Arivaca

In the mesquite-dotted hills of southern Arizona, eleven miles from the Mexican border, is the scruffy, scrappy, unincorporated community of Arivaca. It’s a place where hippies, bikers, ranchers, cowboys, dope farmers, smugglers, outlaws and more or less regular people can all agree on a code of live and let live, and as little governance as possible. It has a dark side too, with plenty of drug abuse, alcoholism and occasional murders. One local man abused a woman for years in a bunker that was so fortified with weaponry that no one dared to try to rescue her.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my author friend Chuck Bowden would go to a small ranch outside Arivaca to write in solitude. The house was small and rustic, overlooking arid grasslands and a tree-lined creek, with hills and craggy mountain ranges on the skyline. It was off the grid with a solar panel and a well, and to get there you drove on a dirt road that led to the ghost mining town of Ruby. From the ranch house at night there were no lights visible in any direction.

I was always nervous about visiting Chuck there, because he shared his back porch with a diamondback rattlesnake that he had named Beulah. They had formed a kind of friendship or mutual nonaggression pact. When it was just the two of them on the back porch, as he described it, Beulah would come out of the woodpile toward sunset, glide past his feet as he sat drinking wine and listening to Miles Davis after a long day’s work, and then go off to hunt for the night. But when visitors were on the back porch, Beulah would come out of the woodpile, approach the chairs, and then coil and rattle, because she could detect an unfamiliar human scent. That sinister husky buzzing sound normally made me levitate and fly backward through the air, and I struggled to sit there calmly like Chuck as Beulah rattled her warning and then retreated.

In time, Chuck stopped using the ranch house and I moved in there with my first wife Gale. We were still then in the happy phase of our marriage, which would end in divorce in 2004. Our landlords in Tucson had sold the house we were renting, we needed a cheap place to live, the ranch was beautiful, and I had long been attracted to Arivaca. It was essentially an improvised experiment in anarchy and tolerance, with no local law enforcement and none wanted by most of its residents. A friend of mine who grew up there, mostly in a tent, describes Arivaca and the borderland hills around it as “the edge of empire, where no authority will hold.” It appealed to my desire to maximize my personal freedom and live outside society’s rules.

Beulah didn’t think much of the new tenants—who included a dog—and to my great relief she moved out and I never saw her on the back porch again. I thought I saw her many times when I was out walking, but there were a lot of diamondback rattlesnakes on that ranch and I was never sure if I was seeing Beulah or one of the others. It was a tough place to live in the summer. There was no cooling in the house except a fan and the well would go dry in June. This meant no showers and a fifty-five-minute drive to Green Valley to fill up water containers so we could do the dishes, until the monsoon rains arrived and replenished the water table under the well. The one solar panel on the house was old and inefficient, but it gave us enough electricity to run a laptop computer, a stereo, a fan, a small fridge and lights at night. But using a toaster or a hair dryer was completely out of the question. Anything that generates a lot of heat, we learned, eats up a day’s worth of electricity in minutes. We cooked on propane and used it to heat water in the shower in the winter.

From the house, I could walk as far as I wanted in any direction without encountering private property fences or barriers. There was barely any phone signal and to access the internet I had to drive eight miles into Arivaca and go to the library. The lack of technology and the peace and quiet made the days feel much longer, and I felt happy and free and close to nature. Gale found it too isolated and boring. She found a house to rent in Tucson and I stayed mostly at the ranch by myself.

For company and entertainment I would drive to the one bar in Arivaca, a hard-bitten establishment called La Gitana (the Gypsy). It had bullet holes in the walls, a bloodstain on the scarred old wooden floor, and an adobe ruin outside the side door where people went to smoke weed. The barstools had denim seats and were built of heavy timber so they couldn’t be picked up and swung as weapons. On Sundays a biker named Mugger would turn his hand to dentistry, pulling out his clientele’s rotten teeth with a pair of pliers, and his toothless wife Cindy was always armed with two Colt .45s.

