Mexican town a last-stop shop for illegal immigrants

ALTAR, Mexico — Some towns thrive on manufacturing. Others are known for fertile soil or tourist attractions.

Altar has only one industry of any visibility and consequence: immigrant smuggling.

This dusty town is the last stop on the line before a 60-mile drive along back roads to the United States. It's a place to buy water, food and the accoutrement of choice for illegal desert crossers — a backpack.

"Altar is just like a big Wal-Mart for smugglers," said Sean King, spokesman for the Tucson, Ariz., sector of the U.S. Border Patrol. "They've got booths set up for backpacks that are prepacked with toilet paper ... shoes that are better to walk in than some of the huaraches they might be wearing — everything you need to come across the border."

There are no holidays in Altar. No "Day Without an Immigrant." No Cinco de Mayo. On any given day, 1,600 people show up from all over Mexico. In April, the high season, 3,000 rolled in every day, according to officials who run the Catholic shelter.

They are lured to Altar by "coyotes" who charge them $2,000-$4,000 for a chance to cross the most inhospitable stretch of desert on the U.S.-Mexico border. They cram like sardines into $3-a-night flophouses or, for those who can afford it, hotels that charge $30 to $40 for 12 hours.

Before they head north, immigrants often kneel in prayer before a bank of candles and a statue of Jesus in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Then they silently march, 30 and 40 at a time, into vans rigged to hold maximum human cargo.

Metal benches run down the sides and center. Cages at head level secure their backpacks for a bumpy, $15 journey to the desolate outskirts of Sasabe, Mexico, the preferred point of entry and the busiest zone on the border for U.S. authorities.

The lucky ones soon find themselves tending manicured lawns in New Jersey or framing houses in California or Texas.

Others end up dead or, like Fabian Rivera Ramirez, arrested, fingerprinted, injured and back in Altar. Rivera tried to cross three times in 17 days, walking for eight days until his blistered feet ached and bled.

He admitted he veered from the path of legality but, with a kid in college and a mountain of unpaid medical bills, Rivera, 50, said he tried to cross illegally for the first time in his life.

"We don't have a right to emigrate," the Veracruz native said. "But how different it would be if we had a permit. Then it wouldn't be a violation. It would be an opportunity."

The smuggling trade is tightly controlled and highly organized on both sides of the border. Mountains of marijuana flow through here, too, but that trade occurs in the shadows.

On the U.S. side, drug-smuggling scouts use solar-powered batteries and radios to keep a watch on law enforcement, and human traffickers maintain safe houses throughout southern Arizona, Border Patrol officials say.

In Altar, the 150 or so "guest houses" and nine hotels, the kiosks brimming with backpacks and shoes, the road to the border and the ubiquitous vans marked "Altar-Sasabe" are part of a vast migrant-smuggling network.

"Altar has no other economic activity," said Francisco Garcia Aten, human-rights coordinator at the Catholic-run immigrant shelter. "Altar is the waiting room for migrants. This is the last place for migrants to have access to the maximum number of services they need to cross. It's the last piece of civilization they'll see for three, four, five or six days."

Garcia Aten said the toll road to Sasabe is run by a former city official who also owns one of Altar's hotels. Receipts are given out at the toll booth, and officially the road is public, but the money feeds the smuggling network, Garcia said. "Nobody says anything about it," he said.

There is even an informal trade union of smuggling coyotes, according to Hector, a guest-house manager who didn't want his full name published. Problems, he said, tend to get handled the old-fashioned way: "The desert has no ears," he said.

People have been streaming into Altar — the gateway to Arizona — since authorities in Texas and California installed physical barriers and increased patrols in the 1990s.

But there are hurdles of a different kind, Garcia said. Immigrants first must get past police shakedowns on the Mexican side, then avoid bandits who operate out of Mexico but prey on crossers a few hundred yards north of the border. If immigrants get beyond those barriers, thousands of Border Patrol agents, with electronic sensors and helicopter support, await them.

Those who don't get busted risk dehydration and death.

Nearly half of the 473 immigrant deaths in 2005 occurred in the Tucson sector, which runs along 261 miles of international border from New Mexico to the Yuma County, Ariz., line. Summer temperatures can reach 130 degrees in the Sonoran Desert.

In Altar, the single public hospital does not accept injured or ailing immigrants, a task that falls to a mobile clinic run by the International Red Cross, said Gerardo Cardenas, a paramedic who works there. The unit treats 1,000 people a month on average.

Despite the risks, immigrants keep coming.

Sometimes it takes multiple attempts and detentions before people make it through. One man needed 28 tries.