By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive To Rense
5-30-23

Behind the 8-Ball

After verging southward from San Diego, Interstate-8 runs parallel along the Mexico border from Tecate to its junction with I-10 at Casa Grande (south of Phoenix). Stretching over deserts and mountains for 348 miles (560.45 km) route has a bad rep due to its proximity to the land of drug traffickers, illegal aliens, stolen vehicles, hit men, blazing heat, insane tequila shooters and their source, spiky cacti. In winter the roadway is covered with slippery ice but for most of the year the ribbon of asphalt is a visionary ocean of silvery heat waves, a mirage boiling up from Hell. In the bad old days of my teenage years, the worst threat of all came with the Arizona Rangers, those legendary troopers who thrived on planting ziplock bags of trash marijuana on unsuspecting youths, followed by an overnight in jail and a huge fine, but that was long ago, way back in the good old days during the last gasp of the Wild West. Much has changed since then, but some things stay the same, for instance, illegal migration across the border and violence-prone gangs.

The storm-driven coolness over the West Coast persuaded me to, once again, foolishly, get behind that 8-ball down memory lane for old-times sake. Actually, the worst stretch used to be just a bit southeast of San Diego, a sandy graveyard of luckless border crossers and victims of gang warfare, a zone with a permanent stench of decayed flesh and the echoes of shaman’s incantations and Satanic verses. That being the wrong foot to start a springtime journey, I avoided the unholy grave sites and remained on the highway angling southeast toward the hinterland of the border region. .

Across the line toward the near south lay populous Tijuana and Mexicali on the upper Baja peninsula, and farther east lay the two only Mexican towns of Sonoya and Nogales, strongholds of the insanely violent Sonora-Sinaloa Cartel (whose members are otherwise, whenever off the job, good family men). These outlaws are caballeros (horsemen) at heart, always ready to joke and laugh while totally prepared to kill. Their most recent feat, accomplished a couple of years ago, was to herd dozens of Mexican policemen into a bar for a mass execution by gunfire. The director Robert Rodriguez tries hard to mimic these crazed clowns but falls short on the vicious cackling after the task is done. I recommend that he switches to documentary videos “sin enganos”, non-fiction, the real deal).

After leaving behind the coastal fog and dripping rain, the sunny and rugged landscape through the Vallecito mountains and Imperial Dunes, and the Saucedo hills of Arizona, pose harsh challenges for people-smugglers and highway robbers, the main crime-prevention coming from the U.S. Border Patrol and Customs checkpoint east of Pine Valley (the last link of old I-80) atop the barren mountains of the Cleveland National Forest. A few trouble spots, during past incursions of violent illegals, lay ahead in Arizona. In one of those drop points, a white dope dealer who ripped off a math professor (an acquaintance of mine in college) of several thousands dollars and that’s after stealing mucho dinero from a Taiwanese thug to threatened to kill me if I did not recover the stolen money. This absurd comedy all hinged on the threat of the Taiwan man to kidnap and shoot a math professor’s 2-year old daughter.

That resulted in a Steve McQueen sequence, when I knocked on the thieving dealers door in Haight Ashbury and then kick it in, only to discover he and a pal, along with their girlfriends, had just slipped out a window and down a fire escape. So the chase was along Highway 101 toward SFO airport. I left the car engine running and ran into the lobby, only to see the foursome board their flight to Phoenix.

All good things must come to an end, and for the thief that happened after he cheated on a cross-border marijuana deal and got into a tussle south of Phoenix with a respected merchant from the Sonora Cartel. The bandito slipped a shiv into the errant dealer’s kidney and then put the fool’s right hand on the pavement and sliced off a forefinger. A day late I pulled up, and after questioning every hippie and biker along I-8, all that remained of those business dealings was dried blood on the pavement and a forefinger tightly wrapped in a yellow bandana. After getting back to Indiana, I gave the Taiwanese thug that memento from my sunny vacation and told him to “get that frock out of Dodge, or else worse will happen to you!” or something on that order. Though I never kept track after the prof dropped out to move to an organic farm in Northern California, I’ve heard that the girl grew up to be a gorgeous woman with a Ph.D. in botany. The passage of time may seem to bring change for the better, but in some essential ways nothing ever changes.