I became good friends with a sweet, funny, old hippie cowboy type named Red George, who had a long white beard and a plastic baggie of weed extruding from his shirt pocket—unless he’d smoked it all. Hard drugs were around, and it wasn’t uncommon to see someone snort a line off the bar, but the everyday maintenance diet was locally grown weed and cheap American beer, and the basic code was to not ask questions about anybody’s life, and especially not about their past or their real name. “I ain’t saying what I was in there for,” growled a man who had just got out of prison. Then he added, “Everyone in this bar has been deeply hurt.”

The bloodstain on the floor recorded an ill-fated moment in the life of a grizzled biker called Chance. I was on good terms with him and would invite him to the occasional parties that I threw at the ranch. The story of the bloodstain had a few variants, but this is the one I was told most often. Chance walked into the bar with a sawed-off shotgun in the inside pocket of a long duster coat. He flung the coat open and said, “Look at me, motherfuckers!” His intention was to show off his badass coat with its badass accessory, but he flung it open with such gusto that the loaded shotgun jumped out, landed butt first on the floor, and discharged into his armpit. Then a grisly thud as the severed bloody tattooed arm fell on the wooden floor.

Another version had Chance holding the shotgun under the coat, with the intention of using it on someone in the bar, when it slipped from his grasp. One of the drinkers at the bar, according to a version that was probably embellished but nonetheless captured something of La Gitana’s spirit, heard the shotgun blast, turned around briefly to look at the arm on the floor, and said, “At least we won’t have to look at those goddamn tattoos no more.”

I wanted to go back to Arivaca and see it again. I hugged my family goodbye and drove down toward Mexico on Interstate 19. I turned off at Amado, where a saloon is housed in a building shaped like an enormous longhorn skull. Then I drove the winding twenty-three-mile road to Arivaca for the first time in fifteen years. Memories flooded my brain. The feral-looking children in rabbit-skin shoes crouched in the back of a pickup as their families drove into town from the tepee and bus encampment out in California Gulch. Meg the librarian, who would bring me small bags of the light clean sativa she grew, and the shoulders of javelinas she had shot in her vegetable garden. She didn’t eat meat, but she didn’t want it going to waste either. Tom who owned the coffee shop and was rumored to have made a small fortune selling cocaine in Florida. When the county health official arrived at the coffee shop, with the intention of enforcing the inspection, fee and permit process, Tom kept growling at the man, “Take your hand out of my goddamn pocket. Take your fucking hand out of my pocket.” The cowboys passing a joint from saddle to saddle as their dogs rounded up the cattle who grazed twice a year on that lovely little ranch with a stream and a grove of trees at the bottom of the hill. The beautiful gray hawks that lived in those trees. The mule deer that walked toward me and then barked like a dog.

It was early on a Saturday afternoon and I went directly to La Gitana. A sign on the door read: “UNWANTED: Members of any vigilante border militia group, including, but not limited to AZ Border Recon. Do Not Enter our establishment.” I wondered what that was about. Then I opened the door and stood there absolutely stunned. People were eating food at tables, the old barstools were gone, the place was clean, the patrons were clean, the decor was different, the raunchy smell and the grizzled bikers and dope fiends were all gone.

I spotted Mary Kasualitis, who came from an old Arivaca ranching family and was a storehouse of local history. “Mary,” I said, “I’m flabbergasted. What on earth happened here?”

“After you left, we had a lot of problems with meth and pills, and it got pretty rough in here,” she said. “Do you remember Maggie and her husband? They went in with two local women and bought the bar, restored the building, cleaned it up, redecorated, opened the restaurant, and made the place more welcoming.”

“How rough did it get?” I asked, remembering the time that someone was knifed to death in the bar, which the regulars didn’t think was a big deal. “It got pretty rough,” she said again. Later I was given a more vivid description by a female bartender in a small town forty miles away: “Partially clothed men trying to ransack your purse while basically living their lives in the same three square feet area of that filthy old bar.”

