By Lorraine Mallinder
BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent
22 April 2011
India and the Canadian/US border edition.
Transcript here:
By Lorraine Mallinder
They call it ‘contraband capital’. In Akwesasne, a native reservation straddling the US and Canada, the frozen river is just starting to thaw, but you can still see the spaghetti trail of snowmobile tracks left by local smugglers. Once the weather warms up, they’ll be heading out on speedboats.
The smugglers, many from the reservation, carry cigarettes, drugs, firearms and people. Their nocturnal games of cat and mouse with border patrol agents are common knowledge round these parts. “Sure, we hear the motors going all through the night, but ya soon get used to it,” shrugs a girl with dyed green eyebrows standing on her riverside porch.
Split between two countries, the reservation has no living, beating heart. Just a series of pot-holed roads featuring scattered shops with names like ‘Another Damn Cigarette Store’, a glitzy red brick casino rising surreally from a vast expanse of wasteland and no shortage of mangy stray dogs.
Outside law and order aren’t welcome here, not judging by a roadside sign proclaiming US Border Patrol, New York State Police, the FBI and other agencies to be “terrorists”. I meet Bill Sears, tough-talking owner of the adjacent building, meeting place of the local ‘warriors’ council’, a vigilante group of sorts.
“They call me the legend,” he announces as we shake hands in the Bear‘s Den. “I’ve been a boxer, an ironworker, a bar fighter, a womaniser, a drunk, you name it.” He had nothing to do with the sign - “it was the people,” he says - but, he agrees wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
“Look, we’re the axis of evil, caught between two governments trying to be number one,” he says, digging into a plate of steaming apple pie. “It’s not hard for the kids to get caught up in the smuggling. Everyone wants the big muscle cars and the fancy clothes. The kids see that and they commit crime.”
Later, I spot a nearby construction worker with a big red beard taking a cigarette break in the sun. He reminds me a bit of Yosemite Sam, Bugs Bunny’s gun-toting adversary in the cartoons. Water drips from melting snow on the rooftop as he squints at me skeptically.
“I’m not sure I like talking to you. Feels like I’m talking to police,” he says. I reply that this might have something to do with my detective-style overcoat. Eventually, he tells me he suspects his two sons are smugglers. “If they are, I don’t wanna know. I don’t want to hear them bragging about how they went out on the ice.”
A lot of kids around here are “on the oxy”, he tells me. He’s referring to Oxycontin, a highly addictive painkiller being smuggled across the border in increasing quantities. A drugs counselor tells me there has been an explosion of addicts seeking help at the local health clinic over the past four years. “Blew me out of the water,” she says.
I’d been told by a city contact that smugglers often hang out at the casino. But everywhere I look, all I see are pensioners in leisure suits and gaudy jewelry. A woman working at the gift shop laughs when I ask whether she ever sees smugglers at the poker table.
Amid the jingle jangle of the slot machines, however, she goes on to tell me how someone in her “immediate circle” perished when his snowmobile fell through the ice. Driving at high speed in the dark, headlights turned off, border patrol on your back, it’s easy to lose your way. “There are areas out there where there’s only a thin crust of ice,” she says.
Police on both sides of the border have tightened their dragnet around the area in recent years, yet organized crime still seems to pull the strings here. In this insular world of limited opportunity, the promise of fast money is all that’s needed to lure locals onto thin ice.