I’ve been saying for years how there’s a lot of crazy stuff that goes on near the Mexican border. Well Folks, it seems to be getting worse, and quickly. There’s been so much activity lately that I just had to devote an entire story to the problem. Let me start you off with an article that appeared three months ago – this’ll get your attention, I guarantee it.

Drug cartel members tortured and executed seven men whose bodies were found near the Sonora/Arizona Border. One of the men had been decapitated. One of the victims has since been identified as a drug trafficker who had previously been arrested in the United States.

The bodies of the seven men were found in a creek at a Mexican ranch not far from Sasabe, Sonora, right on the border with Arizona, Mexico’s  El Diario Del Yaqui reported.

The men had all been shot with high caliber rifles and had been left behind for at least five days. Authorities have since identified one of the victims as 38-year-old Cipriano Obeso Berrelleza from the town of Caborca.

Obeso Berrelleza had been arrested three times in the United States in connection with drug trafficking activity. His relatives had reported him missing on October 21, 2015, several days after they had last heard from him on October 17, El Diario Del Yaqui reported.

The bodies were found in Rancho La Sierrita, a Mexican ranch about eight miles southwest of San Miguel in the Tohono O’odham reservation, the Arizona Daily Star reported. The ranch is located about 160 yards from the border and is considered a staging area for human smugglers and drug traffickers.

Mexican authorities have not specified which drug cartel is suspected of having been behind the murders. Breitbart Texas has been investigating the areas in Arizona which are generally controlled by drug traffickers affiliated with the Sinaloa Federation; however, on the Mexican side, there have been in fact a few incursions by their rivals as well.

The area has also seen a number of heavily armed rip crews that troll the area searching for cartel shipments that they rob at gunpoint. As Breitbart Texas previously reported, armed rip crews operating in the United States side of the border is what led to the shootout where U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered.

It remains unclear if the murder victims were killed in connection with a drug dispute, if they had been part of a drug rip crew, or may have been members of a rival criminal organization.

This story was written by Ildefonso Ortiz, an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas.

So anyway, I got to thinking about where this occurred, and it turns out that Andy Martin and I had one day traveled right along the border to climb a peak, then back again the same day, twice passing within 160 yards of this scene of torture, mayhem and murder. Little did we know that it’d become this place of such grisly activity.

Those murders were a mere three months ago. Sadly, almost every time my friends or I head out to climb in the increasingly-lawless border area, we see disturbing signs that prove it is being overrun by people streaming across that imaginary line that separates the two countries. When I use the term lawless, I don’t mean that all levels of law enforcement aren’t there or aren’t doing their best to stem the influx – I simply mean that they seem to be fighting a losing battle. The drug cartels have unlimited funds with which to work, and that makes for one very tough opponent. As climbers, we get out into the remotest of areas, to places where law enforcement does not go, and as a result see things they will never see.

No matter how deeply we penetrate into these mountain fastnesses, it seems that every cave or rocky overhang has sheltered some border-crosser, probably many. Where only wild animals used to tread, there are now thousands of well-worn footpaths used regularly by those crossing illegally into the country. With no concern whatsoever for preserving the delicate beauty of the desert, their cast-off trash litters the landscape. It’s sad enough to see their leavings, but what’s even worse is to run into these people in person.

On a recent climbing trip into a remote area, friendly Border Patrol agents gave us some sobering advice. They told us we wouldn’t have to worry so much about illegal immigration in that area; rather, the only people we might encounter were drug smugglers working for the Mexican cartels. We asked if they might be armed, and were told that they could be. They have robbed people at gunpoint; if not carrying firearms, they have no qualms about threatening you with large knives, taking everything you may be carrying – food, water, clothing and anything else of use to them. Agents have told me that they have had run-ins with cartel people carrying AK-47s – God help us all! And speaking of rifles……… two weeks ago I climbed a peak with a friend, Two days later, he climbed another nearby peak, where he says he met a guy with hispanic features, in camouflage and carrying a rifle. The man walked slowly past him and they exchanged hellos. The top was littered with the usual trash these guys leave behind. He had a portable solar panel attached to a small, black object, perhaps some kind of a communication device. When he turned to head back down, the man was not to be seen, and he didn’t see him again. The crazy thing is, Folks, that this happened less than 5 miles from the visitor center and park headquarters of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It is likely that he worked for one of the cartels, and the gun was either for protecting his own people coming through, (protecting them from being robbed or kidnapped by a rival cartel) or it also could be used to rip off members of another cartel. This is the exact spot where he met the lookout.

