NOTE FROM DENVERPOST.COM
The story below originally was published on June 6th, 2004
Sells, Ariz. – Lillian Miller lives alone in a cinder-block house at the center of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a sprawling reservation of tall cactuses and stunted villages. The serene, 59-year-old grandmother leans on a cane, her legs weakened from a years-long battle with diabetes.
In a soft voice, Miller explains how, in April 2003, men brought in the bales of marijuana and stacked them on her bed and bedroom floor until they spilled out into the kitchen.
Federal prosecutors claim Miller is a major trafficker and have charged her with conspiracy to distribute close to 1,300 pounds of marijuana with a street value of more than $1 million.
But to hear Miller tell it, she became a drug smuggler in the same way she might have lent a neighbor a cup of sugar.
Miller said a younger Tohono O’odham woman asked her to hold the dope briefly, vaguely promising money. Miller said she decided to do it as a favor.
“I’ve never done anything like that. A lot of people do it. It’s the money, I guess,” Miller said.
Over the past five years, this vast swath of desert west of Tucson has been transformed from a forgotten backwater without a traffic light or hotel into a major corridor for drugs and illegal immigrants on their way to construction sites, sweatshops and street dealers across the United States.
At peak season, according to tribal figures, 1,500 illegal immigrants are smuggled through the 2.7-million- acre reservation every day. Authorities say more than $50 million in marijuana entered the United States through the reservation in a single month last year.
What’s spoken about only in whispers is the deep involvement of some of the Tohono O’odham reservation’s 11,000 residents, who load and drive vehicles and provide stash houses for smuggling gangs. A few have struck out on their own as independent operators.
Arizona becomes go-to border
The inability of federal agents to stop that flow underscores the challenges in securing the country’s southwestern border, with its vast patchwork of federal, private and Indian land.
A decade-long government crackdown of trafficking routes in California and Texas has done little more, authorities concede, than turn the Arizona desert into a smuggler’s paradise and a border cop’s nightmare.
The Tohono O’odham (pronounced toe-HO-no OH-tum) are both facilitators and victims of that illicit trade.
Drug abuse on the reservation is on the rise. Tribal members who once left keys in ignitions are putting bars on windows and locks on doors.
And the alliance between Mexican smuggling organizations and some locals means that a growing number of Tohono O’odham are spending months or years in federal prison. Of 179 federal drug smuggling indictments originating on the reservation last year, 59 involved tribal members.
Yet in quiet conversations or offhand remarks, residents admit to another side of the smuggling boom.
They point to new sport utility vehicles sitting in the driveways of mud-brick houses and talk of plasma TVs that have replaced consignment- store hand-me-downs. Residents describe the irresistible pull of cash in a place as short on jobs as it is on hope.
“It’s tempting. A lot of our people don’t work. This is easy money, fast money,” said Gloria Chavez, a resident of San Miguel, a Tohono O’odham village of about 45 families 10 miles from the Mexican border.
“You go for a quick ride to Tucson or Phoenix, and you come back with lots of money,” she said.
Many here say they are startled at how easy it is for the tribe’s young people to become involved – or how hard it is for the glue of tribal traditions to hold up against smugglers’ cash.
Marilyn Francisco, a round-faced woman with salt-and-pepper hair that reaches down her back, is the leader of the reservation’s Chukut Kuk district but sees the problem through a mother’s eyes.
“One young person that I know of (is) moving drugs. This person keeps calling on my daughter,” Francisco said, “kind of like courting her to see if she would help her.
“So far she hasn’t gotten involved, but it seems like it’s going to happen eventually, and there are other families going through the same thing.”
But Francisco’s children are already among the lucky ones.
Talking recently with her 12-year-old daughter, Francisco realized that she was one of the few in her elementary school with two parents.
She and other tribal authorities concede that the appeal of smuggling is magnified by the reservation’s legacy of poverty, joblessness and broken homes.
A changing desert landscape
Rising in the shadow of the Baboquivari mountains, Sells, the reservation’s largest town, barely makes a dent on the ocher-colored landscape. There’s a small cafe, two video shops and a one- pump gas station. Entrepreneurs sell shoes in the grocery store parking lot and red chile burritos off pickup tailgates.
