http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0428losvidrios.html

Devil's Road: Migrants dying east of Yuma

Susan Carroll Republic Tucson Bureau Apr. 28, 2006 12:00 AM

CABEZA PRIETA WILDLIFE REFUGE - Jerry Wofford studied a set of tiny footprints, no bigger than the palm of his hand, as a light wind swept across El Camino del Diablo, the Devil's Road.

Wofford, a seasoned U.S. Border Patrol agent, can tell a lot from a footprint. If the weight falls on the ball of the foot, the migrant is running. A knee print, dragging a soft line in the sand, means he is crawling.

Both of these are bad signs.

As temperatures start to climb, Wofford is getting more and more apprehensive. To avoid more heavily patrolled stretches of Arizona border, more undocumented immigrants are crossing through this vast expanse of unpopulated desert east of Yuma, made up of thousands of square miles of sand, volcanic rock and stunted creosote bushes.

Arrests in the Border Patrol's Yuma Sector are up nearly 15 percent from last year, and the death tally is already outpacing 2005, a record year. Agents in the remote corridor where Wofford patrols are reporting an 86 percent increase in arrests and are tracking smugglers and undocumented immigrants into increasingly isolated desert.

When Wofford finds migrants out here, and they start to run and scatter, he hollers after them: "Where are you going? You're in the middle of nowhere, in the godforsaken desert!"

They still run.

Sometimes, Wofford has flashbacks. He remembers tracking a teenager, who in his madness ran away from the rest of a group. Wofford followed him, trying to catch up. The kid staggered, crawled, then ran, then crawled again.

When Wofford found him, he saw the teenager had stripped down naked and folded his clothes neatly in a pile. Then, the kid had just lain down and died.

"That's what keeps me up at night," Wofford said. "My biggest fear is that another group will get into trouble like that. It could happen tomorrow. Thankfully, so far, the weather has been on our side."

The thermometer in Wofford's truck read 92-degrees Fahrenheit. Thirty minutes later, it had climbed to 95.

Pristine and lethal

Wofford is one of the top ranking agents in the Wellton station, a small outpost between Dateland and Yuma that includes the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Barry M. Goldwater Range.

The pristine desert, a protected habitat for pronghorn sheep and rare organ pipe cactuses, is known for its breathtaking beauty but also for its ferocious heat in summer months.

David Stoddard, a retired agent who patrolled that stretch of desert for years, describes it this way: "I would compare it to a Russell viper, which is a very, very gorgeous serpent and just as deadly."

From the six-strand barbed-wire fence that marks the U.S.-Mexican border, a healthy man is looking at a 30- to 40-mile walk to the nearest highway, Interstate 8. In the summertime, agents say, it is impossible to carry enough water to make it without suffering from dehydration or some degree of heat stroke.

Nearly five years ago, in May 2001, a group of 26 men and teens crossed the border and cut across El Camino del Diablo, taking a meandering route north along the Growler Mountains. The guides made mistakes, got lost and ran out of water. Fourteen men and teenagers died in the crossing, the deadliest on record in Arizona.

One of the senior Wellton agents is convinced that they haunt the desert. After the 14 died, the Border Patrol put up towering rescue beacons in the desert. Every once in awhile, the beacon that sits right where the bodies were found goes off when no one is around.

Border buildup

Long ago, the smugglers forged their own rutted dirt road through the Cabeza Prieta from a truck stop called Los Vidrios, off Highway 2 on the Mexican side of the border.

For years, they drove load after load of people and drugs up north.

In the past five years, the Border Patrol has taken big stretches of the desert back from the control of smugglers. Now, the agency has built a camp in the middle of the desert to cover areas formerly too remote to regularly patrol. They fly in crews of agents in Huey helicopters and drop them off for weeklong stints at the camp, roughly 95 miles from Yuma.

Still, the smugglers like this location for a simple reason. There is less Border Patrol than in and around cities like Nogales or Yuma, where the agency has built miles of double fencing and stadium lights.

Arrests at the Wellton station are up 86 percent since Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year, compared with the same time last year. Overall, arrests in Arizona have declined about 2 percent so far this year.

Wofford, 43, has seen plenty of summers out here, and he knows for sure that it is going to get really hot, really soon. The best he can hope for, he says, is a gradual increase in the temperature.

He followed the little footprints in the sand, part of a group of 16 undocumented immigrants who crossed west of the sand dunes.

The Border Patrol eventually picked up six, including a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, along the Devil's Road.

Ten made it north to Interstate 8 and caught a ride. They were counted as "got-aways."

'American Dream'

On April 17, Anabel Ramos DeCuesta, 28, and her husband, Paulo Chol Morales, crossed the border with a guide, walking through the desert for three days and nights before they could even see any city lights in the distance. They ran out of food and water and drank from the dark, murky water of a cattle tank.

On the fourth day, within a few hundred yards of I-8, the Border Patrol caught them.

Ramos and Chol were dropped off on the Mexican side of the border, in the city of San Luis Del Rio Colorado, and made their way to a church-run migrant shelter.

In the shelter

In the dining hall, about 35 men and women sat shoulder to shoulder at long tables, covered with yellow tablecloths adorned with little red flowers.

The young couple sat near the head of the table, under a tapestry of the Last Supper.

A few seats down, Ruben Izar, a 40-year-old convicted marijuana smuggler who spent time in a California prison, stared blankly at the white wall.

The man who runs the shelter, Santiago Durazo, recited the Lord's Prayer in a soft drone.

"Forgive us our trespasses," Durazo said, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Ramos and Chol were hoping to make it to Salinas, Calif., to find jobs in the fields. But Ramos wasn't sure she wanted to try again. Not through that desert, she said, but maybe closer to the city.

She had left two sons, 12 and 14, in Mexico with her parents. The kids had cried when she left, asked her not to go.

Her husband tried to comfort her as they ate their first hot meal in days, a bowl of beans, rice and tortillas.

But he was tired and upset that they came so close to making it only to get caught.

"The American Dream," he said, "is very hard."

His wife, not looking up from her dinner, agreed. "Very hard."

Reach the reporter at susan.carroll@arizonarepublic .com or 1-(520)-207-6007.