I asked Mary about various people I was hoping to see. They were all dead, including Red George and Meg the librarian, the two people I had wanted to see most of all. One-armed Chance, whose bloodstain was no longer visible on the floor, had committed suicide with a gun. “That seems on-brand for him,” I said. “Yeah,” she said. “It took him four days to die. He shot himself in the head, but he didn’t do it right.”

And what about the anti-militia sign taped to the door? When I lived in Arivaca, the nearest anti-immigrant border militias were more than a hundred miles away in Cochise County. The most prominent was the Minuteman Project, led by a media-savvy former kindergarten teacher named Chris Simcox, now serving a nineteen-year prison sentence for sexually molesting a five-year-old girl. “Unfortunately we’ve become a magnet for right-wing militias and most people don’t want them here,” Mary said. “You probably heard about the Shawna Forde killings. That really shook the community.”

I had heard about the killings. Forde, a native of Washington State with a long criminal record, was one of Chris Simcox’s deputies in the Minuteman Project. She formed a splinter group called Minuteman American Defense (MAD) with the same basic idea: dress up in military gear and go on heavily armed patrols of the borderlands, looking for migrants and asylum seekers to confront and intimidate and report to the Border Patrol. In 2009, Forde moved to Arivaca. She had trouble funding the militia’s weapons and equipment, so she teamed up with some local drug dealers and hatched a scheme to stick up their rivals and use the stolen cash and drugs to finance the militia.

Her second-in-command was Jason Bush, a former Aryan Nations member who had gone to prison for violent crimes. The drug dealers were Albert Gaxiola—I remembered his aunt Clara as one of the many strong, soulful, impressive Arivaca women—and Oin Oakstar, who ran drugs from Arivaca into Tucson. They singled out twenty-nine-year-old Raul Flores Jr. as a suitable target to rob.

Soon after midnight on May 30, 2009, Shawna Forde, Jason Bush, Albert Gaxiola, and a fourth man who was never identified drove to Flores’s mobile home on Mesquite Road. Gaxiola waited in the car. The others, dressed in camo, armed with handguns and a shotgun, knocked at the door and announced themselves as Border Patrol agents. Once inside, Forde ordered Raul Flores to sit on the couch with his wife Gina and nine-year-old daughter Brisenia. Flores asked what was going on. Bush answered, “Don’t take this personally, but this bullet has your name on it.”

Flores leapt toward him, trying to grab the gun. Bush shot him, and put two rounds into Gina. As the wounded Flores begged them to spare his wife and daughter, Bush shot him multiple times until he was dead. Shawna Forde started rifling the house, looking for drugs and money, but finding only some jewelry that she pocketed. Jason Bush questioned Brisenia as her mother played dead on the floor.

“Please don’t shoot me,” the beautiful young girl pleaded, but he shot her twice in the face and killed her. The murderers left.

Gina, bleeding heavily, with her husband and daughter dead on the floor, called 911. While she was on the phone, the murderers came back to finish her off, but Gina grabbed a gun and managed to wound Bush during a brief gunfight. This time they left for good. Gina survived her physical wounds. Shawna Ford and Jason Bush were both sentenced to death.

The Minuteman movement fell apart after the killings, but in 2017 and 2018, probably emboldened by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric from the White House, a new crop of border vigilantes appeared in Southern Arizona.

The first was Tim Foley, a right-wing activist and leader of Arizona Border Recon, an armed paramilitary group that tries to intercept migrants and smugglers. Having made himself unpopular in nearby Sasabe, Foley moved to Arivaca, where he received an even more hostile reception and was banned from La Gitana, although he did have some supporters, including Jim and Sue Chilton, thoughtful conservative ranchers who used to graze their cattle on the ranch where I lived.