Imperial Dunescape

Taking my time on a leisurely journey, a homecoming of sorts, I stopped to buy a couple of bottles of Hungarian Tokay wine in Alpine, a former cattle ranch transformed into a yuppie paradise (getting away with $3 per bottle; more of a steal than a deal) and then drove over the mountains past the INS/BP checkpoint and down to the Imperial Valley capital of El Centro, where I noticed an absence of Mexican farm-workers in early summer (which can be detected by the absence of portable toilets). At a community event, I gratefully received a hot dog and a bottle of water in a ritual of welcome. (I had worked as a fruit picker in that desert region in preteen early youth before child labor laws were enacted and therefore can appreciate small acts of kindness.) Nowadays the legal farmworkers do not form semi-permanent communities but instead board buses to the fields and return home across the border to their families with weekly pay and a case of beer. Farmworkers’ leader Cesar Chavez is an eternal hero to anyone who ever baked under the merciless desert sun for months on end.

Reminiscing over my early childhood years in the desert, I drove between the vast Imperial dunes, curvaceous piles of white sand. Missing nowadays are, of course, the camels we used to chase and oasis palm groves. To my right, the Mexico border was clearly visible due to the black metal fence aka the Trump Wall and X-shaped steel girders that prevent dune buggies from entering the restricted zone. Green-and-white Border Patrol trucks were posted on the high ground overlooking the foreign space. While traveling in silence without the once-constant company of intruding wetbacks, hitchhikers, bikers or ice-cream trucks of olden times, the pristine dunes seem nowadays more barren than the sandy wasteland of Planet Tatooine. It’s eerily quiet, strangely beautiful and zipped up like tight jeans.

Living it up in the Hotel Arizona

Soon thereafter crossing the state line, my vehicle made the zigzag round-about the Arizona State Penitentiary, formerly known as the Yuma Territorial Prison, the railroad terminus in “3:05 to Yuma”, starring Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, and for the remake Christian Bale and Russell Crow. Nothing can make me feel better than being on the outside of the Big Pen. A dribble of blue below the raised roadbed indicated the last gasp of the Colorado River before it crosses into Old Mexico to be swallowed by the Sea of Cortez. That’s where all the upper-class crap from Lake Havasu ends up.

Pressing onward out of the Mohave region, the arid landscape turns picture-perfect with a forest of flowering yuccas and organ pipe cacti crowned with yellow-white florets, Arizona Highways in the buff. The harsh light and soft shade reminded me in childhood of seeing a pinup at an LA garage of an elegant woman, her face totally shaded under a large straw hat, laying nude on a pristine sand dune. Over the decades since then I’ve been to every desert in the North Hemisphere and never saw anything more glamorous than the ruins of the Great Wall. Real life cannot surpass art, I’ve learned.

This middle section of the Sonora Desert is harmless in terms of escaped convicts and dangerous intruders on the lam due to the lengthy Barry Goldwater USAF bombing range to the right, between the highway and the border. Desperadoes though they may be, smugglers and illegals along with their guides (known as coyotes) are not going to risk being strafed or bombed during a Top Gun exercise. Nevertheless, dodging an Apache gunship might make a great challenge for the TV successor to “Survivor”. Fiction is always better than what’s too real.

Since landscape photo opportunities are nil at the next full-service rest area, located on an especially dry and barren spot, I usually stop to take photos farther along at an emergency pullover for overheated trucks and wild birds. The turnout lacks a water fountain or toilets, but possesses a grand view of cactus-studded mountains. Pulling over, I could not help but notice, to my dismay, the curbside was piled with huge mounds of trash, including empty food cans, large whiskey and tequila bottles, sweat-stained clothing, cast-offs boots and water bottles refilled with urine.

