[CTRL] [5] The Arizona Project

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from:
The Arizona Project
Michael Wendland©1977
ISBN 0-8362-0728-9
Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc.
6700 Squibb Rd.
Misson Kansas 66202
276 pps. - first edition - out-of-print
New revised edition - available amazon.com
Paperback, 304pp.
ISBN: 0945165021
Blue Sky Press, Incorporated
June 1988
--[5]--
5    The Goldwater Ranch

Lupe was waiting out in front of the union hall. Wendland had brought
Drehsler along for the ride, and the two of them listened intently to their
eager passenger. "It's been quiet out there for over a year," Lupe explained
as they drove along Black Canyon Highway. "Nobody from Legal Aid or anyone
else has been around. So they're not going to expect us. But that's no reason
to let our guard down."

Drehsler was appalled that local reporters had never visited the ranch.

"The press in this town is part of the problem," said Lupe. "We've told them
what the situation is, but they refuse to get involved. The people who own
Arrowhead own this town, too." Lupe handed Wendland a sheaf of legal papers.
"These are some of the affidavits we collected when we were trying to clean
up that place. Read 'em. That's what you're going out to see."

The affidavits were from young wetbacks. They painted a grim picture.

The story of Demetrio Diaz, a skinny young worker from the village of Guameo
Chico, in the state of Michoacdn, Mexico, was not untypical.

Diaz's odyssey began when a man named Alberto came to his house and asked if
he wanted to go to work in the United States. Alberto was a coyote, or
recruiter, who scoured the poor villages and farms of central Mexico for
peasant laborers.

"He said he had work lined up working in the oranges for at least $20 [a day]
and that he would get us across the border and that we would walk for two
days to reach the ranch," the affidavit quoted Diaz. "He said that he would
charge me $100 to take me to the ranch."

It was a lot of money for Diaz, but he managed to raise it all by borrowing
from relatives. One night soon after Alberto's visit, he was on a bus with
twenty other young men, heading for the border and their promised fortunes.
The bus stopped at a farm just outside the tiny village of Altar, Sonora. The
men were let out and told to wait. About 2:00 A.M., Diaz said, they were
loaded into two pickup trucks and driven to a desolate spot on the border.

They hopped the fence and set off across the desert, following Alberto. By
midmorning, they were several miles into Arizona.

"One young short boy hurt his leg," recounted Diaz. "The leg was so swollen
that the boy couldn't walk. Alberto gave him some marijuana to make the boy
walk, but the boy couldn't get up. Alberto wouldn't let us carry him, so he
was left in the desert, unable to walk, an entire night's walk from the U.S.
border."

The journey lasted for four days. What little food the wets had with them was
soon gone, forcing several of the men to kill a javelina, a desert pig, to
eat. Several times the men spotted human skeletons and bones beside rusting
water cans on the trail, said Diaz.

Finally, late the fourth day, Diaz said, the aliens reached the southern
outskirts of Casa Grande, Arizona, a small fanning town about seventy-five
miles north of Tucson. There, the affidavit claimed, they were met by a
foreman from Arrowhead Ranch, who drove the twenty men to Phoenix. They spent
the night camped in the ranch orchards.

"The food we ate was brought to us by the foreman," said Diaz. "Then at the
end of the week, money was taken out of our checks. One time we got a bag of
flour, two dozen eggs, salt, and three cans of beans. The foreman charged us
twenty dollars for this."

Instead of the big wages he had been promised, Diaz claimed his salary was
less than forty dollars a week. For that, he worked twelve hours a day, seven
days a week.

Diaz said that the foreman told the aliens that they were never allowed to
leave the orchards. If they tried, the foreman would alert the border patrol,
which would send the worker back to Mexico without his pay.

After finishing the affidavits, Wendland had the same question as Drehsler.
"You mean to tell me that the Republic or Gazette never got their hands on
these?"

"Sure, they saw them," replied Lupe. "They just didn't bother to investigate
any further."

"Hasn't anyone from the local media ever dropped in on that place?"

Lupe said that he had twice escorted newsmen to the ranch for a firsthand
look. "But both of them were not real reporters, they were from small,
community-type newspapers, activist groups really." On one occasion, an
Arrowhead foreman cut the microphone wires of a reporter interviewing a
wetback. On another, Lupe and the reporter were chased off the land by
club-wielding farm supervisors. "It was a good story, but their little
newspaper had a reputation for being a radical underground sheet, and nobody
paid any attention to it." The publication had since folded.

"What about the Goldwaters?" Wendland asked.

"The ranch is really owned by the Martori family and Bob Goldwater," Lupe
replied. "But everyone suspects that Barry has an interest in it. We can't
prove it, but by putting two and two together, it's obvious that Barry wants
Arrowhead to keep making money." Lupe told of an overseas trip the senator
had taken a couple of years before, plugging the benefits of Arizona-grown
citrus. "That certainly has the appearance of using his public office to plug
his family's business interests."

