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Hollow Bones

"In our life there is a time of wonder. Walking with the ancient ones as they share their world. And the dancing voices are carried by the wind. As I walk this sacred ground, I know I'm not alone, and I thank Mother Earth."  ~Alex Davis, Seneca Cayuga

NaNo Ends but Writing Goes On

12/1/2017

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​National Novel Writing Month 2017 is over. I ended with 35,000 words for the month, and just under 50k written on Crescent Moon Crossing.  I am working my way consistently toward the last, and final, crisis in the story. All that it’s the nitty gritty of the detective work, putting all the pieces together to reveal the killer. 

Meet Abby Merrick
With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you this week to Abigail (Abby) Merrick, the victim in the book. She was born and raised in Southern California, and she looks and sometimes acts the part of a SoCal girl.
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When her husband Jace is transferred to Fort Huachuca Army base for his Intelligence training, she insists on moving also. Jace is confined to the Fort for 17 weeks, so Abby moves in with Rumor Vargas, her roommate from college, who has a working ranch in nearby Bisbee. 
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Abby has pressing reasons to stay close to Jace: he’s having a long-time affair with an Army officer who conveniently was also just transferred to Fort Huachuca.

Abby’s wealthy parents were both killed two years ago, and she received a large inheritance, so she is financially independent.

At Rumor’s urging, Abby begins to work as a volunteer at Hope House, an organization that provides water and provisions at stash sites for illegals crossing the Mexican border into the United States. 

Abby is shot and killed While working at the stash site, which is situated in a remote area known for both human and drug smuggling by Mexico’s notorious Sinaloan Cartel.
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Did she inadvertently surprise some drug mules on their delivery route into Tucson or Phoenix? Did her husband carry out his plan to get rid of her?
Or did someone else want Abby dead?

​Border Crossing in the Arizona desert: Gateway to dreams or graveyard?
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants like the ones depicted in my book have tried to cross illegally into the United States over the past several years, even as the government threatens to build a wall and step up investments in manpower and technology to secure the nation's borders.

For those who make it across the border, it isn't an easy journey. Thousands of would-be immigrants have died in the desert of southern Arizona in the past 10 years, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office. Most of them die after suffering dehydration in the summer or fall to hypothermia in the winter.

"People are still driven by economic necessity to come to the United States by whatever means they can. Some come to join family members already here, others because they are hungry," said Isabel Garcia, a public defender and a co-chair of the Tucson, Arizona-based Coalition for Human Rights.
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"But the fact is that very few are prepared for such a hard trip. Many have to survive days and days in the desert," she said, "and they can never carry enough water."

The trek can often last days, as smugglers take them through remote paths in order to avoid detection by the Border Patrol. Wild animals roam the area at night and the people the migrants paid to get them safely across often turn on them, robbing them of their money and abusing the women before abandoning them, according to authorities.
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Just like Naco, the border town I feature in Crescent Moon Crossing, most Mexican border towns, have a Grupo Beta office; it’s the Mexican federal agency that helps those newly deported from the United States and other migrants find food, shelter or a way home. “Don’t put yourself or your family in danger,” blares a poster on one wall. “Putting your children in the hands of coyotes or polleros is like abandoning them in the desert,” warns another.

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It’s easy to spot the deportees. They’re the ones without belts or shoelaces. Border Patrol agents remove those from the people they detain to deter suicide attempts, and they don’t generally give them back.

Take Santiago Rivera Diaz, who sits with two other youths, waiting for a ride to a shelter, like Hope House in my story, where he’ll be fed and given a cot for the night. His left arm is in a sling, his left leg heavily bandaged. His wispy beard makes him look younger than his 20 years.

Rivera, who’s from Oaxaca, says he crossed the border two weeks earlier, north of the town of Altar, with two other men and four young women. Their guide collected $500 from each of them. Then he ditched them in the desert. After three days without food or water, they were nearing a major highway (Rivera couldn’t name it, but his description matches I-19), when they were confronted by a group of five armed men — what the Border Patrol calls a “rip” crew — robbers who target drug smugglers and migrants.

“Two of the girls ran away,” says Rivera in a low voice. “We tried to stop them, but they beat us until we played dead. We were hurt, but we made our way to the highway and La Migra came up. They held us three days. Then they brought me here two days ago.”