Dozens of crumpled packs of American cigarettes littered the ground. I thought to myself that smoking must be affordable for destitute migrants seeking shelter and freedom from impoverishment in an unfair brutal world. And, here I am, worrying about the per-gallon price of gasoline. Too bad the sojourners had left this holy ground, or I would have given them my wallet, the shirt on my back and my sneakers in a humble gesture of welcome in exchange for “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free”. Of course, strutting aount their DJ KhaledXAir Jordans at $25K a pop would have them presuming me to be the village idiot, an oaf wandering the desert. Nowadays the masses come not with a yearning for freedom but a lust for mucho dinero, tax-free money.

The mess left near the Santa Rosa Wash (a desert flood zone) was the leftovers from well-stocked welcoming parties of coyotes, those people smugglers guiding various arriving groups. I’ve seen similar encampments many times before along the US-Mexico border across southern New Mexico and on the outskirts of Uvalde, TX, but none as generous as this “beggars’ banquet” for border-crossers. Tequila nowadays costs more than bourbon, and gallon bottles of margarita mix were strewn across the concrete and sand. Welcome to El Norte, amigos and banditos, Bienvenida! You are so lucky to have it so easy, thanks to your Patron, Jose Biden! Pancho Villa never had it so easy from Generals Pershing and Patton!

Here, the honored guests are also given (actually sold at inflated prices) burner phones with local numbers stolen from Americans across the Southwestern states, a newly arisen crime against privacy and property that’s gone rampant during the nervous anticipation of Biden’s migrant crush along the border. Phone numbers are easily assigned by switching off the legitimatte local phone owners, especially now after organized crime have infiltrated all the major mobile providers. Many of the losers in phone ID theft are illegal immigrants already settled here who dare not lodge a complaint with the sponsoring companies, much less with the FCC. A stolen number suffices for the first couple of weeks of infiltration and adaptation to the USA. With the aid of dupes, aka host charities, churches and social workers, the infiltrators can obtain the necessary sponsorship to apply for several phones directly from call services, which enable prostitution rackets and drug dealing along personal with introductions to local mafia bosses and their political flunkies at Democrat offices and charities.

Worse than the newly arrived crooks, however, are the recently infiltrated military personnel on a covert-ops assignment under strategic operations to infiltrate, scout out and attack the USA. They’ve come not to play but to kill. The welcoming folks with charities and churches are treasonous dupes, who should know better because when the bombs are detonated and bullets fired, those angels of confused mercy will bear much, indeed most of the moral burden for the coming urban warfare against Americans. Naivete is the worst of mortal sins, since it is the most easily avoidable.

Here, at this bare-bones rest stop, the intruders catch their breath after walking from one of the Rez roads and then at nightfall board rogue semi-trucks for the next leg of their journey into the heartland. This transfer station is located at the edge of an Indian reservation due south of Maricopa County (aka the Phoenix area), the Democratic Party stronghold, which is this nation’s capital of illegal immigration and related activities of the Mexican crime syndicates, aka the Cartel. Also Maricopa is the center of the marriage of Cartel and Democrats for the purpose of ballot tampering and electoral fraud, as happened with the unconstitutional installation of Joe Biden, the pretty boy of the Chinese-Cartel alliance. The Phoenix-Maricopa mega-region is what Chicago was to Al Capone, the key to subverting the political system and robbing the American public. Liberalism is a thin cover for political treason and legal protections for outright criminals, which is hardly different from the mob-controlled Democratic Party convention of 1968 or, for that matter, that grim Day in Dallas, just a few months shy of sixty years ago.

From Way Out There to Over Here

Formerly known as the Papago Indian tribe during the Spanish conquest, the Tohono O’odham Nation is about the size of Connecticut, stretching from Mexico’s Sonora State to less than 20 miles from Maricopa, the gateway to Phoenix. Some linguistic history demands attention here. The early tribal name is based on the Spanish aka conquistadors’ word for “parrot”. The natives, of course, took offense to the denigration of their language as indecipherable squawking. The Spaniards would have had a slightly different interpretation, due to the admiration of their naval officers and sailors, for the brightly plume birds that could mimic human language. Though it may seem strange to foreign cultures, the Europeans considered the parrot to be a model actor, ventriloquist and indeed singer, as shown in Mozart’s beloved couple Papageno and Papagena, whose duets enliven “The Magic Flute”.

