Dying in the Desert: Stories from the Border

Bruce Anderson leans back in his seat and runs his hands through his hair. He speaks of the corpses in a matter-of-fact-tone, like someone would talk  about picking up mail. It’s not because he doesn’t care, it’s just that he’s tired of all the dead bodies — bodies that arrive constantly, bodies that need to be examined and have a determined cause of death. He’s tired of sorting through the bones that pile up on his desk each month. Last week he had 10 or 15 bodies he needed to look at that he just didn’t have time to get to. His eyes are red; He rubs them constantly.

His 6-foot-6 inch frame is slouched over in a chair, his arms folded. His blond hair pulled back. He looks like an old surfer that wandered too far from the ocean and suddenly found himself in Arizona, knee-deep in cactus, tumble weeds and the demented echo of some cowboy tune.

Anderson, who graduated from ASU in ‘82 with a bachelor’s in anthropology, is a forensic anthropologist in Pima County. He works in a small building in the shadow of the University Physicians Hospital in Tucson. He determines the cause of death of people who were murdered, committed suicide or died in strange accidents. Each year he examines about 2,500 dead bodies, mostly Americans who are in and out in a few days. But during the last decade, more than 200 of the corpses each year have been from migrants who died while crossing the border from Mexico.

Arizona leads the nation in migrant deaths each year, according to a study from the American Civil Liberties Union. Anderson’s job is to find out who these people are, where they lived and how they died. Many migrants don’t carry IDs. Many have no dental records. Many have been decaying in the desert for days and sometimes years.

“The longer a body is out there the more likely it has been scavenged by critters,” he says. “If you’ve been out there long enough to skeletonize, then you’ve been out there long enough to for a coyote, dog, javelina or vulture to either consume part of you or take part of you back to their den.”

Each body needs to be identified, claimed by relatives and sent back to their family.

Anderson explains this while sitting in a chair behind a long desk, just down the hall from his office. He slowly wipes his hand across his face or through his hair from time to time. Sometimes he closes his eyes after. Then he takes a deep breath like he’s just taken a long drag off a cigarette and is suddenly more relaxed.

The job is hard. He knows this. He’s got 90 migrant bodies from last year that haven’t been claimed by families. Some days, he says, he wishes he could have a day to rest and catch up with the medical journals. He used to have one day at work he could do that. “I haven’t seen that day for seven years,” he says. “It’ll take me seven years just to clean up the messes I have in my office right now.”

The death is hard to deal with. “Maybe you never do build up a level of callousness or distance,” he says. Maybe, he never acclimates to the greasy flesh and the smell of decaying tissue, or organs that have turned to mush from sitting out in the sun, or finding a body and realizing he’s not the first one to come across it — realizing that maggots and beetles have eaten any discernible feature the migrant had.

And the bodies. Most of them have a fetid stench that sticks in his nostrils. Maybe it’s just a series of micro-traumas everyday. Series upon series of traumas that are as common in his line of work as turning a wrench is to a mechanic.

“Every month or year I think, ‘What the hell am I doing?’” he says.

But he wins small battles everyday. He identifies 75 percent of the migrant cases, the highest percentage in the nation, which he says he thinks runs at about 40 percent. When he clears a body out from the queue, a family gets a little closure. And that, maybe, makes the job worth it.

“The alternative, not knowing, has got to be worse,” he says.

The death is hard, it will always be hard, he says. Looking at the body of a an 11-year-old migrant who died while crossing the border never gets easy. But that’s not too common. Most of the migrant bodies he sees are between 25 and 35-years-old. And almost all are healthy — at least they were before they died crossing the desert, through rows of prickly pear cactus and jagged beige rocks.

“I mean, they weren’t shot,” he says. “They were in dangerous situations that they put themselves in, I won’t sugar coat it. But it’s not some kid who drove his car too fast or some girl who took a bunch of drugs and killed herself or some guys who got in a pissing contest and pulled out weapons. These are people who are healthy and they would be alive today if they didn’t see the need to cross that border.”

As almost all of the deaths are because of dehydration and exposure, most of the migrants would be alive if they just had water.