Next in town was Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer, known to his critics and his followers as Screwy Louie. He was a motormouthed hothead with a violent criminal past, like so many militia vigilantes, and he was now obsessed with God and child sex trafficking conspiracy theories. He showed up at La Gitana with his camo-clad Veterans on Patrol group. When the bartender told him he wasn’t welcome, he filmed her on a Facebook Live video and told his tens of thousands of followers that people in Arivaca supported open borders and child sex trafficking.

Next came the Utah Gun Exchange, rumbling into town in a huge BearCat SWAT vehicle with a machine gun mounted to it. To combat the militia influx, a group of about seventy Arivacans joined forces in a rare collective action that went against the usual live-and-let-live credo. They placed “No Militia” signs around town, urged local businesses to blackball militia members, tracked militia activity online, explored the possibility of legal action, and made it very clear that the vigilantes were unwanted and unwelcome.

“Most people here think the militias are far more threatening and potentially dangerous than the migrants and smugglers,” said Mary Kasualitis. “Militia people were responsible for the most horrific violence this community has ever experienced.”

For the first two and half years that I lived on the ranch, Mexican migrants, usually lone men, occasionally in twos and threes, would sometimes show up at my door asking for food or water or both. I would always give them water at least. I knew that plenty of other migrants were coming through the area without revealing themselves, and that groups of extremely fit young Mexican men were backpacking loads of marijuana through the hills, but like most people in Arivaca, I became thoroughly accustomed to migrants and drug smugglers moving across the landscape. I didn’t feel threatened by them because they had never hurt anyone in the area. I knew of several local women who felt safe living by themselves on isolated properties.

Then came one of the periodic surges in illegal immigration on the Arizona border. I started getting groups of forty or fifty coming through the ranch at night, using the stream and the sheltering trees as a migration route. I started to feel more uneasy and bought myself a gun. Nearly every day I was filling up big black bags with empty water bottles, sardine cans, Maruchan instant noodle containers, plastic tortilla packets, and other garbage. I was dealing with a lot more Border Patrol agents, hearing a lot more trucks and helicopters. I was forced to drive through new checkpoints, where I was questioned about where I was going and what I had seen.

The feeling of ease and freedom ebbed away. The occasional migrants who came to my door still wanted food and water, but now they kept asking to “borrow” the keys to my truck as well. Then my landlords got furious with me because I was slow to report a roof leak. I decided it was time to leave Arivaca and close that chapter of my life.

Now, under the Biden administration, another big surge in migration was taking place on this stretch of border. As always, it was fueled by poverty, suffering, desperation and hope, but the smugglers were using different routes and methods than the ones I remembered, the migrants were coming from all over the world, and the whole enterprise had reportedly been taken over by the Mexican drug cartels and turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. To better understand these changes, I spent a day riding around the border near Arivaca and Sasabe with a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Jesús Vasavilbaso, a tall, affable, distinguished-looking thirteen-year veteran. He was born in the United States and raised just across the border in Nogales, Sonora, where his father was a customs officer.

“When I was growing up, it was a mom-and-pop operation,” he said. “They would charge you a dollar to climb through a hole in the fence. The coyotes [migrant guides] were independents who worked for themselves, and a lot of guys would cross by themselves. All that is gone now. The cartels control every aspect of it. If you try to cross by yourself, they’ll kill you. It’s become such a big business for them, and such a cruel business.”

Two days previously, an eighteen-month-old toddler and a four-month-old infant were abandoned and left to die in the desert near Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. “Our agents found a group who told them they had seen a toddler just north of the fence. When the agents got there, the toddler was crying and the infant was unresponsive and facedown. They called for EMTs and managed to revive the infant. Guatemalan birth certificates had been left with them.”

