BY KAREN BOSSICK

The plaintive, sobbing cry stopped Ed LaGrande in his tracks as he and a friend hiked along the rugged desert trail.

Retracing his steps 30 yards, he and Charles Corson found a young Guatemalan hiding in a cliff face in Sycamore Canyon near Tucson, Ariz.

He had traveled more than 2,200 miles from his home in Guatemala only to become separated from the coyote he’d paid to smuggle himself and others across the border the night before.

Now, starving and dehydrated, with no idea where north and south was, he had called for help after they’d passed and he could see they weren’t packing the guns of the border patrol.

He had spent a freezing night in the 45-degree desert night in a short-sleeved shirt and had no idea where to go.

“Sycamore Canyon is very beautiful—it attracts birders from all over the world. But it’s rough, rough country with huge boulders, catclaws, Spanish daggers and other spiky plants everywhere,” said LaGrande, a former political science professor at Tulane University who has made his home in Ketchum for many years.

LaGrande and his friend Charles Corson gave the man part of their lunches—some corn chips, an apple and some jerky.

LaGrande used his best “Spanglish” to establish that the young man had left his family in Guatemala where there was no work with the idea of finding work in the United States and sending money home.

He had been treated badly by Mexicans who had stolen some of his money and food as he made his way north. He was going to be taken in a van to a job in Phoenix but those prospects had evaporated in the nighttime crossing.

LaGrande has spent time in Tucson for the past several years working on volunteer conservation projects. He’s helped with jaguar studies and worked on a spring assessment in the remote Galiuros and Santa Teresas mountains near the Mexican border.

He helped build a pond liner on a desert ranch 50 miles outside Tucson to provide a home for endangered minnows and Chiricahua leopard frogs. And this year he helped remove 100-year-old rusty barbwire fence erected 100 years ago in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge so that pronghorn antelope and deer wouldn’t get caught on it.

The work was done in sight of the tall steel border wall along the Mexican-Arizona border. And he has  seen border patrols at work. But this was his first face-to-face encounter with someone trying to escape to the United States.

And it posed a dilemma, as the two men knew there could be severe consequences for abetting an illegal ranging from stiff fines to jail time.

But their conscience wouldn’t let them continue on without at least sharing some of their lunch with him. They gave him $5, pointed him to the closest dirt road, wished him well and continued on their five-mile hike to the border.

 Returning at dusk, they saw a border patrolman who told them that the Guatemalan had, in desperation, flagged him down. The man would not be bussed across the border at Nogales but, rather, taken to Phoenix where he would be flown back home so he’d be less likely to try to cross the border again, the patrolman told them.

LaGrande has replayed the scene over and over in his mind, wondering what more he or anybody could have done.

A judge told him that giving food to an illegal who’s starving or taking him to a hospital if he’s injured is usually defensible. Helping him catch a ride to Phoenix would not have been, the judge said.

LaGrande, who is writing a novel revolving around Mexican drug cartels, has done enough research to know what the Guatemalan probably went through.

He probably spent a thousand dollars to make his way through Mexico from Guatemala, LaGrande said. He probably hopped on top of a train, known as ‘The Beast’ because it’s such a brutal ride with the smoke blowing in their faces as they hang onto the grates.

He would have huddled with other Guatemalans in train and bus stations, trying not to talk because their accent would have identified them as easy prey for Mexican bandits who consider Guatemalans  pariahs.

Upon reaching the border town on the Arizona line, he would have been shaken down by the drug cartel who would have demanded another thousand dollars for a coyote to put him in a caged truck to take him across the border.

LaGrande admits to chafing at the idea of illegals crossing the border into the United States for environmental reasons.

“I know it may not be a progressive attitude on my part, but they’re overpopulating America,” he said. “I think we have to help them on an individual basis, as we did with this young man. But I think the real answer lies in helping their home country.”

Gangs, such as the Salva Martrucha gang terrorize the poor of Guatemala right now. Helping Guatemala provide jobs for its people so they didn’t feel the need to find work elsewhere would be better for this young man and his fellow countrymen, LaGrande said.

“This young man didn’t know a word of English so what kind of life could he have had here? He probably would have ended up bending over in a field picking onions, his fingers taped because they’d be so bloodied. If there were better opportunities in his own country, who knows what he would be able to make of himself?”

“It’s a tough, tough story,” he said. “But there was nothing we could reasonably do to help the guy. Or, could we have?”