The Dangerous Divide by Peter Eichstaedt

Author:Peter Eichstaedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2014-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Sheriff Cobos

With the police department of Columbus gone, keeping an eye on crime in the surrounding borderlands and the scattered communities is the responsibility of Luna County sheriff Raymond Cobos. I find Cobos in his office in a one-story building in Deming, the county seat, about thirty-five miles north of Columbus. Cobos nods sympathetically when I tell him I’m researching border issues and immigration. For most Americans, he says, the US-Mexico border is “some sort of foggy place down there.”

The exception is Phoenix, Cobos says, which has become part of the national debate over immigration reform and border security because of Arizona’s law Senate Bill 1070. Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes the metropolitan area of Phoenix, has a population of about 3.8 million, more than three times that of the entire state of New Mexico, with a population of 1.2 million. By comparison, Luna County has a population of about thirty-one thousand, about half of whom are Hispanic, Cobos says.

“What happens in Maricopa County is vastly different than what happens in Luna County. We are not a destination for the undocumented people,” Cobos says. “There is no big industry here.” The county has a 30 percent unemployment rate, he says, and because of this has few immigration problems. “There is no chance for undocumented people to get any real good-paying jobs.” The biggest employers are the school district, the federal government such as the Border Patrol, and city and county governments.

The county also is home to many big ranches, and what few jobs they offer are seasonal. Cobos says his office is “aware of the hiring of illegals” but does not go after them in any significant way. The labor issue is more of a problem in communities to the east and along the Rio Grande and in New Mexico’s Estancia Valley, he says, where factories have been built and the area is covered with pecan groves and farms growing alfalfa, chilies, melons, and onions.

Cartel violence along the border surfaced in 2005, Cobos says, and soon border security towers and cameras were installed. Roads were graded to improve access to remote areas favored by smugglers. Beefed-up security was a financial windfall for his department, Cobos says, which received $1.3 million for new vehicles, communications equipment, overtime, and other expenses as part of Operation Stone Garden, a project by the Department of Homeland Security to enlist local law enforcement into border security. “They want us to use our authority for interdiction” of undocumented people, Cobos says. Now Cobos’s men have been “cross-deputized” and can make arrests in neighboring Hidalgo County, the remote “boot heel” area of New Mexico that borders Arizona and is favored by smugglers.

The cartel violence that exploded in Palomas in 2005 was due to the fighting between the Juárez Cartel, which had controlled the Palomas plaza, and the Sinaloa Cartel, which wanted it. Several times a week at least two or three bodies would be dumped at the border, Cobos says. “It was like the Al Capone days” of the Prohibition Era in Chicago.

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