He asked if I was a father. When I said yes, he said, “Doesn’t it just tear at your heart?” Neither of us knew the circumstances, but presumably the smuggler had forced the mother or father, or both parents, to abandon the children in the desert because they were slowing down the group. The children were now in the care of the U.S. Health and Human Service’s office of resettlement, and the birth certificates held some hope that they might be reunited with their parents.

I found it hard to think about the border, because you could multiply heartrending stories like this by the hundreds, or the thousands, or the tens of thousands, depending on the time frame you were looking at. Since 1994, when the Clinton administration implemented Operation Gatekeeper, which beefed up the physical barriers and enforcement in Nogales, San Diego and El Paso and pushed the traffic out into the harshest areas of the Sonoran Desert, the Arizona border has been a relentless staging ground of agony, trauma and death, and at best an ordeal to be survived in hopes of a better future.

Well over 8,000 migrants have died in the desert since Operation Gatekeeper began. Its architects expected some people to die, but they assumed that the risk and danger would act as a deterrent. As former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Doris Meissner said in 2000, “We did believe that geography would be an ally to us. It was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through Arizona would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.”

That didn’t happen. Migrants kept risking their lives in the desert, mainly because they had nothing else to lose, so patrols and enforcement increased, which made the journey even more risky and challenging, and consequently far more expensive. Seeing the profits that could be made, the cartels swooped in and took over. They were now charging Mexicans a few thousand dollars on average, $8,000 to $10,000 for Central Americans, and up to $15,000 to people coming from Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador.

“They’re like travel agents, selling you different packages,” said Vasavilbaso, driving south from his headquarters in Tucson. “The luxury package includes a day at the beach in Cancún, and every one of them is ‘guaranteed’ to get you into the U.S. They lie to migrants all the time. They see them as commodities. They call them pollos, chickens. They don’t care if seventeen die today, because there’ll be another hundred tomorrow. They will take your water away if you can’t keep up and leave you to die. We see that every day. And they’ll squeeze every last penny from you.”

In Altar, which is the staging town in Sonora, migrants are required to buy a whole package of goods, including a backpack, clothes, food, water and two phones, one for Mexico and one for the United States. Most of the smuggling was coordinated by phone now. “It’s so cruel the way they lie,” he continued. “They tell the migrants it’s just a short distance to walk, but it’s forty-five miles to Three Points, where some get picked up, and sixty miles to Silverbell Mine.”

I told him that I had recently walked some of the washes near Silverbell Mine northwest of Tucson, where drivers pick up migrants at the end of their journey. The ground was littered with camouflage clothing and backpacks, carpet-soled shoes, big black water bottles, bottles of Pedialyte, diapers, rattles, dolls, toys, bulbs of garlic, bottles of pain pills, prayer booklets. It was late summer and well over 100 degrees. I tried to imagine walking sixty miles of that ground in the heat with an infant in diapers, trying to keep it alive, trying to give it comfort, but it was impossible for my brain to conceive what that was really like.

“They all wear camo now because it makes them harder to see, the carpet shoes make them harder to track, and the black water bottles don’t reflect the sunlight,” said Vasavilbaso. “Once they reach the pickup place and call the driver, they dump everything and get into civilian clothes.”

I asked about the garlic cloves. “There’s a belief that garlic wards off rattlesnakes, but it’s not true. I have encountered a few migrants with snakebite over the years, but the heat and dehydration are far more dangerous.” In the previous year, Border Patrol recorded 568 deaths on the southwest border, 219 of them heat-related, and 20 sets of skeletal remains in the Tucson sector. Humanitarian groups put out water stations by the main migrant trails, but some border militias, most notably Veterans on Patrol, take pride in stealing or puncturing the plastic barrels of water. In Screwy Louie’s mind, the water stations are there to aid child sex traffickers.

“How does it feel to catch someone, knowing everything they’ve gone through to get that far?” I asked.