During the height of the union's organizing campaign at Arrowhead, Lupe
crashed a testimonial dinner to Barry Goldwater. "I stood up and asked Barry
how come his brother was exploiting wetback laborers when able-bodied farm
workers right from here were going begging for picking jobs," he recounted.
"Well, right there, in front of all those people, Barry looked me right in
the eye and said that if all my people, the Mexican-Americans, weren't so
lazy and would get off their butts and work for a living, his brother
wouldn't have to hire wetbacks. And he was cheered. A bunch of goons carried
me off and tossed me out on my ass."

It took them about a half-hour to reach the ranch, located at the edge of the
foothills to the north of Phoenix, just off Bell Road on Fifty-ninth Avenue.
In every direction, all the reporters could see were neat rows of
fifteen-foot-high citrus trees. Three miles down the road, Lupe told Drehsler
to slow down.

"These are lemons," he said, pointing to a section of the orchard where the
trees were heavily laden with small, greenish-yellow fruits. "My guess is
that this is where we'll find the camps. It's too early for oranges."

They passed a house trailer and a short dirt service road that led to a
couple of frame houses and an equipment storage building. "Just to the south
of that little drive is where we want to go," Lupe said. "There's water
there, and the wets will be as close to it as they can. They'll be under the
trees a dozen or so rows in."

He had Drehsler drive a mile north, where the Arrowhead land ended and the
Thunderbird County Park nestled against a small mountain. "We'll park the car
here," he said, grinning at Wendland, who was overweight and obviously out of
shape. "Sorry, but there's no other way but to walk in. We can't risk being
spotted by the foremen."

Thunderbird Park was empty except for a picnicking family roasting some
hotdogs on a charcoal grill. Their small black dog, leashed to the door
handle of their car, yipped furiously at the newcomers.

The sun was just setting as the reporters and Lupe got out of their car and
began walking towards the ranch. The land was virtual desert, broken only by
an occasional clump of sagebrush. Lupe pointed out a scorpion and cautioned
the reporters to watch out for rattlesnakes.

"He's kidding, isn't he?" asked Wendland, who had never had to worry about
such creatures in Michigan.

Drehsler just laughed.

Arrowhead Ranch was a strange contrast to the barrenness of the land
surrounding it. Kept green and lush by a series of deep wells, pumps, and
irrigation ditches, it loomed ahead like an oasis. The three men crawled
under a barbed-wire fence and made their way into the groves.

"These are grapefruit trees," Lupe explained. "They won't be ready for
picking until December." Even so, it was clear that people had lived under
the trees before. A circle of small rocks marked off an old campfire site. A
tattered shoe, rusting tin cans, and scraps of paper bags and food packages
defined the rest of the camp Lupe said had been used the year before.

The groves were filled with insects. Horseflies and fruit flies were
everywhere, swarming into the trio's faces, tangling in their hair.

They walked on for about fifteen minutes, shielding themselves from view
behind the trunks of trees, slowly making their way towards the small dirt
service road they had seen on the way in. When they reached it, Lupe raised a
hand and slowly crept forward, peeking around a tree.

"There are some people off to the left," he said. "If we cross now, they're
sure to spot us."

They waited, watching two men smoke cigarettes and lean against an old pickup
truck. Somewhere closer, a dog began barking. An elderly man in faded blue
overalls emerged from one of the storage buildings and shouted at the animal,
quieting it down. It was getting darker by the minute. Finally, one of the
men got in the truck and drove off. The other two walked out of sight behind
the storage building.

It was fifty yards across the service road, and it was open all the way. Lupe
told the reporters to walk slowly, as if they were field hands. Midway
across, the dog began barking furiously. "Don't run. Just take it easy," Lupe
reminded. The dog was still barking as they entered the protection of the
groves. They stopped for a breather. Lupe didn't think they had been spotted.

Two quick gunshots rang out. Stunned, the reporters whirled around. They
listened, crouched beneath a lemon tree. For a moment all they could hear was
the buzzing of the flies. Then, behind them and back towards the road, they
heard voices and another shot, followed by far-off laughter.

"Target practice. Maybe a coyote," Lupe said.

It didn't make the reporters any more comfortable, realizing that there were
men with guns nearby.

Slowly, they started to walk up one of the rows. It was almost completely
dark in the orchard. Wendland spotted something moving ahead. He stopped for
a moment. It was a man. Wendland waved, hoping to look friendly. When they
reached him, the reporters were amazed. The man was reed-thin, maybe forty
years old. He was with his wife, a heavy woman in a tattered green dress. Two
young children were squatting in the dirt, trying to eat some sort of soup.
Their faces were covered with open sores. Flies floated in the soup and
coated the sores.

