Death Watch in the Desert

Image Gallery image by Reuters / Rick Wilking

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This is a place of ghosts. Ask anyone who walks these trails, in the bare-knuckle desert.

Here among high scrub, south of Arivaca, Arizona, sunlight glances off discarded water bottles, candy wrappers, tennis shoes, rosaries, and a tiny picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe in yellowing cracked plastic. Such things are hastily abandoned in the headlong passage between life and death, the fate of their owners unknown.

Officially, migrant deaths here each year number in the hundreds. Humanitarians who hike this country call those numbers bullshit. They say the desert is haunted by thousands of unfound dead people. Out here, a corpse gets about two weeks, tops. By then, sun and scavengers have sealed the deal.

A handful of rescue volunteers have come across bodies, but everyone has seen the bones. And in a place where mortality crunches underfoot, folks can get a bit touchy.

Take the feds and the humanitarian outfits. They’ve never shared much in the way of mutual admiration. Sure, everyone pledges bonhomie—each appreciates the other’s “tough job” or “dedication” or “good intentions.” But those are just words muttered to reporters. As it happens, the thing that keeps them at odds also binds them together: death all around. Death behind that shrub or in that wash, or settled in the shade of that half-buried boulder.

Death is the third partner in a relationship that nobody wants. The humanitarians provide assistance, food, and water to migrants. The feds mostly leave them alone to do so.

Until recently.

Over the past couple of years, federal agencies ranging from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management to the Border Patrol have been putting activists under the gun.

Consider Kathryn Ferguson. In January 2008, she was arrested while she was checking migrant trails with the Samaritans group, and was held roadside for several hours by Special Agent Bob Ruiz of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). According to Bart Fitzgerald, BLM special agent in charge for Arizona, Ferguson was detained for “acting mysteriously.” She was cited for creating a nuisance. A few days before her trial, that charge was mysteriously dropped.

In February 2008, No More Deaths volunteer Dan Millis was cited for littering after he left water jugs for migrants on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge south of Tucson. Two days earlier, he’d come across the body of Josseline Jamileth Hernandez Quinteros, age 14. Josseline made it all the way from El Salvador before death caught her here.

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