Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Texas Rancher's Bridge to the Past Runs Afoul of the Border Patrol In a swampy corner of his desolate ranch, Bill Addington proudly flouts the law. The Department of Homeland Security has demanded that he tear down a rickety footbridge from his land across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, authorities have shut down nearly a dozen of these informal river crossings along the Texas border. This is the last they know to be operating. They want it gone. Mr. Addington refuses. The Department of Homeland Security demanded that Bill Addington tear down this rickety footbridge, which links his farm to a Mexican village. He crossed that bridge countless times as a boy, darting into Mexico to buy candy or watermelon juice or to flirt with the girls at church-hall dances. Mexicans crossed over, too, every day, to work the cotton fields for Mr. Addington's father -- a U.S. Border Patrol agent. After a hard season's labor, they would all celebrate together with a night of bilingual poker, fueled by whiskey and calf-brain stew. Mr. Addington, who is 52, clings to those memories. So when the Department of Homeland Security sent his family a letter this past summer warning that his bridge could allow "the illegal entry of terrorists, aliens, and/or drug traffickers," he scoffed. That's not his border. Not the bridge he knows. And he will not accept that it could be....
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