ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Illegal entrants have been dying at the rate of one a day since June, making it likely Arizona will surpass last year’s record death rate, an Arizona Daily Star compilation of crosser deaths shows.
The bodies of five illegal entrants have been found since Friday, driving the number of known border deaths to 121. That figure is based on information gathered from Mexico’s secretary of foreign relations and county medical examiners in Arizona.
The Border Patrol tallies 78 since Oct. 1, the start of the agency’s fiscal year, said Andy Adame, an agency spokesman.
Last year the Border Patrol’s official death count was 139. A similar collection of deaths not included in the agency’s tally showed at least 152.
The Border Patrol does not include in its official death count bodies that were recovered by other law-enforcement agencies. Also, Border Patrol officials note that at least three deaths along the border were people-smugglers, who were not added to the official count because they were not trying to migrate into the United States.
Determining whether a body found in the desert is an illegal entrant is often based on circumstantial clues, such as whether it was found on one of the trails popular with border crossers.
But there also exists the anthropologic evidence that the bodies were of an ancestry consistent with Mexico and South America, said Dr. Bruce Parks, the Pima County medical examiner.
“Basically, in some cases you have clothing, Mexican currency and that’s helpful,” Parks said.
He performs autopsies on the majority of bodies found in the Arizona desert.
“We tend to overcall because we think that the majority of these people are immigrants,” Parks said. “We want to be closer to the correct than to the incorrect.”
In the most recent border death incidents, four bodies were found on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation southwest of Tucson and a fifth body was found near Amado. All five died from exposure.
On Friday night, Tohono O’odham rangers recovered the bodies of a man and a woman west of the village of Big Field, said Police Chief Richard Saunders. Then the body of a 23-year-old man was found Sunday morning by Border Patrol rescue agents near the village of Vamori.
Just before midnight Sunday, a man flagged down Border Patrol agents on Arizona 86 near Milepost 56 and alerted them to a body. Monday evening a fifth body was found on Arivaca Road about 15 miles from Interstate 19.
Nobody knows for sure how many illegal entrants have died this year. Mexican consulate offices here are trying to help dozens of families find relatives who have been missing since they crossed the Sonora-Arizona border.
Javier Cisneros lost his brother Miguel Angel Cisneros Valdovinos in May. He’s been looking for him since.
Valdovinos had crossed illegally through Arivaca when he disappeared.
“We’ve been talking to the medical examiner and they’re looking over all the bodies they’ve recovered, but no luck,” Cisneros said.
“My God, I don’t know what else to do.”
Other border crossers literally stumble over remains in the desert.
Maria Rodriguez Diaz wanted nothing more than to get into the United States to work, she said as she walked through the Nogales Port of Entry deportation gate on a warm night last month, crying a little as she sat down to talk. She’d seen a human skull in the desert west of Sasabe and her hands shook as she used them to describe the dried white skull.
That discovery, the heat and the looming mountains still ahead of her helped convince her and the rest of the group of illegal border crossers to surrender on a highway.
“You could not imagine what that was like,” she said.
? Contact reporter Michael Marizco at 573-4213 or mmarizco@azstarnet.com.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/border/29976.php
Published: 07.14.2004