Armed On The Border

Ranchers along Rio Grande take on illegal intruders themselves

By Thaddeus Herrick
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle San Antonio Bureau

EAGLE PASS One hand on the trigger of his AR15 semiautomatic and the
other steadying his binoculars, Dob Cunningham spied two men on the far
side of his pasture several football fields away. One was armed.

Immigrant smugglers? Drug traffickers? Border bandits?

Cattle thieves, the 63yearold rancher figured. It was sundown last
summer. As Cunningham scrambled down a brush country bluff, bushwhacking
through sage and mesquite, he heard gunfire somewhere along the Rio Grande.

Thirty rounds and 30 minutes later, Cunningham held one suspect at
gunpoint. The other had fled back to Mexico when Cunningham, clad in a
combat jacket and camouflage hat, emptied his clip into the sultry South
Texas air.

Frustrated by illegal immigration, drug trafficking and crime, exasperated
by what they see as a lack of manpower and indifference on the part of the
U.S. Border Patrol, Cunningham and the ranchers of Maverick County are
increasingly taking the law into their own hands.

After ordering his prisoner, a young Mexican man, to strip naked,
Cunningham asked him in Spanish if he wanted to live or die. Then he
ordered him back across the shallow Rio Grande with a message.

"I told him to tell his buddies they're lucky they weren't all killed,"
said Cunningham. To illustrate his point, Cunningham had fired a few shots
short of the river bank on the Mexican side as the wouldbe rustler waded
home.

Several years ago ranchers like Cunningham, most who raise cattle just
upriver in the Quemado Valley, carried hunting rifles. Now they wield
assault weapons and sidearms. Cunningham favors a Glock pistol.

Many ranchers carry handcuffs. Most patrol their property, and a few like
Cunningham stake out welltrodden areas to round up trespassers from Mexico
and hold them until the Border Patrol arrives.

"You're on your own down here," said Neal Watkins, a cattle rancher who
last spring "knocked a hole in the head" of an illegal immigrant with the
butt of his .45 after the Mexican man pulled a pistol on him.

As the bleeding man came to, Watkins called neither the Border Patrol nor
the sheriff. Instead, the rancher marched his wouldbe assailant into the
back of his pickup and dropped him on a lonely stretch of FM 1908.

To be sure, the ranchers of this rural county about 150 miles southwest of
San Antonio are smack in the middle of an illegal thoroughfare running
between Mexico and the United States. The route has for several years been
a favorite of Mexican drug traffickers, who officials say are increasingly
buying U.S. ranches on the river.

Immigrant smugglers are no less fond of the informal highway. Rancher Bud
Natus exhibited trampled barbed wire and muddy, litterstrewn paths on the
ranch he runs for his brotherinlaw, evidence of dayold traffic.

Ranchers complain that illegal immigrants, once deferential, have become
more brazen in recent years, leaving gates open, vandalizing and stealing.
Cunningham has lost, among other things, a registered Hereford bull, he
says to Mexican thieves.

While several Border Patrol agents grumble privately about the ranchers and
their vigilantestyle response to these problems, officials have chosen not
to press the issue. Salvador Rios, the Eagle Pass sheriff, says the
ranchers are within the law when they make citizens' arrests on their
property.

"You can detain anyone, as long as you don't harm them," said Rios. "Of
course, they need to be doing something wrong."

Still, the trend is troubling to many. Illegal crossers, whether mules for
drug traffickers or workers on their way north, have long been seen as
vulnerable in the eyes of human rights advocates. They say these folks,
usually poor and almost invisible once they reach the United States, have
little recourse in the face of abuse.

"A reasonable person looking at this situation is going to see a tinder
box," said Suzan Kern, a spokeswoman for the El Pasobased Border Rights
Coalition.

"Here you have campesinos facing armed civilians with virtually no
accountability," she said. "Don't you think it's just a matter of time
before somebody kills someone out there?"

But ranchers say it's not just a matter of gungho border landowners
preying on Mexican peasants. Increasingly, they say, the immigrant and drug
smugglers and the petty thieves are armed. Several ranchers say they
are the ones whose human rights are at risk.

Indeed, one rancher had his home fired at after a major drug bust. The same
rancher testified before Congress last year about the ranchers' concerns
from behind a curtain, his voice altered. Though he says the narcotics
situation has improved, the rancher still fears leaving his house at night.