The family had fashioned a camp between two lemon trees. A fruit packing case
lined with old blankets served as a shelter for the children. The husband and
wife slept on the ground, their heads partially protected by a sheet of black
plastic stretched between the two trees.

Lupe talked to them in Spanish. They were Mexican aliens who had come to
Arrowhead the week before to pick lemons. The work was slow. It was still too
early for the good picking, though they had been told that they would earn
big money. They had been driven to the ranch in a car by a man who charged
one hundred dollars to smuggle them across the border, the woman said. The
hundred dollars was all the money the couple had. They had even had to borrow
some of it from an uncle.

"But we have been here a week already and all we have earned is ten dollars,"
the man said. "That is not enough. I don't know what we will do."

A small sign in Spanish was tacked to a tree in front of their camp.

While Lupe conversed with the family, Drehsler translated it for Wendland. it
read: "This little house is occupied. Beware of the dog."

There was no dog. The sign was meant to frighten other field hands who came
around looking for something to steal, Lupe explained after the three walked
away from the family, bidding them good luck.

They moved deeper into the orchard, going slowly to avoid tripping over the
tree roots in the darkness. Suddenly, Lupe stopped, raising a hand. "Listen,"
he said. From their right came the sound of splashing water and muffled voices
. They headed towards the sound and discovered two naked men.

Their clothes were hung neatly over the branches of a lemon tree as they
tried to bathe in the copper-colored water of an irrigation ditch. One of the
men grabbed a three-foot-long stick.

Lupe greeted the men in Spanish, telling them they had nothing to fear. The
man with the stick seemed to relax, though he continued holding onto it.

They had just arrived at Arrowhead, the man with the stick said as his
partner continued bathing. They had no money. Work was slow. It was very
difficult, but they hoped that things would soon improve. They had come to
Arrowhead with four friends who were camped elsewhere in the orchard. They
had taken the train from their small village in the interior of Mexico to the
border, where they had squeezed into a van for the trip north. Each man had
paid $125 to come there, they said.

"Already we are losing money," said the bather. "We owe the foreman twenty
dollars for food."

What kind of food?

"Some flour and beans," he said. "But that is not so bad as some of our
friends. One man owes thirty dollars for a pair of trousers."

The men said they would work their debts off as soon as the fruit ripened a
bit more. Meantime, they were having trouble just getting by.

Lupe and the reporters said goodbye and moved off towards the main road to
the east. Ten minutes later, they spotted the flickering light of a small
fire shared by a group of six men.

The aliens were preparing their dinner. A concoction of beans sizzled in a
fire-blackened skillet. Another frypan was filled with toasting tortillas,
expertly rolled out on a tree stump with a short stick by a slightly built
Mexican in a straw cowboy hat. The only shelter in the camp was a sheet of
black plastic strung between two trees. Sleeping blankets were spread on the
ground.

It was cold in the orchards. With the sun down, the ground surrendered its
heat rapidly. It was still October and a light jacket provided sufficient
warmth, but Wendland wondered what it would be like in December and January,
when the temperature in Phoenix dipped to freezing on many nights.

They talked with this group of aliens for nearly half an hour. The men
complained bitterly of the long hours they had to put in to earn a dollar.
One of the workers produced a green checkstub from Goldmar, showing earnings
of less than forty dollars for what he said was nearly two weeks' labor.
Noticing that the deductions section of the stub identified the alien with a
Social Security number beginning with a series of zeros, Wendland asked if he
could have the stub. The worker shrugged and handed it over. Wendland knew
that genuine Social Security numbers never began with zeros.

This group of workers said they had walked all the way to Arrowhead, guided
by a coyote who had charged them $125.

"There were twenty-four in my group," said the tortilla-maker. "Only
twenty-three of us made it. We were crossing an arroyo on our third day when
one of the men was bitten by a rattlesnake. The coyote said we had to leave
him behind. I don't know what happened to him."

Another said he had seen a human skeleton on the trail.

"It is a very rough walk," he said. "Many things can happen in the desert."

Wendland and Drehsler exchanged glances, recalling the affidavits Lupe had
shown them on the way out. These men had just verified the earlier
information.

Lupe thanked the men for their time and led Wendland and Drehsler out of the
groves to the main road. "It's dark now. We can take the road back to our
-car."

The walk back was quiet. The sky was a deep black velvet, illuminated by a
maze of incredibly bright stars. From the road there was no way to discern
the hidden life that went on inside the groves. As Wendland stepped into the
car, he noticed something sticking to the bottom of his boot.

"Shit," Lupe said, pointing at Wendland's foot. "Human shit. There are no
toilets in there. You have to watch where you step."