He says he has no idea what happened to any of the others he was with. Reyes had hoped to find work so he could send money home to his family, who grows corn. But now he’s headed back to Oaxaca.

"Many fall into the abuses of the smugglers, sexual abuse," said Manuel Padilla, head of the Border Patrol's Tucson sector. "The only thing that matters to them is money, not people."

Padilla said Border Patrol agents often spot and rescue immigrants stranded in the desert, which is an important part of the agency's job. However, the agency also focuses on prevention, by educating would-be immigrants of the dangers involved in trying to cross the border illegally.

They ask foreign diplomats at consulates in the United States to spread the word in their countries about the dangers of illegal border crossings, and they try to get the word out in Spanish-language media, Padilla said.

Some make it past the desert and go on to find jobs in the United States. But on the Mexican side of the border, deportations from the United States have become so common that shelters and businesses have opened up, catering to people who've gotten kicked out of the United States.
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Others come back bruised, robbed by smugglers or worse, says Hilda Irene Loureiro, a Mexican merchant who runs a shelter.

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There are more than 800 unidentified bodies inside the morgue in Pima County, Arizona. Investigators believe many of them are immigrants who died in the desert. Authorities hope DNA testing can help desperate families find missing loved ones who died on the trek into the United States.

According to the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, in 2012 the bodies of 157 migrants were recovered in the desert. In 2013, the remains of 169 people were found there.

"Since 2001 we've had around 2,200 immigrant deaths," most of them Mexican citizens, said Gregory Hess, the Pima County medical examiner. "When we find only a bone in the desert, a femur ... or an arm, it's not here for long... we take photographs and measurements and DNA" samples.

Unclaimed bodies and bones are buried or cremated after about a year, he said.

Searching for clues
Since a majority of the bodies belong to Mexican citizens, morgue staff are in regular contact with the Mexican Consulate in Tucson.

It isn't the job Jeronimo Garcia thought he was signing up for when he joined the Mexican Foreign Service. But now he's become so used to handling human remains that he no longer feels the need to wear a surgical mask to protect himself from the stench of death.

The consulate employee has become a go-to person for American authorities when it comes to finding clues about the immigrants' identities.

Garcia has earned the trust of U.S. officials because of his track record over the past 12 years, helping to identify dozens of bodies.

"(This one) has dental work. Sometimes teeth give us clues as to where they come from," Garcia said as he examined cadavers and bones at the Pima County morgue. "Central Americans, particularly Guatemalans, often have ornamental work done. They put copper stars on their teeth."

Migrants sometimes sew documents into their underclothes, or conceal strips of paper with the telephone number of a contact in the United States or their country of origin, he says. This information can be a solid clue to track down identity.

After the extensive search at the morgue, the bodies are labeled and stored in a freezer. Personal effects and identifications are also stored, as any clue could lead to the identification of a cadaver.

Sometimes, there aren't many clues. If all that Garcia and the medical examiner's office have to go on is a set of dry bones, DNA testing is the only viable option.

The Mexican Consulate sometimes pays for the tests when Mexican citizens are involved.
For immigrants from other countries, the medical examiner's office relies on its growing ties with the New York-based Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.

The organization, which started out trying to identify remains of dissidents killed during Argentina's brutal military dictatorship, now has also collected more than 1,700 DNA samples from families in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala in efforts to help find missing migrants. So far, they've identified 65 bodies.

"This is never a happy ending. ... We just try to reduce the time that families have to prolong their pain," said Mercedes Doretti, who directs the organization. "What it means is ending the uncertainty of the family not knowing what happened to their relative, the suffering that everyone goes through."
At the Checkpoints: A Million Pounds of Pot
​

At the Yuma port of entry, a line of traffic going north, most with Sonora plates, backs up at the Sentri lane for “trusted travelers” who’ve passed a security check. Customs officers are searching an SUV. They soon find tightly wrapped bundles of heroin in the wheel wells, and take the young, well-dressed woman into custody.
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Even as the number of migrants detained annually in Arizona has dropped by 70 percent over the past five years, drug seizures have climbed.
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Legal ports of entry are where most heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine seizures are made, Border Patrol officers say. In one week in mid-March, officers made five seizures at Arizona ports of entry totaling 148 pounds of cocaine, 90 pounds of meth, and 9 pounds of heroin. 
But, by volume, marijuana dwarfs everything else. One day last spring, Nogales border officers seized a 1-ton shipment of pot in a tractor-trailer of bell peppers; the next day, they arrested another tractor-trailer driver with 6,219 pounds of marijuana in boxes labeled as vacuum pumps and lamp holders.