Most of the Southwestern tribes dispatched young men to seek out and bring back exotic birds from Central America, notably the scarlet macaw and parrots, their feathers used for ritual purposes. Of course, there is the factor that Catholic priests, seeking to suppress native traditions, characterized parrots as incomprehensible, their noisy squawking incomprehensible to European ears. If this sort of disdain conversely for the indigenous population promoted the Tohono O’Odham language in defiance of cultural suppression, then all the better. Contrariness is one of the keys to cultural survival against imperialist demands for conformity, then and now and into the future.

Sometimes, however, minor differences can lead to widening the gulf between cultural systems. The tribal leadership adamantly opposed President Donald Trump’s plan for the border wall, due to the fact that many tribal members reside in northern Sonora state. From the local perspective, Trump’s defensive barrier became something like the Berlin War, a rallying point of resistance against national division. Instead of a watertight wall, a short fence of steel pipes remained intact, porous though it may be for illegal border-crossers and the Sonora-Sinaloa Cartel. Any barrier to the passage of humans and herd animals is going to arouse opposition and controversy. Yet leaving the north end of reservation unguarded by the Border Patrol is even greater folly, allowing the Cartel free passage into the United States with no barrier at all. Democrats’ rejoice! Soon you shall be rid of the evil USA!

Meanwhile, I remain a skeptic about facial recognition technology along the border, since scanning every Indian is tantamount to the selective racial evils of the past. What to do? Probably as a first step to bolster the tribal police force along the border and also by I-8. That is an investment in national and tribal security and not some sort of entitlement or espionage program.

Meanwhile, the all-too short border fence of steel pipes os easy enough to climb over to be picked up a waiting car on the US/reservation side. One of the unintended results of lacking a wall is that the Rez has become the major entry point for illegal immigrants into the USA. There is no Border Patrol checkpoint on the northern edge of reservation, just an open road to the Maricopa County only an hour’s drive away before proceeding to nearby Phoenix, the gateway for the Cartel into the USA, under safekeeping of the AZ Democrat Party. This joke of a fence between Mexico and the pathway along tribal dirt roads completely negates the Biden-DHS bolstering of personnel at border stations in El Paso and southern New Mexico.

The Tohono O’Odham space is cross-stitched with a complex road system linking some 20 towns and villages. The only barrier against rampant border-crossings is the expense of reaching the Tohono-Maricopa cakewalk. The Mexican border cities of Nogales and Sonoya are not linked by a paved road (as all supplies are accessed from southern Sonora).

The Sonoran-Sinaloa Cartel

Sinaloa is the Mexican state directly to the south of Sonora, fronting the Sea of Cortez (Baja Gulf) and the Pacific Ocean. Its two main ports are the tourist center at Mazatlan and the major container port is farther south at Tocolobampo. These entry points are the major import centers for fentanyl transfers to the USA. Some of chemical alteration to fentanyl is done inland, in neighboring Jalisco, which is also the center of tequila production.

The open channel for illegals enables the reuse of once-idle airstrips and remote airports in this double-region. The Sonorans controlled vast ranches along the Arizona border, nearly all with unpaved landing fields for small aircraft delivery to the Phoenix area, Calexico and even as far as the Grant County Airport near Silver City, New Mexico. This Golden Triangle of the Southwest preceded the rise of Dade County and Miami Vice, and its been making a strong comeback. Any undercover cops resembling Sonny Carson and Rico Tubbs are going to taken out without mercy because this is the Wild West and not multicultural Miami.

The reign of the Sonorans as the major drug-trafficking group ended in the mayhem following the the collapse of the Obama admin’s wayward attorney general Eric Holder’s “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation. The Cartel discovered the tiny tracking devices in those rifle barrels and upon removal expanded their army of hitmen. The consequent inter-cartel violence discredited Sonoran boss Rafael Caro Quintero, who was arrested in Costa Rica in 1985 in connection with the torture and death of DEA Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. Separate branches of the old Sonora cartel have continued their reign terror, for instant, with the shooting American Mormon mothers (one of the young children evaded the killers by crawling through the desert) and the mass murder of dozens of Mexican policemen.