The visit had been depressing. The misery in the Arrowhead groves was worse
than the reporters had anticipated. During the drive back to Phoenix, they
made plans to return to the ranch on the following Thursday to search for a
large camp the aliens had said was located in another section of the groves.

The U.S. Border Patrol, a division of the Customs Bureau, is the government
agency responsible for the enforcement of all laws regarding illegal
immigrants. Early the next morning, Wendland was on the telephone setting up
a meeting with Raymond Feld, head of the local office of the border patrol.
He could hardly wait to get the government on record with some tough
questions about Arrowhead.

Feld was a tall, slim man of forty-six, neatly dressed in the bright green
border patrol uniform he had worn for the past twenty-one years. He was
clearly nervous. But he was also more than willing to talk. In fact, he had
just about had it with government service. Much of his dissatisfaction
stemmed from the way his superiors had handled the Arrowhead case, he said,
pulling out a sheaf of file cards which indicated that the ranch was the site
of more wetback arrests than any other grower in the valley.

"Look, let me ask you this," he said, putting down the cards. "How many men
do you think I have in this office?" Before Wendland could reply, he answered
himself. "I'll tell you how many. Exactly four. That's right, four men. And
I've got a 36,000-square-mile area to cover. That's as big as some states,
all the way from here to the Utah border. We do what we can, but there's no
way we can really keep Arrowhead or any other ranch clean."

Wendland asked why Feld didn't request extra help.

He laughed. "A few years back, I did. And on a couple of occasions, my
district office in Tucson would send me a detail of a half-dozen agents for
special enforcement. But we'd go out to Arrowhead expecting to make a
complete roundup and the place would be as clean as a whisker. Nothing. Not
one wet to be found on the whole place."

Feld later learned that spies from Arrowhead had somehow been tipped off on
the impending raids and that Arrowhead supervisors secretly monitored the
conversations of border patrol agents over government radios. "They even had
people watching our office and the motels the extra agents stayed in. They
knew every move we were going to make before we made it."

Since then the agency had been caught in a budget crunch. The U.S. Congress
had made border areas the top priority, thereby relegating more distant
offices like Phoenix to second-rank status. "All the money is being spent
down in Tucson near the border. I couldn't get extra help up here for
anything. But that's just part of the problem.

"What else is there?" asked Wendland.

Feld tensed. Then, with a sigh, he stood up and began to pace around his
office. "A couple of years ago I wouldn't have said anything. But the service
is damn well aware of what's going on out there. So I'll tell you. Maybe you
guys in the media can do something."

Feld explained that alien arrests were easy to make. "We take them into
custody and ship 'em back home. Next week, they're right back up here." The
charge he wanted to make was harboring, getting to the organizers who
profited by the smuggling and procuring of illegal workers. He had found such
a case earlier that year. "The guy's name was Frank Sanchez. The workers call
him Pancho. He's the number one foreman for Arrowhead."

That spring, Feld had developed an undercover informant, a local man who ran
a mobile concession service that trucked coffee and sandwiches out to various
farms for the fieldworkers. The man knew Frank Sanchez and, in February,
reported to Feld that he had been approached and asked to transport wetbacks.
Feld told him to go ahead and the trap was set.

"The informant was to be paid $150 a head. He agreed and met Sanchez after
dark one night not far from Arrowhead. They piled eight wetbacks in my man's
truck and off he went. All the way to Idaho, where Sanchez had set up a drop
not far from Twin Falls. Okay, now my informant kept me posted every step of
the way. As soon as the deal was set, I notified the patrol up in Idaho. They
said they'd take care of it. We had the name of the ranch Sanchez had sold
the wets to and everything. So what happens? Nothing, absolutely nothing. My
man's back the next day and Idaho tells me they don't have the manpower to go
search the ranch. I get on the phone with my superiors in Tucson and tell
them. I beg and plead and offer to go up there myself to do it. They say no,
that I can't work another district's territory."

Several days later Feld's informant was again approached by Sanchez and asked
to make another run. Feld decided to trust that his agency would come through
this time and authorized the second trip. Meantime, he had gathered telephone
company records which proved Sanchez was in contact with the Idaho ranch. The
informant met Sanchez as before and drove to a secluded spot in the orchards.
They got out of the informant's truck and Sanchez whistled in the darkness.
Soon, a half-dozen wetbacks emerged from the trees. Sanchez was furious. He
had told eight workers to meet him.

"But, senor, Jose and Juan say they do not want to go to Idaho," one of the
wets explained, according to Feld's informant.

Sanchez told the informant to wait, that he would be right back. A half-hour
later, the thick, muscular Sanchez returned, pushing two pathetic looking
aliens ahead of him. One of them had obviously been beaten. He loaded all
eight into the informant's truck, and they left, heading for another ranch in
Idaho.