The Tucson sector is the main marijuana corridor from Mexico, accounting for 44 percent of all Border Patrol marijuana seizures across the entire Southwest border last fiscal year. Border Patrol agents in the Tucson sector seized more than 1 million pounds of pot. 

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Most commonly, that marijuana is hauled across in remote areas by teams of backpackers, agents say. Tracking them remains a challenge. The drones (10 of which have cost $240 million to buy and operate to date) are useful, agents say, but they are sensitive to high winds and the Border Patrol hasn’t yet trained enough controllers to fly them. Last fiscal year, each drone averaged just over an hour and a half in the air a day.

Nor has border security dented traffic in guns headed south. Over the past five years, CBP (Customs Border Patrol) officers have seized, on average, fewer than 2,000 weapons a year presumably headed to the criminal groups sending the drugs north. That represents less than 1 percent of the estimated 252,000 weapons that are bought in the United States and smuggled south each year, according to a recent economic study by the University of San Diego’s Transborder Institute and the Igarapé Institute, based in Brazil.
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“This is an issue that has been studiously ignored by the media,” said Topher MacDougal, one of the authors of the study. He calls for strong background checks, banning cash purchases of guns along the border and tougher criminal penalties for “straw” buyers — people with clean records who buy guns on behalf of those who wouldn’t pass background checks.

I hope you have enjoyed my blogs on the characters and topics in Crescent Moon Crossing during NaNovember. Please consider signing up as a Beta Reader.
As always, thank you for your support!

​See you next week with the first of my blogs on Yule.
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NaNo: Clawing My Way to 30k

11/23/2017

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This week kicked my butt. I’m still moving forward, but it seems like getting to 30k is taking FOREVER.

If this was a cycling race, I’d be the one attempting the break-away from the back of the pack, trying to catch that large peloton of riders behind the leaders. 

35,000 words this month is kind of my benchmark. It won’t make me a winner in NaNo, but that’s how many I need to personally feel like a winner. That would put my novel-in-progress at a little over 60,000—and within striking distance for a finished draft by year-end.

Fellow NaNo’ers: If you’re stuck in the back of the pack but still fighting, I’m with you and I feel your pain! If you’re cruising your way to the finish line, hurray! And if you pulled to the side of the race course and quit? Get back on that writing bike and pedal through NaNovember and on into December. Because writers don’t quit!
 
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Today,  meet Rumor’s half-brother, Alberto Vargas, 32. He has lived in Mexico all his life. His father and uncle work in a factory in Agua Prieta and he lives with them.

Alberto worked as a coyote, smuggling illegals across the Mexican border into the United States.

Rumor has known for years that her brother made his living smuggling, but she also suspects he has ties to the Sinaloan Cartel. It’s true. Alberto injured a Cartel member in a bar fight a few years ago, and the man later died.

To protect his father and repay his debt, Alberto switched from smuggling human cargo to smuggling drugs. He is now in over his head, and desperately wants out from under the Cartel, but he’s worried they will hard his father and uncle if he refuses to work for them.  
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In the book, we learn a lot about human smuggling into the United States from Mexico and Central America. Here’s an excerpt:

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Naco, Mexico

Alberto Vargas sat among the group of border hoppers gathering in the shade on the Mexican side of fence, wondering which of them would be the first to die.
         
A dusty thermometer on the cantina wall read 103 degrees.
 
Pathetic. When he was little, the demarcation between los Estados Unidos and Mexico had been a simple stone marker by the side of the road and a single sentry who waved you through from his seat in the shade.  But since 9/11 everything had changed. Now, more than ever, Mexicans had to sneak across the border under cover of darkness, across the most rugged and least populated areas.  The coyote smugglers met them on the other side, well past the "taco checks" and the border patrol rifles, to hide them in stash houses in Tucson or Phoenix.
 
A man with his wife and toddler rested on pads under a flatbed truck, waiting out the afternoon heat. The man stretched out and smoked. The little girl babbled a counting song and played with the fingers of his free hand.
         
 "How far did your man tell you to walk?" Alberto asked the father in Spanish.
 
