Posted on 03/09/2004 12:36:24 PM PST by DumpsterDiver
SASABE, Sonora - Mexico has opened a clinic in this small, rough town to treat migrants who've gotten sick or hurt on their way to the border they intend to cross illegally.
The triage center - a large Mexican Red Cross mobile clinic on a semitrailer with an ambulance acting as its satellite - is an effort to reduce the strain on Sonora's own medical centers in the area. It also could lessen the impact on hospitals in Tucson that treat illegal entrants on a daily basis.
The clinic, located next to Mexico's border safety force, Grupo Beta, also reflects the country's attitude toward illegal migration into the United States. There's a long-standing policy that the Mexican government feels it must care for and protect its citizens, even as they're making a run for the U.S. border.
The clinic was opened in February as a pilot program to see which area of the border migrants needed help along the most before heading north, said Jorge Luis Mireles Navarro, regional migration delegate in Sonora for Mexico's National Migration Institute.
Hundreds of people are injured or get sick even before they start to cross illegally into the United States, he said. As a result, they're more vulnerable to the hazards of crossing and more likely to end up in U.S. hospitals if they're intercepted.
"I can sympathize with the costs to hospitals in Arizona," Mireles Navarro said.
When the program ends next week, the decision will be made to either keep the clinic in Sasabe or begin moving it along the border to areas like Naco, Agua Prieta or Nogales, Mireles Navarro said.
So far, 195 people have been treated for everything from sprains to respiratory problems to bad scrapes from walking the desert slopes south of the Baboquivari Mountains, said Juan Preciado Felix, commander of the Red Cross clinic.
"We expect the numbers will climb even higher as the temperatures increase," he said.
The clinic is similar to Grupo Beta, the migrant safety force that operates along the border. In late March, 45 more Grupo Beta agents from around Mexico will join the border units south of Arizona and California in hopes of stemming the risks to would-be illegal border crossers.
But like Grupo Beta, there are limits to what the clinic's six volunteers can do.
For instance, the clinic's ambulance would have to take a seriously injured migrant 80 miles south down a rutted dirt road to the major hospital in Caborca. Then, too, the rough roads leading into the desert west of Sasabe are nearly impossible for an ambulance to negotiate.
A seriously injured migrant would have to be brought out of the desert in the bed of a Grupo Beta truck - if the agents can safely enter the area.
At a crossing point about 30 miles east of Sasabe, border bandits lurk in a riverbed and behind cliffs waiting for migrants. A group of more than 100 was robbed at gunpoint last Tuesday, said Enrique Enriques, the Grupo Beta commander in Sasabe.
Last Thursday night, he forced his agents to pull out from a haven for migrants about 40 miles west of town after two people were killed by narco-traffickers inside Mexico.
At night, his agents won't enter the lawless desert because they have no way to stay safe since they stopped carrying guns three years ago and are not allowed to make arrests.
"That leaves no one to tend to the migrants out there," Enriques said.
From Feb. 1 to Friday, more than 34,000 people arrived in this Mexican town from Altar, a town of about 15,000 two hours south of the border. The Red Cross ambulance targeted the local drop-off point to treat migrants who needed medical attention while Grupo Beta trucks headed into the desert to watch for bandits and to make sure the soon-to-be-illegal border crossers were aware of the dangers they faced.
Migrants moved like smoke through mesquite and ironwood trees as tall as a man as they made their way to havens just south of the border. At a ranch house 10 miles west of the San Miguel Gate on Tohono O'odham land in Mexico, Maria Castro held her 4-year-old son's hand as she listened to agent Mario Lopez Vasquez.
"The important thing is you know what to do and what not to do," Vasquez warned the group as he described the dangers of crossing the desert.
It was Castro's first time crossing into the United States. She knows her boy faces dangers even worse than she does as they walk across the reservation for four days to Phoenix.
"I want to give my son something better than this," she said, gesturing at the adobe walls of the house sheltering more than 80 people like her. She traveled from the Mexican state of Oaxaca the week before.
But border safety agents and clinics aside, the Tucson sector of the Border Patrol counted 152 people who died and hundreds more who were injured after crossing illegally into the United States last fiscal year.
At University Medical Center, the Tucson hospital that treats the greatest number of foreign nationals, the cost last year for such treatment was about $11 million, most of which was not reimbursed, said hospital President and CEO Greg Pivirotto.
In the past six months, the hospital treated 215 foreign nationals at a cost of more than $5 million. About a quarter of those are undocumented, said Barbara Felix, head of international patient relations for UMC.
"We're running about $1 million a month in unreimbursed costs from foreign nationals," said UMC spokeswoman Katie Riley.
Because the undocumented patients are not in anyone's custody, the hospital must allow those who don't require further treatment, about half, to leave, essentially setting free four or five illegal border crossers every month.
The Border Patrol makes it a policy not to detain people injured in the desert unless the person is going to face criminal prosecution, said Tucson sector spokesman Andy Adame.
"It's not only inhumane, but also controversial, if not illegal, to question someone who is dying," Adame said.
Waiting for his smuggler at the old brickyards south of Sasabe, Antonio Valdez Acosta, from Sinaloa, says he's aware of the dangers and appreciates the clinic his country placed in town as well as the Grupo Beta agents who stopped to advise him of the dangers.
But he only glanced at the booklet the agent gave him before letting it fall to the ground.
"I'm still going to cross," he said. "If they want to help us, then give me a job in Mexico."
Contact reporter Michael Marizco at 573-4213 or mmarizco@azstarnet.com
And, unfortunately, we will pick up the tab.
Isn't it past time for groups like MeCha to start have fundraising events to pay for their brethren?
It's a real hoot, ain't it?
Yet our gov't *thinks* a 'guest worker' program will end this INVASION.........LOL
It's not an invasion, it's a Work Caravan.
Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to work we go.....
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