toward the
southern horizon, he and other traditionalists make a four-day trek
from the Maneger’s Dam Gate across the desert, over mountain
ranges to a sacred spring in the Sonoran village of Quitovac.
Ortega says he served 10 years in the Marine Corps,
including a stint in Lebanon during the early 1980s, when a car
bomb blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing more than 200.
But now, Ortega says, he receives no veterans’ benefits
because he was born at home in Mexico and doesn’t have U.S.
citizenship.
For Ortega, a physical barrier dividing the
O’odham’s traditional lands would be a sacrilege. He
says the O’odham were not consulted prior to the creation of
the current international boundary.
“They all just
got together and said, ‘This is where we are going to cut it
in half,’” Ortega says. “Who cares who lives
there? Nobody even understood that there were people who lived
here.”
In addition to cultural
issues, the Border Patrol faces technical problems as it
tries to cover the miles of open desert and mountain ranges on the
O’odham Reservation. The mountains severely limit lateral
movement along the border; the most formidable of these obstacles
are the Baboquivari Mountains, which run in a north-south direction
along the Tohono O’odham Nation’s eastern boundary.
Famous as home to Kitt Peak National Observatory, the
Baboquivaris block the Border Patrol’s direct access to the
international boundary. Narcotics and human smugglers take
advantage of geography, frequently crossing the border on the
eastern and western flanks of the mountains, Soto says.
Just west of the Baboquivari range is the San Miguel Gate, and
beyond that nearly 60 miles of open range, where the only barrier
to the border is the barbed-wire cattle fence. Smugglers take
advantage of the desert terrain by stealing four-wheel-drive
vehicles from urban areas, loading them with drugs and/or
immigrants and making a Mad Max-like dash across the desert.
“If they destroy the vehicle, they don’t
care. It’s not theirs. It’s stolen,” Soto says.
The Border Patrol hopes that vehicle barriers, which will
cost about $1 million per mile, can help stop the flow of
trafficking across the border. The barriers are made from old
railroad tracks welded into an “X” shape and then
affixed vertically in the ground.
Like the Tohono
O’odham Nation, the Border Patrol opposes construction of a
more substantial “secure” fence across much of the
border, Soto says. Such a fence, he says, would cause serious
environmental impacts on Indian lands. “Our proposal is for
vehicle barriers to keep people from driving through, not a
wall,” he says.
Some O’odham are skeptical
the vehicle barriers will do much good. Tohono O’odham Police
Sgt. Elton Begay says most of the traffickers bring stolen vehicles
to locations on the U.S. side of the border and wait for smugglers
to deliver their loads of drugs and immigrants.
—-
“The vehicle barriers aren’t going to do too much good
in stopping the trafficking,” Begay predicts.
Other
tribal officials say the O’odham supported construction of
the barriers primarily to stop cattle rustlers from crossing the
border from Mexico and raiding O’odham ranches. “The
ranchers are the ones who really pushed for the vehicle
barriers,” says Toto, the tribal chairwoman’s executive
assistant.
The wide divergence of views on the vehicle
barriers is a reflection of how the Tohono O’odham Nation and
the Border Patrol perceive one another’s operations,
generally.
Border Patrol officials insist that they fully
cooperate with the tribe before undertaking any formal actions on
the reservation. “Everything is done to ensure that the
citizens of the nation are as informed as possible as to what our
intentions are,” Soto says. “We take their
considerations and merge them with our operations and come to an
understanding before anything is done on the Nation.”
Tribal officials and traditionalists say the Border
Patrol fails to fully understand the cultural customs of the
O’odham and continues to disrupt life on the reservation,
particularly since the 9/11 terror attacks. “Abuse of the
people increased,” says traditionalist leader Ofelia Rivas.
“The Border Patrol would hold them at gunpoint and sometimes
run them off the road.”
In an effort to reduce
tensions, the Border Patrol is distributing a recently produced
video to the approximately 1,700 officers assigned to the
reservation; it describes the unique customs of the O’odham,
such as all-night wakes that — as vehicles come and go from a
home — can easily be mistaken for drug-dealing operations.
Border Patrol officials are also meeting regularly with community
members and explaining what O’odham can do to improve their
relations with law enforcement. They emphasize simple solutions,
such as turning on the dome lights in their cars if they are pulled
over by Border Patrol officers at night.
Even if tensions
between the O’odham and the Border Patrol remain, there are
early indications that stepped-up enforcement — particularly
the deployment of several hundred National Guard troops in June
2006 — is beginning to have an impact on smuggling through
the reservation. In the last three months of 2006, the Border
Patrol arrested 27,800 illegal immigrants in the Tucson
Sector’s Western Desert District, which includes the Tohono
O’odham Nation. In the same period of the previous year,
30,000 arrests were made.
Soto says the decline in
arrests is an indication that smugglers are slowly being deterred
from using the reservation as a conduit for illegal immigration.
