By Tim Gaynor
SASABE, Mexico (Reuters) – For decades, residents of this
Mexican desert village on the border with the United States
baked bricks and ranched cattle to make a meager living. Sasabe
was barren and isolated then.
Now it is a boomtown studded with bars, flophouses and taco
stands as that isolation has made it a popular and thriving hub
for smugglers hauling undocumented migrants north into America,
authorities say.
The U.S. Border Patrol said more than 165,000 illegal
immigrants were picked up last year in a scrub- and
cactus-strewn corridor near this sun-baked community, nearly an
eighth of the total 1.2 million arrested for the whole
2,000-mile (3,200-km) Mexican border.
A crackdown on security in the border cities of San Diego,
California, to the west and Nogales, Arizona, to the east in
recent years has forced immigrants to seek more out-of-the way
spots like Sasabe to sneak across the border.
Each afternoon hundreds of weary looking travelers, many
hefting gallon jugs of water for the journey ahead, gather on
benches outside cheap restaurants in Sasabe as they wait to
cross into Arizona, led by guides dubbed “polleros” or
“coyotes.”
“It all started when the U.S. authorities closed the border
around the cities, and people started to cross in the most
inhospitable areas,” town administrator Jose Alejandro Leyva
said in the one-story office building he shares with the
community’s three police officers.
“At one time there were no undocumented migrants here …
and now the town is growing out of control … driven by the
influx of migrants passing through here on their way north,” he
added.
BORDER BOOMTOWN
Two coyotes, dressed like immigrants in well-worn jeans,
T-shirts and baseball caps so as to blend in if nabbed by U.S.
border police after crossing into the United States, bluntly
refused to be interviewed for this story and accused the
reporter of being a policeman.
Mexican state migrant welfare organization Grupo Beta
estimates up to 1,000 people — mainly from poverty-wracked
southern states such as Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas — stream
north through Sasabe each day headed for the United States
either on foot or in trucks.
The village has doubled in size to some 4,000 people in
just four years as a result, with criminals and entrepreneurs
from across Mexico flocking in to make money on the back of the
illicit cross-border trade.
The most obvious beneficiaries are the coyotes, who earn a
fat cut from fees of up to $2,000 that U.S. border police say
immigrants must pay to be taken over the border and north to
Arizona cities Tucson and Phoenix.
The money is spent building new cinder-block homes in the
dusty village, as well as on things like late-model pickup
trucks, many of which are fitted with tinted windows. These
trucks ride the dusty main street blaring out thumping
accordion ballads.
Secondary businesses have also sprung up to cater to the
migrants including general stores, flophouse hotels that charge
just $3 a night, as well as restaurants and cantinas — one
cheekily named ‘El Coyote’ by its owners.
Locals say many businesses have been set up by people from
outside the community to take advantage of the easy money,
including one cook from the eastern state of Veracruz who
opened a taco stall early in October.
“We figured there was a chance to make something out of the
passing trade,” cook Mariano Oliver said as he stirred a vat of
simmering ox bones for a group of migrants in his dirt-floor
diner.
A DANGEROUS BUSINESS
The trade can be deadly. The U.S. Border Patrol in Tucson
said 145 migrants died in the year to October crossing the
western desert area that includes Sasabe. Most perished of
dehydration during the brutal summer heat.
The cross-border trade also has a downside for Sasabe and
surrounding areas, as cinder-block buildings are thrown up
regardless of planning regulations, and added demand is placed
on already hard-pressed water supplies, Leyva said.
Some ranchers near the town also complained that immigrants
snip through the five-strand barbed wire border fence marking
the northern limit of their land, letting their cattle out to
roam into the United States.
Sasabe’s namesake twin just across the cactus-studded
border in Arizona, has also been marked by the migration, as
pristine desert trails are littered with empty water bottles,
plastic bags and discarded clothing.
Residents say the roadway through the tiny village, which
includes a primary school and a general store, has become a
racetrack as Border Patrol units chase after smugglers fleeing
back to Mexico in vans packed with migrants.
“One time they were going so fast through here that they
spun off the road at the hairpin bend and through a neighbor’s
wall,” said long-suffering store owner Deborah Grider.
“We have a school here, and we are very concerned that
someone could get killed,” she added.
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