This time, the informant arrived at the drop-off point only to be met by the
ranch foreman, who told him that they did not need so many workers. The
foreman took only two of the men, leaving the informant with six others. The
informant drove them to the Twin Falls office of the border patrol, dropped
them off, and returned to Arizona.

Again, Feld was on the telephone, explaining the situation and requesting
help in arresting Sanchez and the Idaho ranchers who had contracted with him
for the illegal laborers. Again nothing happened.

"I had a solid case that would have busted a major alien smuggling ring,"
Feld said, providing Wendland with copies of the reports he had written and
forwarded to his superiors. "They totally ignored it."

According to Feld, Sanchez was probably one of the state's biggest smugglers.
"I personally know that he makes over $150,000 a year just running wetbacks."
Sanchez was currently waiting deportation, said Feld, thanks to some nosing
around by Phoenix agents, who had come up with a birth certificate proving
that he was not an American citizen as he claimed, but a Mexican, Born in the
small town of Imuris, Sonora.

"But even that deportation is doubtful," Feld remarked disgustedly. "It's
being appealed and won't be settled for a couple of years, at best. And
you'll never guess who Sanchez's lawyers are. He's represented by the Martori
law firm. And the Martoris, with Bob Goldwater, are the people who own and
operate Arrowhead, Sanchez's own employers."

"Why is it that you are getting so little cooperation from your superiors?"
asked Wendland.

"Who knows? I've tried to figure it out myself. All I can do is wonder if
somebody high up has told the service to lay off Arrowhead.

"Somebody like Senator Barry Goldwater, for example?"

"Exactly. That's the only thing that could explain why the situation is so
totally ignored. Goldwater's certainly got the clout. All I really know for
sure is that the service is doing everything possible to ignore Arrowhead and
keep me down."

"What do you mean, keep you down?"

Feld sat down. "I've told you this much, I might as well tell everything."

Feld had once had a drinking problem. It had developed the year before, and
he had long since straightened it out, taking a leave of absence and coming
to grips with himself. But back on the job and in the midst of his
investigation into Arrowhead, the ax. suddenly fell. "I was hauled in for a
disciplinary action," he said. "They gave me a short suspension. I think the
whole deal was intended to put pressure on me to not take my job so
seriously, to lay off a bit."

The interview continued for another half-hour. Feld had kept good, solid
records on his investigations and he allowed the reporter to make notes on
them. After Wendland finished, Feld stood up and took him to a back room of
the building where there was a coffeepot and a small hotplate. Feld filled a
paper plate with beans he had cooked in a crockpot and treated the reporter
to a lunch of beans and toasted tortillas.

"Look, I don't know what you are going to do with all this," he said as
Wendland prepared to go. "Just remember one thing. What's going on out there
at places like Arrowhead is not much better than slavery. Those wetbacks are
being used and exploited. They are the real victims. And it's the big
corporations, the agribusinesses who make millions because of the cheap
labor, who deserve the punishment. Right now, that's not happening. They're
just getting richer and everyone is turning their back to what's happening. Th
e Grapes of Wrath was a Garden of Eden compared to the misery in those citrus
fields.

Back at the Adams, Wendland spent the rest of the afternoon writing a
memorandum on the Feld interview. He made a number of telephone calls to
civil rights groups, legal aid workers, and various social agencies which
came into contact with illegal aliens and the border patrol. In each case,
Feld was described as an honest, compassionate man, hamstrung by a lack of
manpower. Wendland contacted the informant Feld had used to infiltrate
Sanchez's smuggling operation. The informant verified the story, adding one
significant detail. "We were riding around the ranch one day and I asked
Sanchez if Barry Goldwater was involved in Arrowhead-it was just idle
conversation, really. Sanchez's face turned red and he slammed on the brakes.
He turned to me and said to forget that name. He said if I ever mentioned it
again, he'd break both my legs."

The next day, Thursday, October 14, Lupe was waiting out front of the union
office at the arranged time. Because the three men were concerned about the
health of the children they had seen during the first visit, they decided to
bring along a nurse Lupe knew, a woman named Ann Morales. A tall, blonde,
Anglo woman originally from Minneapolis, she was married to a UFW organizer
and devoted herself to public nursing. From what Lupe had told her of the
family's living conditions, she was worried.

Again they left the car in the county park just north of the ranch and made
their way in beneath the barbed wire. There were no problems crossing the
service road, and they were soon inside the groves at the camp where they had
encountered the family. But the family was gone. The little sign warning of
the nonexistent dog was still tacked to the lemon tree. But the blankets had
been removed from the packing crate. The campfire ashes were cold.

The six men in the camp further in and towards the main road were still
there. "Jesus," said Drehsler as they approached the camp, "I feel like a
soldier in one of those old war movies. I feel like we ought to be bringing
these poor people some chocolate bars or something."

