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 News from Around the Americas | July 2005 
Two Wounded in Weekend Incidents
 Leslie Berestein & Anna Cearley - San Diego Union-Tribune
| | In the heavily polluted New River near the California border, Mexican migrants plunge through filth, knowing the Border Patrol will not wade in to arrest them. |
A Tijuana man who last weekend said he was shot shortly after crossing the border illegally into the United States is sticking to his story, despite some reports that he may have been shot in Mexico.
Carlos Alfonso Estrada Martinez, 38, was one of two Mexican citizens shot in separate incidents during the early hours of Saturday in the border region between Tecate and Campo.
In statements he made to officials, Estrada had said he was about 200 yards inside the US when he was hit about 1 a.m. A second man who was shot about an hour later said he was assaulted just south of the border fence in Mexico.
Yesterday, Estrada was recuperating from a gunshot wound to his left buttock at his Tijuana apartment.
He said he was among a group of six people crossing into the United States and had just made it past the border fence. He said they were walking north when he saw a laser dot tracing up and down the front of his body.
After that, he said, he heard two gunshots. A third one hit him in his left buttock, but passed through.
"I felt a lot of pain, and we ran back to Mexico," Estrada said as he huddled in a robe on a worn sofa in his family's tiny living quarters. "The people in the group helped me."
The group had walked only about two blocks' distance into the United States, he said. Back in Mexico, Estrada said, they walked about a mile until he was able to flag down a man in a pickup who took him to a hospital for help.
Estrada said he left the Centro de Salud hospital in Tecate when his family showed up the next day.
US federal court records indicate that a man with the same name was arrested in September 2003 and charged with a felony count of being a "deported alien found in the United States."
Asked if he was leading the group into the US when the incident occurred, Estrada said only that he was a member of the group.
The second man, Jose Humberto Rivera Perez, a 32-year-old native of Guadalajara, was shot just below the left knee. Interviewed earlier this week as he recovered at the Centro de Salud hospital, he said he was shot by a man who had his face covered as Rivera and several others waited to cross the border roughly 20 yards south of the fence.
When they tried to flee, the man shouted at them in Spanish not to run and fired, hitting Rivera.
A statement released earlier that weekend by Mexican immigration officials blamed the shootings on bandits rather than on cazamigrantes, Spanish for "migrant hunters." Since mid-July, armed civilians have been watching the border in the area surrounding Campo, patrolling between Jacumba and Tecate.
It also stated that both shootings occurred in Mexico, although Estrada insists he was hit in the United States. Both men have also said in separate interviews that they were not robbed.
Jim Chase, the Oceanside resident who organized the three-week border watch, said none of his people have fired any weapons. But he added that while he turns away people he considers extremists, he has been running into people conducting their own patrols who are not with his group.
"It doesn't scare me, but it is scary from the standpoint of these are people who have not gone through me to pledge to be non-racist and nonviolent," Chase said earlier this week.
The shootings are being investigated by the state attorney general's office of Baja California. Yesterday, spokesman Rogelio Contreras confirmed that one of the shooting victims was saying he was shot in the US He added that it is still uncertain whether the culprits were bandits or someone else.
Witnesses are still being interviewed, Contreras said. A crime-scene reconstruction was being planned for today.
A Border Patrol spokesman said an agency liaison has been in contact with Mexican authorities, but that at this point the agency is not involved in the investigation. |
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