THE BORDER REPORT

Two young mothers from Puebla who tried to cross the Arizona border illegally were found dead earlier this week. Word is Border Patrol agents found the two women out on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, somewhere south of Hickiwan. Erika Zepeda Caballero and Estela Juárez Martínez would have turned 21 on Sept. 17. They were headed for the Chicago area to join their husbands and had paid a smuggler to get them across. If the recent information is correct, the two women did not very far, less than 25 miles in. I'm hearing that a younger brother of Estela's returned to Puebla Sept. 5, with news that Erika had died in the desert and the group of illegal migrants they traveled with left Estela behind after she lost conscioussness. That brings the number of recovered bodies to somewhere around 190 this fiscal year. Not that it seems to matter. The number of dead is conscionable, apparently. No federal policy, no number of impactful story, no commentary, no GAO investigation, and no public shaming of an ineffectual border security infrastructure changes a damned thing. The only ones who did seem to adapt this year were the smugglers, who dragged out their old Sedalmerck pills again. The triple combination of acetaminophen, caffeine and pseudoephredrine is enough to make you think you're good to make a run for Tucson. But the effects of the triple-stack pills speed up your heart-rate; dizziness and nausea set in. Then unconsciousness. Then death. "They deplete your water even faster and in the desert that's not a good thing," says one Homeland Security source who tells me that agents are finding triple-stacks in the migrants' posession with a greater frequency than any other year. It's an old story now, these migrant deaths. But by all measurings, it's one that's not going to go away.

-- Michael Marizco