Altar, Mexico — BACK AT HOME, the TV news has been speculating over what sort of weather catastrophes the summer months might bring to an already battered Gulf Coast. But here, in this grimy desert town 65 miles south of the Arizona border, no one has to guess about what sort of horrors are in store. They're already happening.
Triple-digit temperatures mark the annual, inevitable spiral toward the scorching heart of what's called the "season of death" -- the time of year when the death toll of those trying to cross the border soars along with the mercury. Ever since the Clinton administration initiated (and the Bush White House extended) an enforcement blockade of border cities such as San Diego and El Paso, funneling migrants into ever more perilous and isolated desert routes, the body count has skyrocketed tenfold in a decade.
Last year, a record 500 deaths were recorded along the Southwest border, more than half of them in Arizona. This year's total is already on track to be the same or worse; as of late May, the U.S. Border Patrol had tallied 210 deaths since Oct. 1, a 20% increase over the previous year.
This town of 15,000 people has become a major launching pad for many of the unauthorized immigrants who provide fodder for these grim statistics. I arrived with a group of journalists in an air-conditioned van, with six bottles of water per head for the two-hour trip each way. Outside, the temperature was 112 degrees.
I had been here before, in January, and I knew the migrants coming the other way on the road travel in much different conditions. Paying as much as $2,000 each to their smugglers, they're loaded 25 or more at a time into battered, windowless vans that carry them along a two-hour, brain-shaking ride on a rutted dirt road. The vans come and go as quickly as the shuttle cars into Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Just short of the border, the migrants unload, fan out and disperse into smaller groups. By nightfall they're following their "guides," trekking on foot two, three, sometimes five days or more, attempting to penetrate the geographic and political membrane that separates them from the promise of something better. Through the winter and spring, as many as 3,500 a day made the trip up this road. More than 100,000 a month.
