Pipeline Malarkey

Aren't the folks who oppose the natural gas pipeline from Tucson to Mexico (Republic 5/5/2014) getting a little carried away when they claim the pipeline right-of-way will open up a new route for drug runners and illegal immigrants.  The Republic's own map of the project shows the pipeline follows the route of state highway 286.   Who's kidding who.  An LA Times story from a few years back featured  Sasabe, Mexico as the jumping off point for smugglers of all kinds using the highway 286 route (http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/18/world/fg-mexborder18), .   Moreover, how much environmental pollution will there be from a pipeline where there's already a road and actually not much vegetation.   Probably a lot less than what clean natural gas can eliminate from the Mexican power plants burning dirty fuel and polluting our Arizona air.  You'd think environmentalists would be overjoyed that Mexico is doing something to eliminate greenhouse gases.

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In 2000, according to the DEA, some 50,800 pounds of marijuana were seized on Tohono land. By last year, the figure had soared to 192,225 pounds. Other authorities put the number even higher. More and more Tohono themselves, meanwhile, have been caught up in the drug trade. "Young Indians," says Coulson [DEA], "carry it over to drop houses" from which the pot eventually finds its way to the streets. 

 

Most every family, it seems, has been touched by drugs, including some of the reservation's most elite. In September, Tohono O'odham police stopped a 1996 Chevrolet Lumina for speeding and discovered six bales of marijuana under a blanket in the trunk. The driver, 39-year-old Nicholas C. Juan, was arrested and now awaits trial. He is the brother of Vivian Juan-Saunders, the Tohono chairwoman.

He isn't the first member of the chairwoman's family to be caught drug-running. Her sister, Mary Juan, was arrested in May 1999 by U.S. Customs officials after they discovered 15 bales of marijuana stashed in her Pontiac Grand Prix and in a shed on her property. Mary had once been a tribal judge. She was convicted in federal court and spent a year and a day in jail. She's out now, raising her three grandkids--her daughter-in-law, busted with her six years ago, moved off the property.

 

(http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jan/08/magazine/tm-tohono2)

 

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“The third is a language that is a mystery to me and perhaps to some of your other readers. It has a degree of importance if it suggests the nationality of a group, other than Mexican, traversing that dangerous stretch of America,” wrote Godfrey Harris of Los Angeles.

The photo was taken by Scott Olson of Getty Images, and he did not address the language question in the caption information he supplied. After readers inquired, a Times photo editor contacted Olson, who in turn checked with the Tucson sector of the Border Patrol to get the answer:
Tohono O’odham.

(http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/readers/2010/07/mystery-language-on-a-border-sign.html)