It’s a blazing hot Monday afternoon, the temperature topping 110 degrees in the deserts of southern Arizona, and Maria Rodriguez is on a mission of mercy. She’s delivering a huge load of dog food to the Mexican border town of Sasabe, Sonora.

By her count, some two hundred and fifty stray dogs roam the streets hunting for whatever food they can find to stay alive. The town itself has largely been abandoned. Shootouts between cartel factions fighting to control smuggling routes into the U.S. have reduced the population of almost a thousand people to about fifty, in Maria’s rough estimate.

The trouble began last October. The fighting was so intense that residents grabbed a few valuables and left as fast as they could. Months of quiet led some to trickle back, but more gunfire erupted in late May and they left again. [See also previous AT piece on Sasabe here -ed.]

“Sasabe’s basically a ghost town,” says Maria, who for safety reasons asked that her real name not be used. “But when people fled for their lives, they left their dogs behind.”

Feeding the dogs of Sasabe is deeply personal for Maria Rodriguez, a way of soothing the heartbreak she feels at what’s happened to her hometown. She was born there and remembers it as a happy place where kids played in the streets, families all knew one another and parents didn’t worry for their kids’ safety.

But in 2005, with the danger from cartel activity increasing, Maria’s parents moved the family to Tucson, eventually becoming citizens. Maria was eleven.

She does her volunteer work for Paws Without Borders, a Tucson-based 5013c charity founded in 2021 by Kimberly Kelly, a medical anthropologist for a healthcare company. “Paws’ came together almost by accident. Folks doing rescue work in Agua Prieta, Mexico, were struggling to handle a dog in a wheelchair.

“I had experience with that and brought him here to get the care he needed,” says Kelly. “Eventually we found him a home in Canada. I saw there was a lot of need and we got started after that.”

On this Monday afternoon, Maria drives seventy-two miles southwest of Tucson to the border at Sasabe, Arizona. Her toddler sits comfortably in his car seat and the flatbed of her pickup is stuffed with eight hundred pounds of donated dog food.

After consulting U.S. Customs agents on the American side, she drives into Mexico, chats briefly with Mexican National Guard troops temporarily manning the international crossing, then meets a woman from Sasabe, Sonora, who parks her truck beside Maria’s to transfer the food from one flatbed to another.

The woman Maria normally works with is unavailable this day. She has twenty dogs of her own and refused to leave them and her home when the trouble began. She knew she was taking a big risk.

“But her mentality was, ‘I have nothing to do with the smuggling so they’ll leave me alone,’ and they have to this point,” says Maria. “Her whole life is feeding the dogs and trying to stay alive.”

As Maria and her partner work, about fifteen skin-and bones dogs bark and jump around knowing a meal is coming. The women take a break from hoisting the fifty-pound bags to feed kibbles to the animals. A stray cow wanders in from the desert and she chows down, too.

With the work done, Maria’s partner turns around and drives back to Sasabe, Sonora to fill the feeding stations set up around town.

Maria is careful to drive no more than fifty yards into Mexico. It’s too dangerous to enter Sasabe itself. Cartel gunmen, young men who, as Maria says, are sometimes drunk and sometimes drugged up, drive the streets “carrying big guns and thinking they own the world.”

“They cover their faces,” she says. “It reminds you of the Taliban.”

The fighting is part of a drug war raging across Sonora, prompting the U.S. State Department to advise Americans to reconsider going to certain areas of that Mexican state, due to widespread crime and kidnapping.

The charity’s efforts to save Sasabe’s dogs faces more than a food problem. Dead cows litter the land, due in part to the cartel taking over ranches in the surrounding area, especially those abutting the Arizona border, and using them to smuggle drugs and people into the U.S.

Of those outlying ranches, Maria says, “It’s a no man’s land out there now.”

The starving dogs feed on the dead cows and a few of the remaining locals seed the carcasses with poison, killing the dogs. Maria says it represents an “old-school attitude” that some still have toward strays.

That practice, combined with starvation and a myriad of health problems, takes its toll on the stray population, especially puppies and their mothers. Maria sometimes picks up sick dogs at the Sasabe border and drives them to a vet in Nogales, Sonora to have them treated and quarantined for the required two weeks before they can be brought into the U.S.

But the process is expensive. For the nine animals she recently brought to Nogales, two adults and seven puppies, the cost was $4,500.

For her part, Kelly, the executive director at ‘Paws,’ searches for people to adopt the dogs. She has done some of that, but with their numbers so large, she says, “We will never adopt our way out of this problem. The long-term answer has to be spay and neutering.”

A small such effort is underway. A vet from the Mexican town of Altar, two hours from Sasabe, has agreed to spay and neuter, free of charge, dogs that can be brought to him. But with gangsters controlling roads around Sasabe, it’s unclear how many animals can be taken there.

Meanwhile, ‘Paws’ relies on kind-hearted donors to keep its mission going. “It’d be amazing if we could bring awareness to this huge problem and get help down here,” says Maria. “My Sasabe dogs are really struggling.”

Leo W. Banks is a writer in Tucson. His latest novel, The Flying Z, is about an Arizona family fighting a drug gang trying to take over their ranch. Reach him at leowbanks.com

Image: Leo W. Banks