`Tunnel Rats' Terrorize A Border -- Illegal Immigrants Prove Easy Prey For Castoff Young Thieves

NOGALES, Ariz. - It was cocktail hour, and the boys were having their usual.

Inhaling deeply from soda cans filled with metallic paint, their faces went slack as the vapors took hold, making them look even younger than their years, roughly 9 to 18.

A boy in a Yankees cap, drunk on fumes, danced across a narrow pipe. Twenty feet below lay a concrete gorge strewn with trash and reeking of human waste. The boy's face was a garish grin. His eyes, black pools.

"No problema," he said in Spanish, slurring the words. "Esta es la buena vida." This is the good life.

To the contrary, life is anything but good these days in Nogales (pop. 19,000), a dusty border town 60 miles south of Tucson on the edge of the Sonoran Desert. Ever since the U.S. Border Patrol began beefing up security this year along the fence separating this town from its teeming sister city, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico (pop. 250,000), there have been problems aplenty.

Illegal immigrants, who once slipped freely through holes in the fence, have been driven underground - literally - into sewer tunnels that traverse the border. As they stumble north in the dark, they have become easy prey for a gang of paint-sniffing young bandits who inhabit the dank and fetid netherworld.

To U.S. authorities, they are "Tunnel Rats." The Mexicans call them bajadores - undergrounders. The kids themselves prefer the name Lado Sur Libre, meaning Southside Free.

Castoffs, runaways and orphans - mostly from Mexico - they live like animals, frying their brains on paint fumes and attacking with rocks, lead pipes, brass knuckles and homemade knives.

Officials worry that the kids are becoming bolder and more numerous. Once consisting of a handful of sad cases, teenagers now run the tunnels in packs of 20 or more. Some estimate their numbers as high as 200, although the number actually living in the sewers is far smaller, perhaps 50.

Recently they have begun attacking in broad daylight.

One day recently, a dozen scrambled down a 20-foot bank and swarmed three illegal immigrants who had just emerged into an open wash, where the tunnel ends about a mile inside the U.S. border.

Sgt. Steve McDonald, who had been bantering with the boys in Spanish moments earlier, watched from a high wall.

"Dejala!" - Leave it! - McDonald yelled, as one of the boys tore open a blue bag belonging to one of the immigrants.

The boy looked up at McDonald, as if weighing the danger posed by this hulking gringo in a green uniform. Then he smiled and continued.

"If I go down there, we'll have to fight them all," McDonald told a reporter. He added, "Don't show any fear or they'll be all over us."

Later, his voice still shaking, he spoke of the frustration shared by many officers who patrol this border. "By the time I called for backup, they would have been back down the tunnel," he said. "And they know we're not going down in that water. That's raw sewage.

"What could I do?"

So far, nobody has an answer.

The City of Nogales has installed a gate, blocking off one of the tunnels from Mexico. But another tunnel remains open. And plans for a second gate have become mired in bureaucratic wrangling over who is responsible for the tunnel kids. No one seems eager to take them on.

Several illegal immigrants have been stabbed and beaten. One victim clawed his way up through a manhole, clutching a stomach wound. He was robbed of $11.

Manny Lopez, a Nogales police sergeant, has been photographing tunnel kids for about three years, when only a handful of teen-agers roamed wild beneath the streets. The photographs now fill a loose-leaf album in his office, a sort of yearbook of lost souls.

"This boy died a couple of years ago," he said. "He overdosed and froze to death. . . . This one is gone, too. I heard they killed him on the other side of the line."

In March, Lopez traded his Polaroid for a video camera, and everything changed.

In his first video, Lopez recorded a dozen kids cavorting at the mouth of the tunnel - posing, sniffing vapors from soda cans and washing their hands in the infested water. The scene turned violent when a group of illegal immigrants emerged from the tunnel and headed north.

The tunnel kids attacked, wielding rocks, knives and other weapons. One of the immigrants was cracked over the head with a 3-foot lead pipe.

The next day, a police SWAT team waded into the sewers and rounded up nine kids. Soon, Lopez's videotape was on its way to Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, State Attorney General Grant Woods, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, President Clinton and others.

The video, which spurred law-enforcement efforts to close off the sewers, also struck a human chord. Activists on both sides of the border since have launched plans to help the tunnel kids and others like them.

The goal: to open a private, non-profit shelter on the Sonoran side of the border. The facility would provide emergency housing, medical treatment, education and other needs to young homeless children. Much of the money would come from private donors in the United States, who would act almost as foster parents, sponsoring individual children, 10 years old or younger.

On a border where each side views the other with suspicion, the project has received surprising support. Earlier this month, the Arizona Supreme Court donated $50,000 in delinquency-prevention money to jump-start the effort. A board of directors, composed of both Mexican and U.S. citizens, should be named soon.

And, on the Mexican side of the fence, the volunteers so far include a prominent minister, several members of the local bar association and a Sonoran social worker who has acted as a surrogate mother to some of the tunnel children.

"What they need most is a sympathetic ear, someone who cares," said the social worker, Teresa Leal, who pays regular visits to the kids in their subterranean world.