No Expectations: Ain’t No Use In Cryin

Before Mike Wilson drove 100 miles west  to the middle of the Tohono O’dham Nation, he reached into his truck’s center console and pulled out a metal cross with a turquoise stone in the middle. He put it around his neck and said, “The bus is leaving.”

Wilson is a man who has run out of fingers to stick in the dike.

In the middle of the desert, more than an hour west of Tucson, he glances down and points at tread marks lining the ground. He sighs, and dust kicks up from his feet as he walks closer to the marks.

“Those look like they’re from the tribal police,” Wilson, 60, says. Something about the tread pattern makes him think so, he can’t say it was them for certain.

For nine years, Wilson has put out water for migrants crossing into America. He places groups of water jugs on the ground in high-traffic areas, hoping that migrants will find them. He does this in a corridor on the Tohono O’odham Nation, or “the Nation” as Wilson calls it. The area that he puts the water in was referred to as “The Killing Fields” in the ACLU study and is one of the most commonly used border-crossing routes, and one of the most deadly.

The citizens of the Baboquivari District, the district on the Tohono O’odham Nation where Wilson puts out his water, has decided  leaving water for migrants is aiding in illegal activity.

“Well, I know that [Wilson’s] efforts are for a good cause,” Baboquivari District Chairwoman Veronica Harvey says. “But the people are the ones that have a say.”

People in the District have their homes vandalized, Harvey says. They’ve had problems with drug traffickers and trash that crossing migrants leave behind. But Wilson believes the Nation should still put out water. He believes they have an “obligation to a higher moral code.” So Wilson goes on, even though it’s illegal and he could be arrested.

With the sun high overhead, Wilson’s long black hair is neatly pulled into a pony tail. The cross hanging from his neck flashes in the sun. Through out the day, when Wilson is lost for words, he swings it back and forth along its chain. He moves steadily and with purpose. He is a man, not of few words, but of rhythmic, tight sentences.

Against a backdrop of hellishly mangled trees and saguaro cactus that peer over the rest of the landscape like green watchtowers, Wilson walks closer to his water station. This station, the first of four on the reservation, he calls St. Matthew. Near the station there are foot prints, but they’re not migrant foot prints.

Wilson plods over to where his water jugs should be. He looks down and runs his hand over the tan dirt. The ground is smooth and has been distorted by running water. Last time he was here, under the shade of a tree, he left 10 gallons of water organized in the shape of a cross. But now, instead of empty jugs used by thirsty migrants, Wilson found several round holes carved into the ground – scars from where the water poured out onto parched earth.

“Well, let’s leave 10 [gallons] here,” Wilson says as he sighs. “You leave what you’ve got and that’s all you can do.”

A Rock and a Hard Place

At one time, Wilson was a Presbyterian pastor on the reservation. While there, he came across a map showing a red dot in each place a dead migrant was found. In a corridor, five miles from where he lived, was a splashing current of red, so full of dots that distinguishing one from another was nearly impossible.

He thought to himself, “Hey, here are all these people dying and the Nation is not doing anything about it.” That was the beginning of what Wilson calls his “mission.”

As if traveling more than 100 miles every other week, and sometimes each week, wasn’t hard enough, the District’s policy of taking down his water stations has made Wilson’s mission even more futile. Like a man pushing a boulder up a mountain, a Sisyphus of the west.

But the Nation finds itself in a hard place. It shares 75 miles of border with Mexico and, by its own studies, about 450 illegal migrants cross through the Nation each day.

In total, the Nation spends $3 million each year on migrant related issues, half a million of which is spent on identifying migrant corpses. It deals with drug traffickers and peaceful migrants.

Wilson doesn’t try to hide what he does. He doesn’t skulk around in the dark. He simply drives an hour west from his home and into the middle of the Nation, just south of its capital, and goes about his business, obeying a “higher moral law.”

Don’t Stop: Mixed Emotions

David Garcia, a fellow tribe member, has helped Wilson put out water for four years. His face is wrinkled and tan, and his eyes are always squinted. When Garcia talks, which is not very often, his mouth opens just enough to show he’s speaking.