But as arrests for human trafficking have declined, drug seizures
have skyrocketed. The dichotomy, Soto says, can be easily
explained: Far more manpower is being deployed across the
reservation to stem the influx of illegal drugs.
“The extra eyes and ears that the National Guard is providing
us is helping,” he says.
During the last three
months of 2005, Border Patrol officials seized 88,000 pounds of
marijuana in the Western Desert District. Seizures jumped to
123,000 pounds in the last three months of 2006, Soto says.
Marijuana isn’t the only drug being smuggled. One
of the biggest busts on tribal lands last year involved Arthur
David Pablo, 55, of Sells. Pablo was sentenced to 10 years in
federal prison last July after pleading guilty to conspiracy to
possess with the intent to distribute 406 pounds of cocaine, said
to have a street value of about $14 million.
Many of the
seizures have occurred on the western half of the Tohono
O’odham Nation, where smugglers have recently stepped up
operations, particularly through the area around Maneger’s
Dam Gate. The drug activity has become so great that tribal
officials have decided to close the gate.
Soto credits
the increased drug interdiction and decline in arrests of illegal
immigrants to more Border Patrol officers and the deployment of the
National Guard, but it’s unclear how long the Guard’s
help will last. Soto says the current National Guard operation is
scheduled to end in 2008.
“The Guard has been
helping us for years,” he says. “They will continue to
help us for years to come, but not in the numbers that are
presently on the border.
“What will happen when
they leave? We don’t know.”
Still, smuggling is slowly rending the already faltering
heart of one of North America’s oldest surviving
cultures. In 2004, Tohono O’odham police reported that
111,264 immigrants entered the reservation’s borders, with
84,010 arrested by either the police or Border Patrol. “If
this was happening in Tucson, or any other metropolis, a state of
emergency would be declared,” the tribe said in a written
statement.
The tribe’s 71 officers have been
overwhelmed with border enforcement duties that are properly the
responsibility of the federal government. The police department
spends an average of $3 million a year — or more than half
its budget — responding to immigrant- and drug-smuggling
incidents.
Smuggling has impacted nearly every
O’odham family. Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts
and uncles have been arrested for dipping into trafficking’s
netherworld, or for getting tangled up in the urban-style street
gangs that tribal police increasingly must deal with. There are at
least 26 such gangs operating on the Nation, tribal police say;
their graffiti can be seen on old adobes across the reservation.
Tribal chairwoman Vivian Juan-Saunders — who
canceled two interviews scheduled with High Country News and did
not respond to written questions submitted to her press secretary
— has had two members of her family convicted of drug
smuggling. Traditional leader Ofelia Rivas’ nephew,
meanwhile, is seven years into an eight-year federal prison
sentence for drug trafficking.
As its culture is being
corroded by organized crime, the tribe’s desert landscape is
being shredded. The O’odham — whose name means
“the desert people” — have had their silence
shattered and their solitude violated. Helicopters swoop low over
the desert, floodlights shining on yet another monster truck packed
with high-grade marijuana roaring down a dirt road on a high-stakes
flight to suburbia. Wild vehicle chases end in crashes. There are
shootouts.
And as hundreds of thousands of Mexicans try
desperately to immigrate across the reservation, O’odham are
regularly horrified to stumble across the twisted bodies of those
who fail, dehydrated humans rotting under the 120-degree summer
sun, ghosts where once there had been hope.
These are all
now routine occurrences.
For traditionalists like David
Ortega, trafficking has pushed the O’odham society to the
brink of annihilation. Many of his people, he says, have lost touch
with their historical teachings; at the same time, he notes, they
are ill prepared to enter the mainstream American economy.
Smuggling — which can garner a destitute O’odham a
quick $3,000 to $5,000 for hustling drugs and/or immigrants just
one time — is the best job opportunity many see, he says.
After more than a century of neglect, the federal
government and tribal leaders finally have begun to address the
poverty, lack of modern education, loss of traditional teachings
and crippling job shortages on the Nation. But it’s a
fledgling effort.
The casinos continue to provide crucial
funds for education and job training. Gaming revenue, for example,
financed the construction of the Tohono O’odham Community
College, a widely acclaimed and fully accredited two-year college
where about 300 O’odham attend classes.
And a
recent water rights settlement with the federal government will
bring 37,800 acre-feet of water to the tribe, increasing its annual
surface water rights to 66,000 acre-feet. The “new”
water comes from a portion of Arizona’s share of the Central
Arizona Project, which diverts water from the Colorado River to
central and southern Arizona.
The tribe will lease some
of the water, substantially increasing its revenue. The CAP water
will also allow a substantial boost in agricultural production on
the reservation.
Though these are important steps, Ortega
says that — with organized criminal smuggling syndicates
rapidly corrupting tribe members — there needs to be far more
money and effort put toward vastly improved education and job
opportunities for O’odham youth.
And the
improvements must come quickly.
“If these things
are not done,” Ortega says, “we will be lost as a
people.”
John Dougherty writes from
Phoenix.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline One Nation, Under Fire.
Read More
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
