Americans Fleeing Border Invasion
By Leo W. Banks
AmericanThinker.com
They spent ten winters hunting quail in the
sun. But those halcyon days ended last week for Terrie and Glen Stoller.
Smugglers -- armed, numerous, and brazen -- have frightened them off their
southeast Arizona property.
The couple is selling
their home, 45 miles north of the Mexican border in the notorious
Chiricahua Corridor.
"Last
winter," says Terrie, "as we walked the hills looking for quail with our
dogs, I kept thinking, ‘What if we come upon a drug encampment? What's
going to happen to us?' I carry a camera, my husband carries a 12-gauge
for quail, and we have four hunting dogs. It'd be the end of us. It'd be
no contest against drug runners carrying rifles and big weapons."
Glen
likens the family to frontier homesteaders loading a wagon and returning
home. "Cochise has won," he says, referring to the Apache chief who made
the Chiricahua Mountains his homeland. "The Indians are running us off."
I drove
out to the Stoller place for moving day. Their winter retreat is a
modest, Santa Fe-style manufactured home west of Highway 80, at the
mouth of Horseshoe Canyon.
The
couple, both 71, made a party of their last hours in Arizona. Terrie had
lunch ready for dear friends who came to help pack. Others drove to the
barbed wire fence around the property, threw their arms wide and said,
"Let's have a goodbye hug."
It was a
sad day, made more so by events in Washington.
At the
precise moment Americans citizens were saying a wrenching farewell to
their friends and property, President Obama stood on the White House
lawn and listened as Mexican President Felipe Calderón criticized SB
1070, Arizona's own effort to deal with a state under siege.
Obama
offered no correction or objection, and what a shock to see an American
president acquiesce to a foreign leader's interference in the affairs of
sovereign Arizona.
But Obama and his cabinet have had plenty to say about SB1070 on other
occasions, and most of it has been nakedly political, uninformed, and
demagogic.
The day
after the Stollers' move, we were treated to a second spectacle
-- Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, most of them,
standing to cheer as Calderón repeated his slanders against Arizona.
Do we even
need to mention the shameful treatment by the government of Mexico of
migrants passing through that country -- the rapes, beatings, and
robberies to which they're routinely subjected?
Do we
need to mention Mexico practically shoving its people out of the country
to take advantage of their hard labors here, and the billions they send
back to shore up the economic and human rights basket case Calderón
oversees?
The
hypocrisy bends the mind.
Finally, this week, two months after Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords and Republican Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl asked for help
to defend the state's border, the president agreed to send "up to 1,200"
National Guard troops and request $500 million in supplemental spending
for added security measures.
More money
is always welcome, but everything hinges on how it is spent. The troop
commitment is more symbolic than real, and the details here are
critical, too. How many of the "up to 1,200" will be sent to Arizona?
Our border with Mexico is 380 miles long. Our representatives asked for
3,000 soldiers in Arizona alone.
Will the
National Guard be stationed right on the line, with bullets in their
guns and the authority to defend themselves? Almost certainly not. The
border is a "combat zone," says T.J. Bonner, head of the Border patrol
agents' union, too dangerous even for Border Patrol.
You read
that correctly. Without armored vehicles to protect them, Bonner opposes
putting Border Patrol agents on the border itself.
But the
Stollers and friends kept Washington's alternate reality far away this
day. They worked, chatted, and reminisced as the moving trucks filled
up. It was a blue-sky morning in this rural valley on the Arizona-New
Mexico line.
The
landscape here is among the Southwest's most beautiful, big beyond
imagining, with waving grasses, dirt roads that never end, and hidden
canyons that twist through the Chiricahuas and their sister mountains,
the Peloncillos, on the New Mexico side.
But
smugglers of both people and drugs now control those ranges, and these
dangerous men have transformed life here. Some residents carry weapons
inside their houses. Others grab a firearm to
step out to the garage or the storage shed, or to go to the market.
The
Stollers own a nursery in California and grow grapevines for farmers and
wineries. When they began wintering in Arizona, they never locked their
doors, even though they encountered illegals who'd ask for water or
food, sending Glen to the fridge for leftovers.
"We didn't
feel it was our job to turn them in. We felt sorry for them," says
Terrie. "Work is hard to find in Mexico, and they're just trying to feed
their families."
But
that began to change several years ago as break-ins mounted, with
reports of guns stolen. The Stollers themselves were broken into in May
last year and again in June, and in January, a retired couple living a
mile north suffered a home invasion by two illegals, one carrying a
machete.
"It all
built up," says Terrie. "The Apache School was being totally ruined and
trashed and everything taken out of it. Then Rob Krentz was killed March
27, and he was just down the road."
One of
Terrie's pressing fears was for her beloved Llewellin setter hunting
dogs.
At night,
the animals would often respond to a coyote and charge out the doggie
door to investigate. Terrie says she'd lie awake listening for their
return, hoping she wouldn't have to "go out and find them with a bullet
in them next morning."
"It didn't
happen, thank goodness," she says. "But we didn't want it to happen, and
we became fearful enough we finally said, 'That's it. We can't stay.'"
The
Stollers could be forgiven for harboring bitterness. But it's not in
their nature. Terrie acknowledges feeling some anger, although her
primary emotion is sadness.
"We don't know who to blame,"
she says. "Is it the government's fault? Is it people taking drugs in
America? Is it Mexico for allowing it to happen? There's no use blaming
anyone. It's just a sad state of affairs. We've met so many wonderful
people in Arizona, and we're just keeping our fingers crossed nothing
happens to them."
In one
respect, the Stollers are fortunate. They've found a likely buyer, a
fellow who grew up here and wants to return to the valley in retirement.
Selling the place through a real estate agent to someone just coming in,
without local ties, would've been impossible.
"Nobody in
their right mind would even look at it, knowing what's going on here,"
says Terrie.
Property values are plunging across the borderlands. I got an e-mail
last week from retired Cochise County judge Rich Winkler, 71, who always
dreamed of owning a cattle ranch. He lives outside Rodeo, six miles from
the Stollers and fifty miles north of the Mexican line.
His
ranch is in the Peloncillos. Here is what he wrote:
Mary and I have worked all our life to pay for
this place, and now they tell me it is worth nothing because no one
will buy it. I don't blame them. Helen Snyder sells real estate in
the area and she said that since Rob's death, the market is dead it
the water. I can't believe my country would leave me high and dry
like this.
If the heartbreak Winkler feels doesn't leap from
those words, read them again. Heartbreak is everywhere here, every day.
Wendy
Glenn, with husband Warner, lives on a ranch right on the border east of
Douglas, and she's a throwback, as tough as they make them. But she
choked up likening the Stollers' moving day to a funeral.
As she
carried boxes out to the truck, Glenn said, "This is God's country, and
it's being taken away from us."
Leo W. Banks covers the
border for the Tucson Weekly.