“All there is to do is drink and have sex,” said a young tribe member with a thick silver chain around his neck who declined to give his name, but whose view reflects sobering statistics.
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| Post / Hyoung Chang |
| Sgt. Vincent Garcia searches a safe house for illegal immigrants entering the U.S. through the Tohono O’odham reservation. Because of tribal loyalties, even those who oppose smuggling are reluctant to help authorities, police say. |
Unemployment among the Tohono O’od ham is 42 percent (compared with 5.6 percent nationally). Only 5 percent of tribe members have a college education.
Almost half of tribe members live outside the reservation. Others commute to jobs in Tucson or to two tribal casinos – work residents say usually pays less than $10 an hour.
It wasn’t always so.
Tribal elders, their copper faces deeply lined, recall once living off a land of hidden bounty. They harvested rich summer crops of cactus fruit and wild spinach, and hunted white-tailed deer and javelina, a small desert boar.
The Tohono O’odham – once known as the Papago, a derisive term endowed by the Spanish that means “bean-eaters” – are admired by anthropologists for their skill at wresting food and water from the desert.
But now, the desert gives up a different kind of bounty.
Beginning in 1994, the Clinton administration began an ambitious, decade-long effort to secure the southwestern border. It dispatched hundreds of new agents and millions of dollars in technology, sealing off traditional smuggling routes around major cities in California and Texas.
This pushed billions of dollars in black-market goods and people into the desert between Yuma and Douglas.
As night falls, the once-silent desert comes alive. Small groups of mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants shuffle among the mesquite and paloverde, guided by smugglers known as coyotes. The thump-thump of water jugs against human thighs echoes like drums in the desert.
Occasionally the hikers cross not for work, but for the $1,200 they can earn carrying a 40-pound pack stuffed with marijuana. Known by drug agents here as “backpackers” and recruited mostly from Mexican border towns, the human mules dump the drugs in hiding spots in the desert or deliver them to a house on the reservation, where they are stored until they can be hauled secretly to Tucson or Phoenix.
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| Post / Hyoung Chang |
| ]Lillian Miller says she was just doing her neighbor a favor when she allowed nearly 1,300 pounds of marijuana into her home on the Tohono O’odham reservation. |
“A smuggling organization needs certain services. It needs to be fed, kept and watered,” said Roger Applegate, who leads the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tucson.
“You need a place to put your dope. You need a means to transport it. The whole gist is that the (smuggling) organization has money, and that’s what everybody is in this game for – financial profit,” he said.
Children in Sells show up at the local grocery store with rolls of hundred-dollar bills to buy food for immigrants waiting in the desert. Police say drug-laden backpackers sometimes knock on residents’ doors and offer thousands of dollars for a lift to Tucson.
“It’s wrong. … We just do it”
Sitting on an upturned plastic bucket next to her trailer house in Sells, Joanne Lopez shakes her head in astonishment at the money to be made.
When a friend called looking for transport for 15 illegal immigrants, she offered $1,000 upfront, another $1,000 when Lopez arrived in Mesa with her cargo.
Lopez, who made $395 in monthly welfare payments, drove to a village south of Sells commonly used as a pickup point, where the immigrants were waiting in another tribe member’s house. She loaded them into the same rented van she used to make grocery runs to Tucson once a month.
Lopez was pulled over by tribal police before she even got back to Sells. Both the money and the van were confiscated, and Lopez spent four months in the federal penitentiary at Florence, Ariz.
“We know it’s wrong. We know it’s against the law. But we just do it,” said Lopez, who has custody of five grandchildren, including one who is deaf.
Tribal involvement in smuggling is deep, leaving few untouched.
Vincent Garcia, a rotund patrol sergeant for the tribal police, drives past a small house hidden behind a lemon- yellow blush of paloverde where last year police seized 472 pounds of marijuana. Just up the road, they found 1,000 pounds of the drug in the bedroom of a tribal accountant.
Up Arizona 86, Garcia peers into what looks like an ordinary shed next to a white ranch house but turns out to be a pickup point for illegal immigrants coming out of the desert. Their toothbrushes, old clothes and beer cans still lie scattered on the dirt floor.