Before vehicle barriers were installed along much of Arizona’s border with Mexico, smugglers would routinely drive across the line and, in a desperate attempt to outrun law enforcement, created hundreds of rough vehicle tracks and destroyed much fragile desert ecosystem in the process.

Here’s a photo I took of some smugglers carrying loads of drugs through the mountains. It’s a little grainy because it’s a blow-up of a small part of a bigger photo.

These are probably 50-pound loads of marijuana. I ran into four of these guys face-to-face in a very frightening encounter an hour after I took the photo.

On a recent weekend in the Ajo Mountains, I ran into lookouts for the drug cartel on two consecutive days. Another time in the Growler Mountains, I accidentally walked right up to two scouts for the cartel as they kept vigil on the top of the mountain I had just climbed. Another friend encountered a scout for the cartel on top of a border peak, and was told he had five minutes to look around and leave.

Also during the last two weeks, my friend Mark was out climbing in remote areas of Arizona and had a few encounters with Bad Guys – here’s what happened:

He came over Point 2441, on his way to Benchmark Charley in the Growler Mountains, arriving at the BM around 11:30 AM. He was just about to summit  when two men stood out to “greet” him. One guy was very aloof, holding a large pair of binoculars The man drifted off north after Mark arrived, uninterested in his presence. Meanwhile the  guy (slender, mid 30s, in routine camo garb and tennis shoes) was very friendly and chatty. He knew no English, so they had to make do with Mark’s limited Spanish. He asked him where his house was and he said it was “north” – yeah, right.

They saw a huge bird and Mark said águila, then the man corrected his pronunciation with the correct version. He also showed Mark his injured left knee, wrapped in an ACE bandage. Mark asked him if it was cold at night and he affirmed it was. There was plenty of routine summit trash, plus a solar panel, and a five-gallon water jug.

There was no sign of the benchmark disk and they didn’t seem concerned that he was groping around “their” summit camp looking for it. He honestly did not feel threatened but was naturally a little anxious. In fact he sat there, had some water, ate a snack and enjoyed the view while he practiced his Spanish with the man. He even showed him his map of where he was headed to assure them he was only interested in summits. He was on the BM about 20 minutes or so before climbing south to Peak 2870. He never saw any arms, just their huge binoculars and summit trash. Mark speculates that maybe that’s what they’re trained to do with a passive encounter.

Within a few days of the event described above, Mark had a similar experience. He was climbing Peak 3019 and saw two lookouts as he neared the south summit (which he approached from the east) and said “good morning”. He recalled that a mutual friend of ours said he had seen one of them the day before on the same summit. Of course, Mark was startled when he looked up to see them staring down at him. After a few words in broken Spanish, they drifted off to the south and he never saw them again. Mark thinks these guys desire to be elusive, aloof and passive. He then climbed south over to Peak 2974 and there was a lot of trash and a car battery and a multi-level “nook and cranny” bivy camp. He thought this took the prize for the trashiest and most elaborate summit camp he had yet seen.

Something else we climbers see way too often in these remote areas is communications equipment. Often, it’ll be a solar panel which charges heavy lead storage batteries. There could also be an antenna and even a radio. The last time I found such stuff, it really pissed me off – I pulled off all of the wires and carried each piece over to a nearby cliff and hurled it all into the abyss where I watched it smash into a million pieces. Of course, you need to look around carefully before doing something like that, to make sure no Bad Guys are nearby. I hope that other climbers will start doing that, to send a message to them.

Dear Readers, I swear I can’t keep up with this stuff. Here’s a story from today’s Tucson newspaper, dated February 2, 2016. The piece is by Perla Trevizo, from the Arizona Daily Star.

http://tucson.com/news/local/border/rare-cross-border-drug-raid-leaves-dead-in-custody/article_85fe0bea-22a5-5e3a-a3d6-a3f46630387b.html

In summary, the Mexican police set up a rare operation working in conjunction with U.S. authorities to go after members of the Sinaloa Cartel. Mexican law enforcement was allowed to enter Arizona with men and helicopters and stage a raid back into Mexico. Cartel members were killed and others arrested in this exciting and unusual operation.

So, you might ask, what’s the point of this whole article? Maybe I’m just getting all of this off my chest, but I guess it’s safe to say that my friends and I are getting pretty disgusted with running into these rat-bastards. This is our country and they shouldn’t even be here. I’ll keep you posted, but I guarantee it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

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