They were greeted like old friends. The apprehension the wets had felt during
the first visit was gone. Lupe introduced the nurse and asked them what had
happened to the family. "They have gone back to Mexico," said one of the
aliens. "The children were sick and there was no money." No one knew how the
family would make it back, though the men assumed that the border patrol
would spot them and they would be picked up. "On the way home, we do not
hide," said another of the wetbacks. "The border patrol will give us a ride
back to Mexico."

They chatted for about a half-hour before Lupe, Ann, and the reporters set
off to find the large camp. It was supposed to be across the main road, deep
within another section of the orchard.

"This is what you will never believe," said Lupe. "It is like an entire
village."

"Good lord, I can't believe this," said Ann. "I thought I'd seen rotten
living conditions, but this is the worst. This place is crawling with
disease. Living like this with no sanitation facilities, these people can't
help but become ill."

Wendland stopped her and pointed to the ground. She was about to step in a
pile of dung. A brown-stained leaf from a lemon tree, used as toilet paper,
partially covered it.

"I made that mistake the last time," he said.

"But, you see, those leaves are probably covered with parasites," she said.
"They wipe themselves with the leaves and they get infected by them. I bet
these people all have ringworm and intestinal infections."

They continued walking, scurrying across the road into the other side of the
orchard. Ten minutes later, they found the main camp.

It was impossible to say how many people lived there. In the darkness, they
could only see those they passed. But small campfires were everywhere for
three and four rows across, a hundred yards long. Wendland tried to count
just the men he could actually see. He stopped at a hundred. They were, as
Lupe had predicted, standing in the middle of a small village. Thick,
sweet-smelling smoke from mesquite logs filled the orchard. Workers lay or
sat on the ground, chewing on tortillas and talking in low voices. A few of
them had made shelters out of packing crates. Most slept beneath the trees,
under sheets of plastic. As Lupe began talking with the men, a crowd slowly
formed. Wendland offered one of them a cigarette. A flurry of hands appeared
and the pack soon emptied.

The workers were not particularly upset about the sudden invasion, only
curious. Lupe introduced Ann, who had been hungrily watched by a couple of
them, and said she had come to help out the children. "She is a nurse," he
said, looking straight at one of the watchers, who then cast his eyes
downward. "And these are journalists, here to learn how hard you all must
work."

Their stories were no different from those of the other wetbacks.

"I have a small farm," said one. "The coyote who came to my village said I
could earn more here in a month than from my land in a year. So I came here.
I make nothing, not even enough to feed my children one week. I will go home
soon. But I don't know what to do. It is too late to seed my own land this
year. I have nothing, senor, nothing.

The visit lasted for half an hour. Wendland was able to collect a couple of
other Goldmar checkstubs, further documenting the low wages paid the
wetbacks. Drehsler joined Lupe in questioning the men in Spanish, getting
more information on Arrowhead's recruitment practices.

Despite the miserable conditions and obvious abuses that the reporters had
observed, they would have to come back to Arrowhead at least one more time.
They had to document what they had seen with photographs.

Meanwhile, new reporters were appearing, at the IRE office in the Adams. By
the start of the project's second weekend, Norm Udevitz of the Denver Post had
 arrived, and Harry Jones of the Kansas City Star had also checked in. Both
men were in their late forties, slim of build *with horn-rimmed glasses, and
both were seasoned pros. Udevitz was the first westerner from outside of
Arizona to work on the team. A native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, he had been a
reporter for twenty-seven years, at one time owning and operating the Wyoming
Buffalo, a small weekly that eventually folded for want of advertising. Since
1970, he had headed the Denver Post's investigative efforts. Earlier in 1976,
he had dispatched a team of Post reporters to the town of Trinidad, Colorado,
exposing widespread corruption among public officials there. As a result of
the Post's reporting, a grand jury had indicted fifteen town leaders. Udevitz
had never met Don Bolles in person, though he had often spoken to him on the
telephone.

Jones, from Kansas City, also had wide experience in investigating organized
crime and political corruption. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man who went to
his room each evening at exactly six o'clock to change into a comfortable
blue jumpsuit for his evening file reading. An excellent records man who had
a reputation for dogging a story until he dropped, Jones was frequently the
last reporter to leave the office and the first to arrive the next morning.

Both were assigned by Greene to back up Wendland and Drehsler on the visit to
Arrowhead planned for the next Tuesday. Mike Padgett, an ASU student
volunteer, would also go along as photographer. Married and in his
mid-twenties, Padgett had worked at several small Phoenix-area newspapers as
a reporter-photographer and knew his camera well.

Tuesday morning Wendland went through the Phoenix yellow pages, trying to
find someone who would rent several walkie-talkies for use on the Arrowhead
visit. He dialed half a dozen firms but struck out on each one. Though they
carried walkie-talkies, they would only lease them for extended periods of
time.

