Source: Houston Chronicle Contact: Pubdate: Sun, 02 Nov 1997 Page: 1 Website: http://www.chron.com/ 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.'"