"The traffickers have turned it into a noman's land," he said.

Illegal immigration and drug trafficking have been factors in the decisions
of several ranchers, among them Cunningham, to put their land on the
market. Meanwhile, they are determined to reclaim their ranches.

Natus, for one, takes target practice with his SKS semiautomatic rifle near
a popular crossing point on the Rio Grande. Once, when a man across the
river threatened him in Spanish, Natus let loose a few rounds from his pickup.

"You gotta let them know you're not scared," he said. "Or they'll slit your
throat in the middle of the night."

That may be overstating the situation. But there is ample reason to be on
edge. In January 1996, Border Patrol agent Jefferson Barr was shot to death
by traffickers during a nighttime drug bust down river.

A beefy middleaged man with a country drawl and a bushy mustache, Natus
pulled his .45 on two illegal immigrants and threatened to shoot if they
didn't stop. When they stopped, he made them take off their shoes before
calling the Border Patrol.

Such vigilantism is almost routine on the ranches east of San Diego,
Calif., where property owners in combat gear patrol their property,
detaining illegal immigrants at gunpoint. But it is new to the Texas
border, where historical and cultural links to Mexico run deep.

As a chat in any Maverick County cafe would reveal, those bonds are frayed.
So fed up is Cunningham that he has joined a Southern Californiabased
organization called American Patrol, which relies on dispatches from border
property owners to issue an illegal immigration "weather report" on the
Internet.

American Patrol urges its correspondents to track illegal immigrants, not
to confront them. But the ranchers in Maverick County say they have no
choice. Often, they say, their calls to the Eagle Pass Border Patrol office
are ignored, a charge dismissed by the Border Patrol.

"The law won't help you," said Cunningham, a crusty, white haired veteran
of the border.

Human rights proponents say law enforcement officers at least are trained,
a claim few ranchers can make. Even so, Sheriff Rios says he has yet to see
an abuse case, though four illegal immigrants turned up dead in recent
months on one Maverick County ranch. The sheriff says the autopsies ruled
out foul play.

Nor have any recent cases cropped up along the rest of the 2,000mile
U.S.Mexico border, with the exception of an incident in eastern San Diego
County, Calif., in 1995. There, six immigrants say they were shot at,
detained and beaten by two men, though the charges were never substantiated.

Still, Maverick County ranchers say frontier justice could be carried out
on their spreads without anyone ever knowing. After all, their ranches,
populated by little more than rattlesnakes, cattle and coyotes, often
ramble on for hundreds of acres. Who would know if an intruder from the
other side of the Rio Grande perished?

"It's probably happened," said Natus. "But nobody's going to say anything
or the FBI would come down and we'd be the bad guy."

For all their frustration with law enforcement, the Maverick County
ranchers have not been ignored. In addition to congressional hearings,
Immigration and Naturalization Service chief Doris Meissner has come to
this border outpost to listen to them, as has Barry McCaffrey, the nation's
drug czar. Gov. George W. Bush even dispatched extra state troopers here in
1996.

The Border Patrol's Del Rio sector, which is sending additional personnel
to its Eagle Pass station in December, has reported drops in drug seizures,
apprehensions and violent incidents between its agents and illegal immigrants.

And in September, the 500acre Las Moras ranch, which lies just north of
Cunningham and Natus, was turned over to the federal government after
federal officials implicated the owners in a marijuana smuggling ring
stretching as far north as Ohio.

"We're here and we're dug in," said Leonard Lindheim, special agent in
charge for the U.S. Customs Service in San Antonio, as he showed off the
ranch to reporters in October. "We're sending a message that there's a
price to pay."

But the ranchers of Maverick County, one who dubbed the Las Moras press
event a "dog and pony show," say that's only so much hooey. They say the
only way to control the border is to dispatch U.S. soldiers, or as
Cunningham said, "some triggerhappy mean Marines."

Meanwhile, Cunningham is spreading the rumor that the military is
patrolling the border, even though antidrug operations were suspended
after a U.S. high school student was shot near the West Texas town of
Presidio last spring.

At least that's what Cunningham told his suspected cattle thief last
summer, when he held him at gunpoint amid the dense river cane that lines
the Rio Grande.

"I told him I was Marine from Presidio," said Cunningham. "I told him,
`President Clinton sent me down to kill you guys.'"