"Look, all I need them for is about five hours," Wendland pleaded with the
seventh man, the owner of an East Phoenix radio supply shop.

"Buddy, I don't care how long you want 'em for. These are expensive pieces of
equipment. The only way I get to make any money is with long leases. It'll
cost you fifty bucks each, whether you keep them a day or a month."

There were only two other companies listed in the phone book that he hadn't
tried. This time, he took a different tack. Wendland's syndicated CB radio
column was carried in the Phoenix Gazette, the city's morning paper. When the
next shop owner came on the line, Wendland introduced himself as the CB
writer. The shopkeeper recognized his name. Explaining that he was in Arizona
to do some radio tests out in the desert, Wendland asked to rent three
ultra-highfrequency walkie-talkies to keep in touch with his research
assistants. The shopkeeper was delighted to cooperate. By three that
afternoon, the Arrowhead team was equipped with three hand-held radios which
could reach out for five miles, more than enough range for the job.

The reporters drove out in two cars. 'Me first stop was at the western end of
the Arrowhead groves, where a small white cross and a pile of rocks marked
the spot where an illegal alien had died.

"He was picking fruit on a ladder," Lupe explained, as Padgett got out to
photograph the grave. "Somehow, he slipped and came into contact with some
power lines. Arrowhead just called the sheriff's office and asked them to
remove the body. We found out about it from some of the other wets and took
up a collection in the union to send the poor guy home for burial. Otherwise,
he would have been planted in the unclaimed section of the county cemetery."

After Padgett had finished, the two cars made a U-turn and headed towards the
section of the groves where they had found the main camp on the previous
visit.

That's when they picked up the tail.

As the reporters' cars passed, a shiny new yellow pickup truck eased out from
between two lemon trees. It had been parked there, rear first, as if the
driver was waiting for someone. It stayed back a hundred yards or so, turning
when the reporters turned, accelerating when they went faster, slowing down
when they did.

"I'm going to lose this guy," crackled the voice of Drehsler over the radio
in Wendland's car after about fifteen minutes. "Let's split up.

Drehsler turned east on a road that led to Black Canyon Highway, the main
north-south route out of Phoenix. Wendland's car took a dirt cutoff a mile to
the north, past the Arrowhead groves.

The man in the pickup paused, making up his mind. As the reporters hoped, he
decided to stick with Drehsler.

Wendland's route wound its way past mesquite and cactus towards a range of
small mountains. Lupe had been down the road before. "Keep going for another
half-mile or so, then stop. We can hoof it to the groves," he instructed.

Twenty minutes later, Drehsler, the tail shaken, joined up with Wendland's
group. Lupe picked up a stick and sketched out in the sand their rough
position in relation to the main camp. It was five o'clock, time to get
moving.

Again they divided. Lupe, Wendland, Drehsler, and Padgett would walk into the
groves. Jones would stay where he was with one car, on the watch for anyone
following the reporters into the orchard. Udevitz would take the other car
and drive around to the opposite end of the groves, where he would have a
clear view of anyone coming in from the front.

Lupe led the way. Four hundred yards out, there was a slight rise. He turned
around to tell the group to stay down. Scrambling up it on hands and knees,
he peeked across. On the other side was another pickup; the driver was
waiting, watching.

"Shit," he said. "Those bastards are expecting us."

Lupe led the reporters south, roughly following the rise which divided the
Arrowhead groves from the desert. They had walked for a quarter-mile when,
some two hundred feet in front of them, they spotted a lone figure on foot.
The man had just materialized, stepping out from between a couple of scrubby
mesquite trees. Cradled across his arm was what was unmistakably a rifle or
shotgun. He stood there, facing the opposite direction.

The reporters and Lupe dropped to the ground, hoping to take advantage of the
low brush.

"Who is he?" Wendland asked. "A hunter?"

"He's a guard," said Lupe.

The reporters had two choices. They could turn around and go back to Jones,
or they cou[l]d make a break for it, hoping to clear the rise before the
gunman spotted them. If they called it off, there would not be another
chance. The security was out in full force. It was now or never.

They were over the rise in seconds and kept running until they were well
inside the groves. Then Lupe doubled back to see if the gunman was following.
He returned a minute later with a smile.

"Let's go take those pictures and get the hell out of here," he said.

But the main camp was gone. It had been moved, obviously in a hurry. Sheets
of plastic were still strung between the trees, and neat piles of kindling
wood were stacked next to campfire ashes. But it was abandoned.

The reporters poked around as Padgett took photographs of a packing crate
once used as a bed. They were about to move on when the walkie-talkie in
Wendland's rear pocket crackled with static.

