Dear Fair Traders,

It is with great sadness that I forward you this message about the tragic deaths of 14 Mexicans who dehydrated in the scorching desert while trying to cross the Mexico-Arizona border last week.  This tragedy adds to the over 1500 people who have perished since the beginning of Operation Gatekeeper, the deadly policy of extreme militarization of the US-Mexico border.

This message was front page news last week - but there's a new twist.  In this case, the situation is directly related to the price of coffee and the dire need for Fair Trade Not Free Trade.  Rob Collier's Chronicle article last week reported that thousands of Mexicans from Chiapas are leaving their homes to search for better opportunity because of low coffee prices.  Check out the bottom of  a later AP story pasted below:

"Family members in the poor, highland villages of Veracruz said the immigrants were seeking a better life after plummeting coffee prices left them no other choice but to illegally enter the United States to look for work." Enclosed please find a background article on the tragedy as well as the AP story which makes the coffee connection.

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Devastating Picture of Immigrants Dead in Arizona Desert

New York Times May 24, 2001 By James Sterngold

ELLTON, Ariz., May 24 -- Local and federal officials painted a devastating picture today of a smuggling operation that killed at least 14 young Mexican immigrants in Arizona, saying a "coyote" had apparently abandoned more than two dozen men in one of the country's most brutal and desolate stretches of desert on Saturday with little water and no preparation. A dozen who survived the ordeal, in 115-degree temperatures, were in a hospital in Yuma today. One of them, a 16-year-old, was in critical condition.

Though dozens die every year trying to cross illegally into Arizona from Mexico, this was the area's worst single incident in memory. In 1980, 13 illegally immigrating Salvadorans died in Arizona.

Border officials said today that in years of patrolling this region they had rarely found immigrants in such desolate surroundings, many of them more than 30 miles from any road or structure at a time when the heat had shot up. Every year, more than 100,000 immigrants are caught crossing the border illegally near Yuma but usually on better marked and less dangerous routes. Some relief groups organized by churches have set up water stands at popular crossing points, jugs of water marked by blue flags, but none were near the place where the latest deaths occurred, Border Patrol officials said.

"It was dirt, some rock, just a few small trees," said Sheriff Ralph E. Ogden of Yuma County, who added that the temperatures on the desert floor had risen to close to 130 degrees.

"They did not appear to have any water when we found them," Sheriff Ogden said. "Some had torn off some of their clothing. The bodies we found were already decomposing."

The dead were found in clusters miles apart. The group had apparently split up after traveling about 30 miles north from a Mexican truck stop just across the border. This morning two more immigrants were found, one dead and the other barely alive. Border Patrol officials said agents were tracking what they thought was one more person heading east -- perhaps one of the coyotes, or smugglers, or a guide.

Mexican consular officials said at a news conference in Yuma today that the Mexican police were questioning a suspected smuggler in Mexico but had made no arrests. The Mexican authorities said they thought other men had been involved and were searching for them.

All of the latest victims were male, apparently between the ages of 16 and

35. All were from Mexico, the officials said, and at least some had come from the state of Veracruz.

They were found spread across an area that included the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range and the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, southeast of Yuma. Border Patrol officials said that they had not had a chance to question all the survivors but that typically they would have paid their smugglers more than $1,000 each. In this case they appeared to have been led to a remote stretch of the fence separating the two countries and then told to head north to Interstate 8. The highway is about 70 miles from the border.

Twenty-six people died in the border sector near Yuma in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, and four more died in the region before this incident, said Maurice Moore, a Border Patrol spokesman. The officials said this smuggling operation could not have produced any other result.

"There's not much around there except the sand and bushes with thorns on them," said Glen Payne, the agent in charge of the Border Patrol office here, which found the first of the dead and dying men during a routine patrol yesterday morning. "There's nothing for like 30 miles in any direction."

The initial sighting was about 10 a.m. Wednesday, about 30 miles north of the border. Four men were found badly dehydrated, and they told agents that 22 others were behind them. Just before 1 p.m., 17 people were found just to the south by a Marine helicopter crew, which airlifted them to a hospital. Ten were already dead, and one more died before the helicopter landed. At 1:45 p.m. two more bodies were found about 11 miles farther south. Then, at 5.a.m. today, two more men were discovered, about four miles south of the first sighting. One had already died. The other, the 16-year- old, was near death but made it to a hospital, where he was in intensive care. Doctors at the hospital said that even the healthiest of the men would probably be in the hospital at least a week and that they all might suffer permanent kidney damage.

Many people involved in trying to ease the tough conditions at the border said today that they were outraged at the loss of life, with some arguing that federal policies to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants near urban areas, a Clinton administration policy, Operation Gatekeeper, had led to such deaths by pushing the illegal border crossers to more and more remote areas.

"We knew this was coming," said Isabel Garcia, a lawyer in Tucson and a co-founder of the Arizona Border Rights Project, an umbrella group of 60 organizations that assists immigrants. "We've been forewarning, lobbying, begging, cajoling, protesting, shouting, praying. We've done everything to bring attention to this very deadly law enforcement strategy that has been used by the border patrol of driving people into the most remote areas, where they have to know this will occur."

Jay Michaels, a ranch manager in southeastern Arizona, said that people in his region were shocked by the news and that he was putting water and relief supplies at remote spots on his ranch for any immigrants who might be wandering across the land.

"What you hear people around here saying is that these are not illegal immigrants, they're humans, and we have to treat them that way," he said. Johnny Williams, regional director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said rescuers had searched an area the size of Delaware. "If you haven't been to that area and you want to know what isolation is, go to this corner of the desert," Mr. Williams said.

Over all, deaths along the United States-Mexican border have increased about fivefold since the operation began in 1995. Last year, the deadliest on record, more than 400 people died crossing the border with Mexico, and so far this year there has been about one death a day.

"Today's headline in the Tucson paper said, `Desert Kills 12,' " said the Rev. Bob Carney, pastor of St. Luke's Roman Catholic Church in Douglas, Ariz., which provides sanctuary to illegal immigrants and places water at remote paths used by immigrants. "I believe that it is our policy that killed them, and that this is a failed policy."

Mr. Williams rejected that assertion and said federal officials were doing everything possible both to protect the border and protect the illegal immigrants, particularly from ruthless smugglers.

"What is the common ground is smugglers," Mr. Williams said.

"It's one of the most horrible deaths that can occur for a human being," he added. "It's a grisly, terrible, terrible death."