“It’s everywhere,” Garcia said. “Almost everybody knows somebody” who is smuggling.
That includes Garcia, whose brother was imprisoned last year after he was caught hauling a load of marijuana to Tucson.
Authorities say the networks are protected by tribal loyalties or village connections. Even those on the nation who disapprove are often unwilling to cooperate with investigators, police said.
“The thing we’re up against as an Indian nation is the close-knitness of the community,” said Richard Saunders, Tohono O’odham police chief.
“People know who’s doing it – their friends, their family, their relatives. But they’re not upfront in reporting it to us.”
But evidence of the impact is growing by the day.
Sitting in a trailer that serves as the office for the Tohono O’odham Police Department’s two-man narcotics unit, Sgt. David Cray is surrounded by a collection of confiscated pipes and bongs. On his desk are 4 ounces of crystal methamphetamine fresh from a local dealer.
In an area where drugs were once rare, the increase in use on the reservation in the past few years has been “fantastic,” said Cray, who wears a T-shirt and jeans, a police badge clipped to his belt.
Cocaine and marijuana are now common in tribal schools, and meth is gaining fast, he said. The hard drugs often are bought with the money smuggling brings.
With marijuana, Mexican drug cartels sometimes pay off local hands in kind, giving them a couple of pounds to sell locally.
In a recent case, tribal police arrested a 17-year-old who began selling marijuana in a reservation elementary school that he picked up from loads he found stashed in the desert.
“When backpackers are bringing in a load, everybody talks. He’d go out in the washes and find where it was stashed and take some,” Cray said.
“As far as the rest of the world is concerned, it’s a minor problem. To the tribe, it’s major. It’s ruining their kids and their families,” he said.
Neither Cray nor anyone else seems to know what to do about it.
Because the tribe members’ land extends into Mexico, they are able to cross the border without having to go through official checkpoints.
Federal customs agents say it is almost impossible for them to run surveillance in tribal villages that are often little more than a few dozen houses. Tribal cops fare little better.
“Out here, the phone company is owned by the tribe. If we go over to the phone company and say, ‘We want to hook up (surveillance on) this phone,’ the guy we’re after knows it in two days,” Cray said.
Blame is easy; action isn’t
Discussion of long-term solutions often gets lost in mutual recrimination or debates over jurisdiction.
Tribal officials blame a long history of federal neglect and misguided policies that rob Native Americans of both the resources and the power to address problems. Federal officials say they have little jurisdiction over the larger social concerns that lead the Tohono O’odham into smuggling.
“We as a federal agency don’t have the ability to try to preserve the culture or the fabric of the community, and that’s really where the tragedy comes in in this situation,” said Aurene Martin, assistant deputy secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington.
Tribal authorities say they must now acknowledge that although some individuals get rich from smuggling, the cost to the tribe is intolerably high.
Last year, the tribe spent $7 million on law enforcement and medical costs related to the flow of drugs and immigrants across reservation land. That money could have gone to serve tribal members, tribal authorities said. Almost half of the Police Department budget is spent on border-related issues.
“We want to send a message out to our people that tribal members’ involvement in illegal activity only adds to the destruction of our culture,” said chairwoman Vivian Juan- Saunders, the first woman to lead the Tohono O’odham in its modern history.
To Karen Miguel, the costs are much more personal.
When her parents split six years ago, Miguel said she and her three siblings formed “our own little family.” Struggling to pay the bills, her oldest sister agreed to transport a load of immigrants. She was pulled over her first time out and is now serving two years in federal prison.
After that, the youngest – a 19-year-old athletic man who dreamed of joining the Marines – moved off the reservation and got caught up with friends already involved in smuggling.
The first time they heard he was in trouble was when police called to say he’d been picked up leaving the reservation with a load of drugs. He’s serving 27 months in federal detention.
“They are taking young people in their prime and getting them into this when they could be doing other things,” said Miguel, 22, who works as a driver for the Indian Health Service.
“It’s breaking up families,” she said. “They make promises. They offer them money. It makes me so angry.”