One legacy remains, however, which is Sonora’s archipelago of small airstrips used by crop dusters and also people smugglers, as the most direct way for would-be border-crossers from Central America to reach the U.S. border. Adding to the law-enforcement challenges for tribal police and Border Security are the series of parallel mountain ranges, the Sierra Pinta, Granite and Growler, and closer in, Mount Ajo, which block radar detection and phone intercepts over that porous stretch of 60 miles along the border between the Mexican cities of Nogales and Sonoyta. Flying Apache helicopter gunships would infuriate the local tribes, who are historic enemies of the Apache tribe.

Yet one more challenge is recreation, specifically the rising popularity of dune buggies among younger Mexicans and Hispanic Americans, who can make a tidy profit on a weekend transport assignment and have a lot of fun racing between the cacti.

Air Travel as The Way to Arrive

The Soros crime group aka “charity” has spent millions of dollars to promote bus caravans from Central America to Mexico, which only provoked massive local Mexican opposition in Oaxaca and the Yucatan region against illegal border crossings. Don’t believe the tripe on TV about migrants walking for months from Panama’s Darien Gap, if only because there are six national border crossings en route to the USA, each requiring hefty bribes to local officials, at a staggering cost even for wealthy yanquis (Yankees). Save the sob-sister stories about abuse against desperate migrants for NPR and other useless saps. Travel to El Norte is a well-oiled machine for people with thousands in disposable cash.

This raises the obvious question: Why would anyone walk across Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala before reaching Yucatan and then through an unfriendly Mexico to arrive in Paraiso Norte, paradise, the Land of Milk and Money aka the USA? Why not instead simply fly or take a boat to the USA border? Latin America is rife with cheap-seat airlines and private plane operators eager to haul fentanyl and illegals through the open skies devoid of radar surveillance, much less airborne police interception. In the Euro-American mindset, the rest of the world is primitive and technologically backward, and therefore prone to the impression that Latin Americans do not fly to Miami and Orlando to take their kids to Disneyland and Universal theme parks. The elite media build on this erroneous perception of perpetual backwardness. The good news folks is that average citizens worldwide ride aboard airplanes, though that’s bad news when it comes to the ease of illegal immigration. OK, so what is the going price aboard an airliner, preferably of South American origin, from Panama to Guadalaja? Less than U.S $250. Flight time: 4 hours and 20 minutes. So why walk the distance and pay the tolls? In other words, do not believe the BS on news programs from poor suffering illegals arriving to El Paso across the Rio Grande.

South versus North - Intercontinental Civil War

Get real, these “destitute migrants” are being flown aboard charter jets and small aircraft or in the case of Venezuelans, aboard military planes. These are not downtrodden refugees; they are infiltrators dispatched to the USA to wage economic robbery (push lethal candy, take over a motel chain for a crime family, pimp children, sell body parts to dumbed-down Americans.

As for VIP border-crossers, including wealthy drug dealers and military officers traveling incognito, my rough estimate for travel costs per infiltrator is in the $10,000 range: Minimal $7,000 to the cartel network for transport, bedding and silence from Panama to the USA; $1,000 for food, drink and medical; $300 for booze, cigarettes and weed; $150 for a burner phone; and the remainder for contacts to the first days of in-USA housing and transport. Of course, individuals do not foot the bill; governments hostile to the U.S. are paying the costs of infiltration, which resume on the next leg of journey within the USA to their placement at a target city near a military base, communications hub, key airport or vital highway to be sabotaged.

Let’s not get outraged by violations against our homeland since American spies do the same whenever infiltrating war zones, from Nazi-controlled Norway to postwar China, Castro Cuba to eastern Ukraine. In anything, our own special ops trainers and military advisors have taught deep-penetration techniques to former allied military officers in Panama and El Salvador, many of them now allied with Caracas and Beijing. We, too, spend a lot of tax money to export our lethal madmen to places like Ukraine or Syria. This world, you see, is a heinous place best suited as a killing field, a free-fire zone to avenge long forgotten crimes and insults. Immigration is just a game of feel sorry for me, who wants to inflict pain on you for reason you can never comprehend. In a pitbull fight, it’s usually the clever one who feigns pain and injury who kills the overconfident mutt.

