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Tom and Dena Kay moved from Colorado six years ago to a rundown ranch outside of Arivaca, Arizona.  They were long-time ranchers, but very little prepared for having Mexico, with whom they share a five-mile stretch, as a neighbor.

Thousands of head of cattle on thousands of acres of arid canyon lands are head enough to water, rotate and round up, say the Kays.  Border crossers complicate these tasks by damaging fences or leaving gates open.  Cattle wander through the holes, get lost, even disappear into Mexico.  There's also the trash: discarded traveling clothes, toilet paper, food cans, and unending plastic bottles.

The drug smugglers are the real rub. They tend to travel in convoys of pick-up  trucks - carving a network of informal dirt roads into productive land- or on horses leading mules- cutting and re-cutting the vital barbed wire divisions. Occasionally, their presence is violent; Tom Kay says he has witnessed running gunfights between smugglers while out tending cattle.

The Kays say these disruptions eat up their already meager profit margins, costing them about $30,000 annually in repairs. But most of that activity has disappeared since the Department of Homeland Security constructed a vehicle barrier on the stretch of border the Kays own.

The Kays praise the diminuitive but solid concrete-anchored structure for slowing the flow of narco-traffic.  It's a welcome relief, but they still estimate 1,000 people cross their land from Mexico each day.

Posted: May 28, 2008