Garcia stands next to Wilson and smokes a hand-rolled cigarette by the back of Wilson’s green Dodge truck.

When he’s finished, Garcia climbs up the back of Wilson’s truck and into the bed. Garcia methodically pulls out 10 gallon-size jugs, and two at a time he walks them beneath the tree. He neatly arranges them on the ground in the shape of a cross.

“Always in the sign of the cross,” Wilson says. “I hoped [whoever is dumping the water out] would have a conscience.”

Garcia takes his jacket off. Even on this spring day in Southern Arizona the sun is becoming a nuisance. In the summer it’ll reach over 115 degrees; the small green shrubs and the wildflowers that are in bloom now will shrivel up. There are groves of leafless, gray trees whose branches tear at everything passing through like the sprouting dregs of a horrible torture device. Wilson says it will only get more frustrating the hotter it gets.

The two get into the truck. Wilson backs it up onto the main dirt road. Tree branches claw the truck’s side. He drives for another five minutes and then turns into the next water station, which he calls St. Mark.

“Yup, more tracks,” Wilson says as he lets out a long sigh.

All the water is gone again, taken and dumped onto the ground. It’s like this for Wilson’s two other water stations. All four stations — St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke and St. — are preceded by a set of tire tracks. Around each set of tracks are foot prints that stomped around where the jugs were left in the shape of a cross.  All that’s left of the water and jugs are ridges in the ground where the water was poured out.

“We never know when he is coming,” Harvey says of the local governments attempts to stop Wilson. “We find out later that the water stations are up again and so we take them down.”

At each station Wilson bends close to the dirt. He waves his hands over it and feels the ridges left by the water. He examines very closely. At one point he can tell how the person stood as the water dumped out: two jugs at the same time, held in each hand with arms slightly spread in opposite directions out from the hips, he says.

Wilson sighs as he pulls out his notebook to record the missing water. It’s enough to make a person throw in the towel, just give up. Why not? He doesn’t get paid for this. He doesn’t have to set out water for the migrants. He could just let them die in the desert, shrivel up on the ground and die of dehydration.

But he knows he can’t agonize over the missing water. What happens after he leaves is out of his control.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Garcia and Wilson get back in the truck and drive down the dirt road to a watering hole for livestock.

The watering hole is a stagnant, muddy pond where migrants are sometimes forced to fill their bottles when Wilson’s water is gone. The thick water blends in with its muddy banks.

To the east is Baboquivari Peak, a sacred point of genesis for the Tohono O’odham people. It’s a part of their creation story. This made Wilson think about the District’s policy toward his water stations.

“I find it to be hypocrisy,” Wilson said.

The two get into the truck once more. They leave the dirt road and turn onto a two-lane highway. Wilson turns across the oncoming-traffic lane, just in front of a faded sign with “Law Enforcement” written in small black letters. He wants to let the Border Patrol know he’s going to check on his last water station on the Mexican side. The Border Patrol doesn’t care if he sets out water. They don’t mingle with tribal laws.

The Border Patrol station is several dilapidated mobile-home type buildings in the middle of nowhere. On the back of the main mobile-home-unit is a large cage. It looks like a dog kennel in an animal shelter.  This is where captured migrants are held. Dirt ground and metal corrugated tops, all fenced in with chain link. On the ground are 14 or so hard plastic-looking beds. Like stray curs, they’re snatched up and placed in the cages.

Wilson is talking to one of the officers, he tells them he’s going to check on his water station.

“Not a problem,” the officer says. He has a crew cut, green uniform and a badge that reads “Z. Klinske.” “I’ll take care of it, sirs.”

The radio crackles and he mutters Wilson’s directions into it.

Wilson drives on and crosses the border, which is two lines of barbed wire and a 20-foot no-man’s-land. Any half-sober person with a keen sense of north could cross it.

Crossing the border is not the hard part, though. Surviving the desert and not getting chased down and locked up in the dog pen is the hard part.

The water station on the other side of the border is the only one left with any water. It’s the only one that hasn’t been poured out.

Contact the reporter at wphippen@asu.edu

Tagged as: American Civil Liberties Union, Baboquivari District, Tohono O’odham