Arivaca, border town | The Press

(Arivaca, Arizona) Vigilantes, militiamen, do not enter here, you are not welcome, says the poster at the entrance to the La Gitana restaurant-bar.

This is not a political opinion, but rather the echo of a tragedy that forever shook Arivaca, an isolated town of 700 souls planted in the middle of the desert of southern Arizona, which might as well be said nowhere.

At dawn on May 30, 2009, a woman and two men members of the Minutemen American Defense, or MAD, entered Raul Flores’ house. These nationalist vigilantes claim to protect the border, poorly defended according to them by federal agents against traffickers and migrants. Mexico is about thirty kilometers away, and if one is brave or crazy or desperate enough, there is a way to make your way through the mountains in the sometimes scorching, sometimes freezing air.

The “Minutemen” showed up that morning at the door of Flores, whom they suspected of being the American contact for the Sinaloa cartel. The punitive raid was to be used to seize drugs and money to finance the “MAD”.

” Police, open up, we know you’re hiding fugitives…”

Flores opened. The three vigilantes found nothing. They shot Flores at point blank range. Her 8 year old daughter was screaming too loudly. They killed her too. Gina Marie Gonzalez, the mother, survived by playing dead after being shot three times.

The trio were convicted of murder in 2011.

Fifteen years after the fact, it’s a subject we still prefer to avoid. But everyone here is somewhat obliged to have an opinion on the border.

I sit at the La Gitana restaurant-bar. Zoe serves me a dish of shelled peanuts. Next to me, Ron Dennis, 65, looks like he’s drowning a little, but I’m not sure if it’s in the Bud Light or in Zoe’s blue eyes.

“Where are you from, Zoe?”

– Hawaii, replies the woman with the tattoos, preparing two Ilegal Mezqual.

– Why would anyone want to leave Hawaii?

– My husband was sent to a federal penitentiary in Arizona, so I followed him…”

Ron’s last job was installing the border wall in 2020.

“I’ve worked in heavy equipment all my life, big construction sites, roads, all that. But that, oh my lordit’s the most interesting but most dangerous job I’ve ever had in my life. That’s where I got injured, by the way. »

He explains to me the dynamiting, to build motorable roads on steep slopes along the future wall.

He takes a sip, then throws this at me:

“We saw lots of dead babies. Eight. That’s devastating, let me tell you that…”

He takes a break, speaks more and more quietly. His eyes get wet.

“Little guys, 4, 5, 6 years old… barefoot, in 110 degree weather [43 degrés Celsius]. They came out of nowhere. I jumped out of my machine to give them water… I told them: no bebas quickly… Don’t drink too quickly! We lost eight… They were exhausted. Hey, I have grandchildren that age, it broke my heart. I have never seen one Border Patrol cry with my life, but there, the supervisor, I saw him cry. I try not to think about it. There was this 6 year old kid one day. The officer asked him, “Where is your mom?” He said, “Bad men have taken her, they are hurting her.” “How did you get here?” “Bad men brought me here…”.

“That’s what people in the city don’t understand about the border. It’s not pretty. The smugglers are bullies.

“When we regain the strength of our country, there will be tons of agents. I don’t care if it’s Trump, I don’t like him more than I should. But it can’t continue like this.

– But we can’t put an agent every three meters, Ron?

– Yes, I know… »

Alan Wallen walks barefoot through the aisles of the grocery store.

With his vaguely hippie demeanor and his zen phrasing, he actually looks like he came straight out of a Vermont coop.

“I grew up in Arivaca and farmed organically for 15 years, but at some point I decided to get a real job,” the 56-year-old says as he sits down in the shade of a mesquite tree. He’s the one who provides IT services for almost everyone here.

“Borders are a relic of the old days, kings found a way by drawing lines to say: they are the bad ones, we are the good ones. You have to go fight them. We have technology that covers the world, why not policy that covers the world? It’s a pipe dream, I know, but I have the right to dream. »

In elementary school, most of the students came from Mexico and crossed over to get an education.

When heavily subsidized American corn flooded the Mexican market, especially after the North American Free Trade Agreement, thousands of small farms went bankrupt in Mexico.

“It’s poverty that brings people here and most of the migration problems are due to U.S. government policies,” he says.

“There have always been migrants. They walk down the street. They knock on the door to get water, food, medicine. They have a sprained ankle, a broken limb. Lacerations. The wall is totally useless. As former Governor Janet Napolitano said: Show me a 40-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 41-foot ladder.

“The construction of the wall destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of beautiful wild land. The wildlife is now blocked. Our ecosystem is being disrupted. »

Barbara Stockwell has long taught struggling students in Arivaca.

“Almost all the students came from Mexico to learn English. The children got along well, they played baseball, took Mexican folk dance lessons… But it became dangerous. The cartels have set up shop at the border, and drugs are flowing in all the time. Former students have been imprisoned. »

She voted Democratic until Obama’s first election. Then switched sides because of it.

“We have to close the wall and keep it watertight,” she said, wearing her Trump t-shirt.

Alan put me in touch with his friend RD. “He thinks the complete opposite of me, but we’re friends nonetheless. »

RD is digging a hole with his excavator, but he gives me a few minutes.

“I am not anti-migrant and even less anti-Mexican. We are a nation of immigrants. But it must be done legally, with verifications. I saw some people arrive with bags of drugs. The border should be closed, the wall completed, and entry controlled. There are people who want to kill us, period. September 11 proved it. »

His colleague, George Huesler, 36, has changed his mind about the wall since his brush with death while hiking. Heatstroke. He felt what so many people encountered on the roads here have experienced.

“My boss, a rancher, was a staunch Republican. At one point his wife calls us in a panic. She had fired her 38 into a bush. There was a poor panicked migrant. The guy was frozen, he was shaking. He told us he was a police officer in El Salvador. That people there were going to kill his wife, or had already killed her, and his son if he didn’t send money. You could see in his face that he wasn’t telling stories. He was begging me not to call the patrol, but it’s illegal, and the boss’s wife had already called… He was crying. »

This part of southern Arizona voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden in 2020, contributing to his slim victory by 10,457 votes in the state.

But that was before the biggest waves of migration in recent years, particularly that of 2023.

This year’s election could be decided by a few hundred votes in Arizona, and in Arivaca, no one can predict who will win.