Dear Minutemen: Those Tanks Don't Pay for Themselves.

Sitting in front of me, right next to my keyboard and a "Happy Secretary's Day" commemorative coffee mug, is a nice little copper colored bullet. I'm not sure what caliber it is as I have limited experience with small arms (and very little experience with any real guns to be honest), but as far as I can tell it is probably the spent shell of a .38. This bullet was given to me on Wednesday by a woman I work with. It was found in the desert outside of Naco, Sonora where it was embedded in the plastic of one of the water tanks used by Agua Para la Vida. Apparently another tank had been shot as well, but that was done with a shotgun and so no bullets were recovered. I have been told that the tanks we sent to replace the ones that were shot have had their taps stolen, rendering them useless.

Agua Para la Vida is an organization very close to my heart. I spend at least one solid day a week out in the desert with the water truck making sure that our tanks don't go dry. Agua Para la Vida is a good thing. It is a coalition of groups including Frontera de Cristo (where I work), CRREDA (a Mexican drug and alcohol rehabilitation center), No More Deaths ( an umbrella organization combatting deaths on the U.S./Mexican border), and Healing Our Borders (a local NGO), among others. The idea behind Agua Para la Vida is pretty simple. Basically, over the past several years, hundreds of people here in Cochise County, and thousands of people nationally, have died in the deserts as they were attempting to cross into the United States without documentation. These people have died, and continue to die, of both exhaustion and hypothermia, but primarily they have been dying of dehydration.

Agua Para la Vida, literally Water for Life, tries to address this problem by leaving tanks of water out in the desert outside of the Mexican towns of Agua Prieta and Naco. The goal of Agua Para la Vida is to have water available to migrants who are thinking about crosssing so that they do not suffer from dehydration, or to migrants who have become lost and are in need of water. While there is a legitimate argument to be made that we aid in illegal immigration, our goal is strictly to prevent further deaths. I'm not talking about dangerous criminals here, I'm talking about men, women, and children.

We put out the tanks and fill them with water to stop people from dying. Someone shot two of those tanks. Should I read these actions as support by the shooter(s) for people dying in the desert? Despite the title of the post, I am not going to accuse anyone of doing this. I have my suspicions, but nothing even close to something resembling proof. Plus, let's face it, there are a lot of people wandering around out there in the desert with guns. I will say this, however: the two tanks that were shot are the only tanks that we have which are easily visible from the United States, and are in fact only about twenty or thirty feet away from the border.

Isn't it usually considered war when one country shoots at another one?