THE BORDER REPORT

Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations released its tally of illegal migrant deaths this year, saying 117 of its citizens have died trying to cross into the United States.

My, have times changed.

As little as two years ago, the Mexican consulates in the U.S. were absolutely clamped shut when it came to trying to discern how many people had died. I can recall spending hours at the Mexican consul’s office in Tucson, arguing for the data; and occasionally, they would relent, giving me partial numbers to get me the hell out of there.

At one point, I was so fed up with them, I started filing public records requests with the border county medical examiners to get the real numbers and an old friend slapped them up on the Internet for the world to see. After a while, I started noticing a dark irony: inevitably, the numbers from the scientists who document the deaths was always far higher than what the Mexican government was reporting and only somewhat higher than what the U.S. Border Patrol would say.

Bureaucrats on both sides of the line were playing games with the numbers; Mexican diplomats would argue that unidentified bodies weren’t necessarily Mexican and accuse reporters of yellow journalism for reporting them as migrants.

On one particularly memorable afternoon, the Border Patrol told me some of the bodies were those of smugglers and so they wouldn’t be entered into the fiscal year tally.

Now, it appears, everyone is willingly disseminating the numbers, and yup, I smell a rat.

I remember a conversation I had with an old rancher out southwest of Tucson a while back.

John and Pat King own a vast spread of ranch land about 37 miles from Mexico, bordering on the Baboquivari Mountains of the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation out that way. It’s an astonishing valley of deep green mesquite running gradually upwards into the mountains of the O’odham Sun God, I’toi. Much of the land is now state trust, but the Kings have worked out there for more than a century.

So have the smugglers. The ranch sits on a route up from Sasabe, Sonora, which lends itself perfectly to smuggling and drug trafficking because of the lush vegetation, a good highway leading north and the utter lack of any serious control by the United States.

The King’s cowboy, his name escapes me at the moment, a hired hand who’s worked that land since he was in high school, had earned himself a new nickname.

“We call him hound dog,” King said. “He kept finding these bodies everywhere he looked.”

The summer I was out there, that young man had stumbled across four bodies in less than three weeks. He seemed to have a magnetic propensity for those cadavers.

“One day, he found a human head rolling down a wash,” King said. “We said, ‘Jesus Christ, not again!’”

That one, it turned out, was a mannequin’s head that somehow ended up on the ranch after a monsoon rain.

The point is this: nobody, not the Mexican government and not the Homeland Security Department, has the slightest idea how many illegal migrants have died crossing the border.

The only number that is known for sure is how many bodies were discovered.

“I’d say they’re finding some 60 percent of the bodies out there,” says a U.S. Forest Service ranger who has worked the Sonoran Desert for half his life. “No way they’re finding every single one.”

The sad truth, one that neither country seems to acknowledge much, is that nobody is searching for the dead. The United States argues the time is better spent searching for those who may yet be alive, while Mexico, unsurprisingly, says nothing.

So, yes, the Mexican government claims 117 of its citizens have died this year.

I’d like to invite the Mexican consul offices to join me on an actual search for its citizens out in the desert.

Then we’ll see how willingly they start talking about body counts.

-- Michel Marizco