2 migrant water stations named in honor of high-ranking Mexican officials
by Fernanda Echavarri on Dec. 19, 2008, under Local, Nation/World, Special
Jose Luis Soberanes Fernandez, a high-ranking Mexican human rights official, fills water barrels at the Humane Borders water station named after him near Arivaca Thursday morning. The station is about seven miles north of the border off of Arivaca Road.
Humane Borders celebrated International Migrants Day Thursday by naming two water stations in the desert for high-ranking Mexican human rights officials in a morning ceremony.
Jose Luis Soberanes Fernandez, president of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, filled the water tanks at the station named after him about seven miles north of the border on Arivaca Road, where immigrant bodies have been found in recent years.
“Today we have the satisfaction of inaugurating two water stations that will offer, like many other stations already out here, the indispensable water for the lives of migrants,” Soberanes said in Spanish.
Soberanes’ position in the Mexican government is equivalent to a Cabinet-level position in the United States. The government-funded commission has more than 1,000 employees and is politically independent from the federal government.
Soberanes traveled to the water station with a dozen members of the Mexican media and Mexico’s chief human rights inspector, Mauricio Farah Gebara.
Humane Borders named a second water station nearby for Farah.
Soberanes said that to humanize illegal immigration, it’s necessary to recognize it as a social and economic issue, and separate it from criminal activity and terrorism.
“It is also necessary to start programs of regional development that would generate job opportunities for (the immigrants in their) places of origin,” he said.
Soberanes’ water station is in a high-traffic border crossing area near Arivaca Junction.
A few feet away from the water tanks, behind a bush, empty backpacks, jackets, a toothbrush, half-empty packs of pills, and a plastic bottle filled with urine could be seen.
“Sometimes the migrants are so desperate they save their urine in a bottle so they can drink it later,” said Tim Holt, Humane Borders’ treasurer.
In less than 15 years, more than 5,000 people have died trying to cross the 2,000-mile border, according to official Mexican numbers, Soberanes said.
But many human rights organizations account for twice as many deaths. Those numbers include deaths on both sides of the border. In Arizona, the U.S. Border Patrol said 167 migrants died between Oct. 1, 2007 and September 30.
In 2006, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission distributed at least 70,000 maps showing highways, rescue beacons and water tanks in the Arizona desert in an effort to curb the death toll among illegal immigrants, according to Citizen archives.