No Other Brick in The Wall

Trump’s wall was deliberately left uncompleted in Arizona by the incoming Biden admin. At the time, the Donald was tussling with the Arizonan tribal chief and needed more time to work out a deal. To backtrack a couple of years, soon after Joe Biden was declared winner of the 2019-29 presidential elections, I met a contractor for the Border Wall at a laundromat in Lordsburg, near New Mexico’s border with Arizona. His account went like this: “My crew had 200 miles left to go for completion of The Wall across southern Arizona, but the project was terminated by the incoming Joe Biden. I had to fire more than a 100 workers who have since filed for unemployment benefits. Later today, I’ve got to apply, too. My team installed 600 miles of that steel barrier in California and Arizona, but that job is now totally futile and ineffective when a massive gap was deliberately left wide open by Biden. What he did was simply criminal.”

After taking a few photos of the coyote smuggling site, piled with filth, I noted that the concrete tables under the shaded roofs had been used for bedding the infiltrators, who needed a nap after walking several miles from one of the many winding dirt roads of the Indian reservation and then awaiting their pick-up for the next leg of the endless journey. My estimate was that upwards of 300 and possibly thousands of border-crossers were directed to this transfer point. No impoverished individual could ever afford the inflated charges for tequila and whiskey, along with cartons of cigarettes delivered to this desolate location. Someone or some government had paid all their travel expenses.

A Whiff of the Night

With those findings, I continued driving eastward past Tucson, ever closer to the New Mexico state line, stopping only at a truck stop to buy a can of Coke. Suddenly in the darkness, at around 8 p.m., my vehicle was overtaken by the whoosh of a speeding semi-truck, which had no identifying information painted on its side panels or rear door. Blowing past, the transporter emitted the strong stench of bleach, which could be smelled for several minutes as its tail-lights diminished to pinpoints. The rogue driver had cleared the container of stench of human trafficking with a chemical flush. Yeah, it’s a shitty job but somebody’s got to do it. In all probability, that truck was one of the convoy that had conveyed the illegals, aka covert ops teams, to Phoenix in the early morning hours.

In an earlier report posted here, I challenged Kamala Harris’s defense for “brown people killed in a racist attack” proved correct in identifying the gunshot victims to have been members of an Al Qaeda cell targeting Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque for a bombing attack. Their assailant was a retired Afghan police officer who recognized the terrorists for what they were. No apology was issued from the VP’s office, unsurprising since she’s not actually an American.
In the months since, the Biden policy of ease-of-entry is flooding every strategic center across the USA with trained terrorists. The War on Terror has come home as a multinational Jihad against Americans. Should I feel pangs of eco-guilt for not sweeping up the filthy mess left by those poor immigrants? I decided to leave that task to the “green movement” to haul the trash left by that roadside in their electric vehicles, that is, if you reach a recharge station. When your entire living space is being trashed and taken over for the purpose of destruction and brutal exploitation, the notion of green space is a moot point when covered with blood and guts.

So my advice is simple: Get ready for the worst-case scenario because the global war’s come home, the next Minneapolis arson riot is warming in the oven. These foes and their willing slaves here in the soon-to-be former USA will not be in any need of treasonous educated slaves with a privileged attitude, meaning the gutless and politically correct advocates of compassion should get out of the line of fire with an overdose of fentanyl rather than risk being shot as yesterday’s pal. Pleasant dreams! Meanwhile the rest of us who still hew to the American way must get ready to fight for freedom from a position of disadvantage since their AKs are way more effective than your ARs. It still takes two to tango in a dance of death at midnight. In this fast-approaching battle, you may lose your friends, your family, your church-goers and, of course, your own life, but we cannot, must not lose the war of survival for the USA. So after all is said an done: Happy Trails, Friends!