Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea was slipping across a rancher’s land near the border with Mexico when the shooting started. “I’m hit,” he said, before his eyes rolled back and he crumpled face down by a mesquite tree.
To the sheriff in rural Santa Cruz County, Ariz., this account, relayed by a witness, and other pieces of the investigation into the shooting death of Mr. Cuen-Buitimea seemed to make the next steps clear. The sheriff’s office arrested George Alan Kelly, the rancher suspected of firing the fatal shot, and charged him with murder.
Then the angry calls started pouring in.
“This is garbage.”
“It’s a travesty of justice.”
“Since when do illegals have rights?”
To conservative ranchers and far-flung immigration critics who seized on the case as it ricocheted across social media, Mr. Kelly, 74, was the real victim in a murky tale of death and justice in Arizona’s politically volatile borderlands.
...The question of security for ranchers living along the border is a complex one. Most migrants are looking for work, or seeking to escape dangerous conditions. Yet that flow of families and young migrants is often managed by networks of smugglers controlled by organized crime groups, including some of Mexico’s most violent cartels. Ranchers in remote areas say they feel especially vulnerable because they are isolated.
.Some ranchers have responded to rising numbers of undocumented migrants by setting out water for them in the desert. Others use game cameras to track groups threading their way up ravines and arroyos. Some ranchers say they bring rifles for self-defense against traffickers when checking on their stock.
“The border is out of control,” said John Ladd, a rancher outside Naco, Ariz., who said he had found 16 migrants’ bodies on his land and had seen people with 30-foot ladders scaling sections of border wall by his ranch. “Everybody’s just sick of it. When you think your life’s threatened and your wife — everybody has a certain point where enough is enough.”...more
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