“If they’re in trouble, it feels great,” said Vasavilbaso. “They see you and start crying because they thought they were going to die. If they’re not in trouble, you’re depriving them of their liberty, which is something to be taken seriously. We know why they want to come here, and most of us would do the same if we were in their shoes, but a nation has to protect its borders and enforce its laws. It also feels good when you catch a bad guy with a criminal record, because you’re protecting people from him. They make up about 1 percent of migrants.”

Ever since Trump left office and the Biden administration halted construction of the border wall and allowed unaccompanied minors to apply for asylum, Republicans had been repeating the mantra that the border was “wide-open.” I wondered if this was insulting to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with an annual budget of $25 billion and some 60,000 employees, including 20,000 Border Patrol agents. Those agents recorded more than 2 million encounters with migrants in the previous year leading to apprehension or expulsion.

“How do you feel when you hear politicians talk about the border being wide-open?” I asked.

“As agents, we could care less about politics. We want to do our job. The immigration system has to change. In the meantime this is what we’ve got. This is what Congress has authorized.”

At Sasabe, he turned on to a dirt road that ran next to Trump’s border wall, which Vasavilbaso called “the fence” because it’s not a solid object, but a see-through construction of heavy steel slats, known as bollards, approximately thirty feet high. He pointed to a large gap where asylum seekers, including many unaccompanied minors, would come through and wait to present themselves to Border Patrol. “We had QAnon and a vigilante group camped out here, giving the children food, water and Bibles, and taking their information, supposedly to save them from sex slavery.” In general, he said, the border vigilantes made the job harder. They wore camo like the migrants, it was sometimes hard to tell who was who at a distance, and they added another layer of worry.

What Border Patrol agents found exciting about “the new fence” were the access roads that were bladed through the desert for the work crews, and the new dirt road that runs alongside it. “We’re not hiking so much, we can get places much faster.”

It was helpful to have a more robust physical barrier too, although it was fairly easy to breach. “A lot of times they’ll cut through it with an angle grinder, or go over it with ladders and ropes, and as you can see, in this area there are gaps because construction was halted.”

West of Sasabe there was a seventy-five-mile gap because the Tohono O’Odham nation had blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to extend the barrier across their land. On the other side of the reservation was the Yuma sector in far southwestern Arizona, where the wall resumed. “The way the cartel has arranged it at the moment, it’s mostly Mexican and Guatemalan migrants coming through Sasabe into the Tucson sector, and in Yuma it’s mostly asylum seekers who surrender to agents, and they come from all over the world—Ukraine, Russia, India, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Haiti, over a hundred countries.”

I got out of the vehicle and looked at the tracks coming through the gap in the so-called wall. Sure enough, many of them were made by small children. I looked at the surrounding hilltops and wondered if cartel scouts were up there monitoring us through binoculars. On the drive back to Tucson, I asked about drug smuggling, which used to be the dominant economic activity in the Arivaca/Sasabe borderlands. Marijuana had been the drug most in demand, so it was the most frequently smuggled, although plenty of cocaine and heroin came through too.

“Now it’s fentanyl, heroin and liquid meth, but we hardly ever see it out here in the desert,” he said. “It comes in through the ports of entry and it’s hard to catch because it’s in such small quantities.”

Then he grinned and started chuckling. “It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes we still catch people with loads of marijuana and we just have to laugh. ‘Didn’t you hear, amigo? This stuff is legal up here now. You can buy it in the store.’”

I watched the border get further away in the side mirror of his big government SUV. To the west of us were the rugged Baboquivari Mountains, and to the east the flat arid grasslands of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. Both contained well-traveled migrant trails.

“There’ll be some groups out there right now,” he said. “They’ve come a long way already, they’re tired, they’re hot, they’re dehydrated, they’re scared, and they have a long way to go. Unless we catch them first.”

Richard Grant is a journalist, documentary film writer, and author of five nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestselling Dispatches from Pluto and The Deepest South of All. He recently returned to Tucson, Arizona, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Arivaca is excerpted from his recently released book A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona.