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Ranchers battle ticks By JULIAN AGUILAR THE ZAPATA TIMES
Photo by Ulysses S. Romero | The Zapata Times
Zapata ranchers attended the Fever Tick Conference at the Zapata Civic Center to receive information on methods of fever tick prevention and treatment for their cattle.
Illegal crossings down
A fever tick epidemic most people associate solely with the border region of Texas could affect the entire state’s cattle industry if measures to eradicate the pest are not funded and improved, said an official with the Texas Animal Health Commission. “It will have a very significant impact on the cattle industry of Texas, not just those in South Texas, but all of them,” said Bob Hillman, TAHC executive director.
Hillman presented the ominous forecast to ranchers and elected officials Thursday in Zapata at the South Texas Property Rights Association’s Fever Tick Conference at the Zapata Community Center. The cattle fever tick, technically the Boophilus mircoplus or the Boophilus annulatus, carries and transmits Babesia babesiosis, commonly called “Texas fever.” Affected cattle display various signs of the disease, including anemia and anorexia, and may isolate themselves from the herd. Left untreated, the disease is fatal and ca-
pable of wreaking financial havoc on the cattle industry. Hillman said Thursday that if progress is to be made, Congress needed to allocate funds appropriately. He said that the last financial estimates, conducted in the late 1990s, revealed billions of dollars could be lost annually if a widespread epidemic hatched. After recent additions to the permanent quarantine zone along the Rio Grande, the total current quarantine zone for fever tick
See TICKS | PAGE 10A
GETTING READY FOR THE FAIR
By NICK GEORGIOU THE ZAPATA TIMES
A 56 percent decrease in illegal crossings during the past four years in Texas proves that border walls and fences do not work and are a waste of taxpayers’ money, stated a news release from the Texas Border Coalition this week. “I think the wall is just squandering away the taxpayers’ dollars,” said Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas, TBC member. “They’re not good for the people of Laredo and the people of America. We have to deal with it in a common-sense approach.” According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Laredo U.S. Border Patrol Sector, which includes Zapata, recorded about 75,000 illegal immigrant apprehensions in 2005. GUERRA In the 2008 fiscal year, which was adjusted to annualize 11 months to 12, there were about 45,000 apprehensions, representing a 41 percent decrease over four years. The coalition stated the significant decline in U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions occurred despite the majority of the Texas border not having a fence or wall. SALINAS Rosalva Guerra, Zapata County judge and TBC member, said she would prefer to see federal dollars spent on a highway running from El Paso to Brownsville than for the government to put forth $50 billion for a border fence. She said a highway would not only improve the economic development of the area, but that surveillance cameras could be installed along the highway allowing Border Patrol to see into the brush areas. “We want to see part of our history and the Rio Grande run through the border communities,” she said. “It’s very much part of our history. We have lived here all this time and to see it fenced, I think it’s despicable.” While Texas doesn’t have much of a border wall, the San Diego sector, which has the greatest amount of fencing, saw an increase of more than 25 percent during the same four-year period. There were about 162,000 illegal immigrant apprehensions in 2008, a much higher number than the Texas sectors. There were about 127,000 apprehensions in 2005.
Photo by Cuate Santos | The Zapata Times
Alfonso Chapa, 11, a Zapata Middle School student, leads his lamb to be tagged during Sunday’s validation at the Zapata County Fairgrounds. Joel Medina validates a lamb for a 4H Club member at the Zapata County Fairgrounds Sunday.
Scores of youth turn out to have their livestock validated for the show By NICK GEORGIOU THE ZAPATA TIMES
t has begun. For hundreds of Zapata County youth, they’ll be prepping, feeding and exercising their choice of livestock for the next six months in preparation for the Zapata County fair. “It’s just the beginning and it’s exciting,” said Bonnie Ochoa, who heads the 4-H Mesquite Club. “They’ll not only be dealing with schoolwork, but also work with animals.” On Sunday afternoon, about 60 kids from the fourth grade through high school lined up at the Alvaro “Vari” Salinas county fair grounds waiting to get their lambs validated.
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“I look forward to it every year,” said 13-year-old Stephanie Briseño of the North 4-H club, adding it’s her fourth year participating and third year raising a lamb. The validation entails the animals getting tattooed and tagged with a number, so when it comes to the livestock auction March 15, personnel know it’s the same lamb with the same kid. And if they didn’t make it to validation day, they have no chance of presenting the animals at the livestock auction. “If some of my kids are missing today, I’ll call them,” Ochoa said.
See LIVESTOCK | PAGE 11A
See CROSSINGS | PAGE 10A
A LAKE VIEW
Study of Zapata-Guerrero area counts natives hen the Spanish Crown’s auditing inspector, Jose Tienda de Cuervo, set out to monitor the 23 settlements of Nuevo Santander, he and his aides recognized the problem the settlers were facing with indigenous tribes. Tienda de Cuervo already had heard accounts from higher authorities about grievances reported by the Spanish military and the clergy. The downriver situation was a contrast to what the inspectors would find at one of their last stops on the Rio Grande frontier,
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the Villa de San Agustin de Laredo. He had some advance information attributed to the township’s founder, Tomas ARAMBULA Sanchez. The visiting inspector, dispatched to the task by the Viceroy Marques de las Amarillas, arrived at the Villa with his escribano aides, or scribes, armed with an entry tablet and writing tools. The archived material in the Archivo
de la Nacion suggested the auditor wanted to clarify the early reports with answers to a series of questions. A retired Laredoan and collector of border history material pulled several pages out of a publication that quoted a segment from the Archivo de la Nacion on Tienda de Cuervo’s interview with Tomas Sanchez. According to the archived material, that Tienda de Cuervo interview consisted of 14 questions posed to the founder of Villa de San Agustin de Laredo. One of these questions tried to get from Sanchez information about the in-
digenous population in the region. The English translation from Spanish documents went like this: “Which Indian nations and how many are represented among the Indian population; and from what distance are they coming to the Villa to cause problems?” More than 250 years later, a Laredo native, spending years researching his family’s roots in the Zapata-Guerrero region, found that the Rio Grande frontier of preSantander environs was inhabited by more than 50 Indian tribes. Jose Maria “Chema” Peña, retired from government foreign
service and now living in Austin, identified 58 indigenous tribes in the Nuevo Santander region that stretched from Revilla, or Guerrero Viejo, to the upper middle Rio Grande at Presidio of San Juan Bautista in the area of modern-day Eagle Pass and Del Rio. In his book, “Inherit the Dust from the Four Winds of Revilla,” Peña detailed the presence of the different indigenous tribes that comprised what he identified as the region’s Indian Nations. Peña pointed out that the Native Americans’ presence on the South
Texas border and in northern Mexico sectors had been delegated by history principally to the different groups within the Apache family of Native Americans such as the Lipan and Mescaleros. In the immediacy of Villa de Laredo de San Agustin, settlers on both sides of the border tended to identify the indigenous as the marauding Comanche. This was a tribe associated with much of the violence that produced havoc in the villages, on the roads and ranching areas.
See LAKE VIEW | PAGE 11A