Indian nation divided over US-Mexico border fence

ALI JEGK, Arizona, Aug 18 (Reuters) Members of a traditional Indian nation spanning the Arizona-Mexico border are divided over plancs to erect a fence to stop drug and human traffickers driving over the desert from Mexico.

The US Border Patrol is to start building a 120-km vehicle barrier across the Tohono O'odham nation lands abutting Mexico's Sonora state as early as next month, as part of a move to gain greater control over the porous border Tribal authorities back the barrier, made of closely set steel posts sunk in concrete. They hope it will stop cars and trucks packed with marijuana and undocumented immigrants streaming into their lands each night from Mexico.

But some traditionalists in the nation, whose name means ''People of the Desert,'' call the barrier an affront to beliefs centered on the natural world, and fear it heralds other get-tough measures that may weaken ties to members in Mexico.

''It's like somebody put a knife in your mother. The barrier will be continually there, and you can't pull it out,'' said activist Ofelia Rivas, who organizes the ''O'odham Voice Against the Wall'' pressure group.

The nation of 25,000 members reaches up to Casa Grande in the north, a few miles south of the state capital, Phoenix, and stretches across the international line into Mexico, where some members live in nine scattered communities.

They frequently use informal crossing points -- sometimes little more than gaps in the rusty barbed-wire border fence -- to visit relatives on either side and attend traditional religious ceremonies marking the seasonal calendar.

''Our children and their children are never going to understand what it used to be without a border there,'' Rivas said in a tiny hamlet of cinderblock and adobe homes on the parched borderline.

''From this point on, it's never, ever going to change.'' MORE REUTERS BDP BST2146