By MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press Writer
MEXICO CITY Mexico is
creating an environmental
reserve about 30 feet wide and 600
miles long on the Texas border, a
“green wall” to protect the Rio
Grande from the roads and staging
areas that smugglers use to
ferry drugs and migrants across
the frontier.
Much of this border zone is
remote and inhospitable generally
too rough to hike through
except by black bears or a pronghorns,
species that have flourished
in the area’s deserts and
mountains.
And that’s the way Mexico
wants to keep it.
While the proposed Rio Bravo
del Norte Natural Monument is
only about 30 feet wide, it will
connect two large protected areas
south of the river. When a third
nature reserve, known as
Ocampo, is created this year, the
protected areas in Mexico will
form a “wall” of millions of acres
of wilderness, matching Texas’
Big Bend parks foot-by-foot along
the border.
“This stretch of border is the
safest one we have. It’s safe
because it has wilderness on both
sides,” said Carlos Manterrola,
who heads the environmental
group Unidos Para la
Conservacion.
Big Bend National Park has
had some problems with migrant
and drug trafficking, but
Superintendent John King says
extending protected areas on
either side of the border will likely
keep the problem from getting
worse.
“When you have a roadless
area, you make it more difficult
for these activities to happen,”
King said.
The strip protects a much
longer stretch of riverbank, from
just downstream of the Texas border
town of Presidio to the outskirts
of Laredo, Texas, raising
the possibility of still larger
reserves that will serve as biological
corridors, encouraging fourfooted
traffic but making it
exceedingly difficult for humans
to pass.
In other border areas where
U.S. reserves aren’t fully
matched in Mexico such as
Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus
National Monument primitive
roads and ramshackle hamlets
have sprung up on the Mexican
side to provide supplies and staging
areas to illegal border
crossers. They have then overrun
U.S. wilderness areas.
As the U.S. puts up more fencing
near cities and popular crossing
zones, migrants will likely be
looking for new routes in remote
areas.
That happened with the
Mexican hamlet of Las Chepas,
which became a hub for undocumented
border crossers. The
problem got so bad that Mexican
authorities at the urging of
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson
bulldozed 31 buildings to discourage
them from being used as
a smuggling haven.
Now, Mexico is working on yet
another “mirror” border reserve,
to be announced this summer in
an area known as the Janos
grasslands, roughly west of Las
Chepas and across from the
Alamo Hueco Mountains and Big
Hatchet Mountains Wilderness
areas in New Mexico’s boot heel
region.
Law enforcement is a problem
at many Mexican parks, but if
well policed, the 1.2 million acres
of the proposed Janos wilderness
area could not only protect one of
the largest prairie dog populations
in North America, but also
present a natural barrier to
smugglers moving deeper into the
wild as border security tightens.
Mexican ranchers and environmentalists
applauded the Rio
Bravo del Norte proposal, which
was published Monday, starting a
30-day comment period. Along
with the Ocampo wilderness, it
will protect several pine- and oakclad
mountains often described as
“sky islands,” temperate mountaintop
enclaves divided by seas
of heat-seared desert or grassland.
“This would close the circle,”
said Jesus Armando Verduzco, a
73-year-old ranch owner from
Ocampo. “Perhaps later, we could
do a bit of hunting, eco-tourism,
preserve it for humanity.”
Some environmentalists say
this policy of establishing nature
preserves along the border could
be a more effective alternative to
the walls and “smart” fences
being considered in Congress.
“The whole idea that people
are coming up through wilderness
and roadless areas, and that’s
simply not the case,” said David
Hodges, policy director of the Sky
Island Alliance. “People have a
tendency to stay near roads,
because they don’t get lost and
that’s where they get picked up.
... It would be disastrous to put
roads through these areas.”
On the Net:
www.nps.gov/bibe/
www.beartrust.org/mexicoresearch.
htm