It was Harry Jones. "I've got company and he's got a gun." It was the same
gunman the group had spotted moments before. He had stepped out of the brush
a hundred feet behind Jones's parked car and was heading his way. "I'm not
sticking around for any introductions," radioed Jones. "I'm going to join
Norm."

He drove off, only to find his way out blocked by a light blue pickup truck.
Jones stopped. He looked in his rear-view mirror and spotted a dark blue
Volkswagen coming after him. It was the gunman. He looked around, hoping the
desert sand was firm enough to get his Nova past the pickup. But just as he
was about to try, the pickup slowly drove off, heading west. Jones didn't
waste any time.

The Volkswagen continued following him. Jones turned north on Fifty-ninth
Avenue. Then the pickup suddenly reappeared, joining the gunman in a caravan
after Jones. Udevitz's car was on the shoulder of the road at the far
northern edge of the groves. Jones pulled up next to him. As Jones got out of
his car and walked over to his companion, the Volkswagen and the pickup
slowly passed, only to turn around and stop a few hundred yards behind them.

"Look, we might as well be out front with this thing," Udevitz said." "Maybe
we can get these guys to think we're border patrol or cops.

Udevitz and Jones got out of the car. Jones carried a walkie-talkie and
pretended to be talking on it. Udevitz placed a pair of binoculars to his
face, as if he were reading off the license numbers of the Volkswagen and
pickup.

The ruse worked. The two observers drove off, heading back towards the
Arrowhead offices.

Inside the groves, Padgett had finished taking his pictures of the abandoned
camp.

"What I figure is that some of the wets told the foremen about our last
visit," Lupe said. "So they busted up the main camp. Now, they sure as hell
can't make that many men disappear. But what they probably did do was move
them to other spots in the orchard and have them divide into smaller groups.
All we got to do is find them."

It was Drehsler who first noticed the airplane.

A small, silver, single-engine craft with red fuselage striping, the plane
was little more than five hundred feet above the trees, methodically
following a nearby row of lemon trees across the orchard. It was definitely
looking for something.

"Get under the trees," Lupe shouted as the plane swept by directly overhead.

Wendland got on the radio to Udevitz. "Watch that airplane."

A couple of minutes later, Udevitz had a message. "It's turning around,
headed back your way."

This time it was even lower. Again it passed by.

"There are two people in it," radioed Udevitz, who was watching it from the
road with his field glasses. "The passenger has binoculars and he's using
them."

Time and time again, the aircraft buzzed the orchard. On each pass, the
reporters ducked beneath the trees. Finally, as darkness enveloped the
groves, it flew off.

For the next half-hour, the reporters explored the orchard, trying to find
the aliens. There was nothing but darkness. They made their way to the main
road and were about to cross it to search the other side when Udevitz again
radioed them.

"A pickup, headed into the groves."

The reporters ran back into the orchard a few hundred feet, crouching beneath
the trees. "It's shining its lights down the rows," informed Udevitz. "Stay
down."

But the truck, too, soon departed, after making a half-dozen such looks. Ten
minutes later, the reporters were across the orchard.

The six aliens they had talked to on the previous visits were still there.
They were also clearly apprehensive about being visited again.

"The foreman, he told us that you are bad men, that you come to hurt us, to
steal our things," said one of the aliens. "He said we should run away and
tell him when you come back, that he will take care of you."

Lupe explained that they were reporters, who meant no harm.

"They come to see for themselves how hard you work and what little you get,"
said Lupe.

The alien shrugged his shoulders. Padgett hurriedly snapped a roll of
pictures.

"Hey," said Padgett after he had finished, "I thought I had counted six of
them."

Drehsler looked around. There were only five. Obviously, one had slipped off.
"Little guess where he went," he said.

Thanking the workers, the invading party made a hasty path for the main road,
where they were picked up by Udevitz.

For the next hour, the reporters waited in Thunderbird Park. Drehsler and
Wendland drove off in one car to a small store back on Bell Road and returned
with a twelve-pack of beer and some snacks. As a coyote howled off in the
hills nearby, the group filled their stomachs, waiting for the Arrowhead
security people to quit their search. The guards now knew they had been in
the orchard. The flash from Padgett's camera had lit up a large area.

They set off again a little past nine, this time slowly cruising the roads
that crisscrossed the ranch, looking down each row of citrus for light. Far
off in the orchard's western section, they found a large camp of perhaps
seventy-five aliens. As Lupe tried to banter with the men, Padgett took his
photographs. The workers were not openly hostile, but it was clear that the
presence of the strangers put them on edge. It was hard to tell who was the
happiest to see the reporters leave, the wetbacks or the newsmen.

IRE had its photographs. The reporters could now document what they had seen
inside the Arrowhead groves. That part of the story was wrapped up.

But there was much more to Goldmar, the firm that owned Arrowhead, than the
exploitation of alien workers. And Goldmar was just one story.

pps. 54-72
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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