Don't Leave Your Bag Unattended...

I have been back in the desert for a week now. At first it was a slow adjustment, leaving behind my regular type life for real this time and not knowing where the desert would lead me.

On my first day, we found a homemade backpack constructed of cardboard, burlap sacking and string. These backpacks are often used to carry marijuana bricks across the border and finding it led to a conversation about the difficulties of unraveling the border narrative of the drug trade. 

On the Mexican side of the border, most if not all, the crossings are controlled by the cartels. Migrants who cannot afford to pay the cartels for passage across the desert are forced to carry drugs in full, or partial, payment for a coyote’s (guide) services provided by the cartel.

Here in Ajo, the crossing is the longest of any point on the border, up to 70 miles of uninhabited national parks, US army and Bureau of Land Management land. The dangerous nature of the crossing means that the cartels charge the least to cross and that the migrants who cross here are often the least able to afford the crossing fee, therefore they are forced into carrying drugs in lieu of cash payment.

On the US side of the border, this reinforces the right-wing narrative that all migrants are drug smugglers. It is a disingenuous narrative, designed to provoke fear in the US population and to criminalize people who have been displaced through violence, climate change and economic insecurity. A person who has left their homeland though fear of gang violence, walked thousands of miles in search of basic safety and arrived in Sonora only to find that the cartel crossing fee exceeds any amount they could possibly muster, who then agrees to carry a brick of marijuana across the border is not a “drug smuggler.” An unwilling “mule,” maybe, but not a smuggler which implies repeated commercial interest in the drug trade.

For now, the desert is leading me to help these migrants, the ones who do not garner sympathetic news stories or spark crowd-funding campaigns. I am looking for a place to stay in Ajo and to play a small part in humanizing the border for those most in need.