Life Near the Mexican Border: 'Our Communities Are Not War Zones!' John Heid - CounterPunch
go to original March 14, 2014

“You have no rights here!” barked a U.S. Border Patrol agent to a resident of Arivaca, AZ who was passing through a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint 23 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

This remark confirms a sense of violation of rights that many borderlands residents have when encountering one of the 71 permanent or tactical checkpoints scattered across the southwestern U.S. These off-border sites were condoned by the U.S. Supreme Court more than 40 years ago. Stops were intended to be brief, and limited to verifying residence status. They were to be situated within a reasonable distance from the border. This distance was determined to be 100 miles from any external boundary and today roughly encompasses two-thirds of the U.S. population. People in the southwest call this region the “constitution-free zone.”

Arivaca, a community of roughly 700 people, is situated 11miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border and within 30 miles of three Border Patrol checkpoints. There is no way out of town without having to pass through one. This rural community boasts the “oldest standing school house in Arizona,” built in 1879. Arivaca was established during the silver mining rush of the mid-late 1800?s. Today its population is a multicultural mix of cattle ranchers, artists, retirees, many of them school teachers, and local service workers. There is a general store, one bar, one Catholic church and one Baptist church as well as a coffee shop, public library, a handful of small businesses and a post office. Arivaca is the quintessential bucolic small town U.S.A.

Today, however, Arivaca finds itself in the heart of a migration corridor as a result of U.S. border enforcement policy which has funneled migrant-travelers into harsher, more remote desert terrain. Over the last two decades residents have witnessed the human toll of this policy. Now finding the bodies of deceased migrants in the arroyos around town is not a rare event. Residents have also seen a marked increase in the number of people walking around and through town. Usually these travelers are exhausted, hungry and many are in urgent need of medical care.

While Arivacans do not necessarily agree about immigration policy, the common response to migrants has been to offer food and water as they pass through. What has caused resentment, however, has been the militarization of their community in response to this flow of migrants.

Read the rest at CounterPunch

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