"Hasta media noche," the father replied. "We follow the railroad tracks to the big Highway 10. El pollero said he would meet us on the other side of the road at midnight."
 
Polleros. Chicken herders. Alberto shook his head. The smugglers always told first-timers they would meet them on the other side. Forty miles on the other side. That part was left out.
         
"You don't want to do this," Alberto said to the father. "Your family will suffer."
          
The man's face split into a smile. "It will be worth it when I am rich."
 
"At least buy more water," Alberto pressed. "Two gallons each."
 
The father pulled his pockets inside out and shrugged. No spare pesos for more than    the gallon apiece his pollero had given him.
 
Of course he didn't. He and the other border crossers had each paid a partial fee to the coyote up-front, and the rest of the negotiated amount was held by a "respondent" and paid when the crosser was delivered safely to Tucson, or Phoenix, LA or El Paso, wherever had been agreed upon. 
 
When Alberto had been a coyote, he made this run two or three times a year, and even he couldn't survive on a single gallon of water. But it wasn't his job to take care of this naïve father and his young family. 

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Later, the group encounters what is known as a “Cherry Tree” or a “Rape Tree”.

Often these trees are strewn with women’s garments as a warning to stay out of a certain Cartel’s traffic territory. These trees are seen on major smuggling routes in National Forest, on private land, and many other places just inside Mexico before the border.
 
A coyote will make $3,000 to $4,000 a head on Mexican illegals, and $10,000 for a Central American fare. He will bring a few to a dozen people per trip, and may make a trip a month or more.
 
But the rape tree warnings are more likely made by Cartel members marking their drug smuggling routes. That’s where the big business comes in.
An official estimated that cartels send a stunning $64 billion worth of drugs into the U.S. every year.

Mexico’s former Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna dropped that number at a recent conference in Juarez.
 
Would a border wall stem that drug flow? I don’t know.
 
But I do believe that illegal immigrants will continue to come into the United States from all of the countries to our south unless something is done to ease the extreme poverty in those nations. I don’t think a wall will stop the people.
 
I know many of you would like for me to put this suspense novel to bed, and get back to writing on the Ancient Magic series book two. While I think you’ll love Crescent Moon Crossing and these characters, I’m also looking forward to writing the second paranormal book, and use all those beautiful Scotland locations we scouted during our trip this summer.

So cheer me across the NaNo finish line on November 30.

Here’s to a new book release in January. AND the start of a whole new novel in February!

Until then, good reading!

#amwriting
#NaNoWriMo

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Trump-enomics

1/27/2017

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To say it's been a turbulent 24 hours for US-Mexico relations is an understatement, with President Donald Trump ordering construction of a wall along the countries' shared border, and now suggesting it could be paid for by a 20% import tax on Mexico.
 
But wait. Wouldn't an import tax result in a cost increase on imported goods? And who exactly buys those goods imported into the United States? This is a classic case of circular thinking, and it's making me loco.
 
I know, you're sick of Trump. I am too. And so, evidently, is Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. He cancelled his meeting scheduled with Trump next week. Get ready for a trade war, folks. It will hit Arizona particularly hard, since Mexico is our No. 1 trading partner.
 
I'm going to a wedding in Mexico in April. It will be interesting to see how our new man is viewed by the locals across the border.
 
In the meantime, I'm writing furiously on my next novel, (working title Crescent Moon Crossing), which is set in Bisbee and Fort Huachuca, both near the border. The story includes human smuggling, Cartel drug runners, and the art of illegal border crossing in the plot, mixed in with murder. It's been a lot of fun to research, and—with Mr. Trump stirring the headlines—the topic couldn't be more timely.

On a happier note, 0ur family and dogs trekked to our Northern AZ cabin last weekend to play in the snow. Munds Park got a little over four feet of big, beautiful flakes over our long weekend. The hubs had fun trying out his new snow blower (actually, he informs me it's a snow thrower). We put a log of logs in the fireplace, and the dogs had a blast bounding through the drifts.

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Here is Sadie, Teak and Woody leaving me behind. This is in the National Forest behind our cabin. Snow in the trees is sooo beautiful.
 
For those of you in the Northern or Eastern states, snow is no big deal, a hassle in fact. But to an Arizona resident, it's paradise.

 
I'd love to see how your family celebrates a snow day. If you send me a picture in a comment, I'll post it next week. Until then, stay warm, and have a hot cocoa with mini marshmallows with me!

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