Pubdate: Sun, 08 Dec 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Lawrence Downes

BORDERLINE INSANITY AT THE FENCE IN NOGALES

The fence that separates Nogales, Ariz., from Nogales, Mexico, is a 
see-through wall of vertical steel rods 15 to 18 feet high, set four 
inches apart in a deep bed of concrete. It is a rusty ribbon that 
runs up and down dusty hills and streets, cutting one city into two 
and jutting into the desert for a few miles east and west.

An impenetrable barricade it is not. A climber with a rope can hop it 
in less than half a minute. Smugglers with jackhammers tunnel under 
it. They throw drugs and rocks over it. The fence is breached not 
just by sunlight and shadows, but also the hooded gaze of drug-cartel 
lookouts, and by bullets.

As a monument to futility and legislative malpractice, however, it 
achieves perfection.

Border Patrol agents in Nogales took me along the fence last month, 
by the thickets and drainage gullies where migrants hide, past the 
abandoned houses and downtown warehouses where smuggling tunnels pop 
up, beneath the high bluff on the Mexican side where the agents said 
the Sinaloa drug cartel keeps a house, called the Castle, manned by 
sentries who, falcon-like, see everything. Because most of Mexico's 
Nogales looms higher than Arizona's, the Border Patrol is at a 
geological disadvantage. This it counters with floodlights, camera 
towers, ground sensors and boots on the ground.

Through night-vision binoculars, I watched two figures silhouetted on 
a rise against the glow of lights from the Mexican side, crouching 
and running but keeping their distance. It was impossible to know 
what they carried - contraband or merely hopes for a better life.

It makes little difference to the Border Patrol. To defeat the fence, 
migrants must hire guides, a business controlled by drug traffickers. 
Thus they become linked to an international criminal conspiracy. 
Border agents say they don't know whether the shadow they are chasing 
belongs to a desperate peasant or an armed smuggler.

The border is sealed tighter than ever, the result of billions of 
dollars spent with the prospect of billions more if immigration 
legislation passes Congress. The fence is new, the technology 
up-to-date, the military hardware - planes, drones, all-terrain 
vehicles - abundant. The Border Patrol is holding the line, or trying 
to, at a huge cost. Illegal migration is down, but drugs in the 
United States are still abundant and cheap, and cartels in Mexico are 
rich and powerful, doing business on a global scale. On Nov. 13, 
agents in Nogales found 20,000 pounds of marijuana in a northbound 
semitrailer. It was a record bust for the Arizona field office but 
did nothing to change the game.

Border agents describe their job as an unending battle of wits, a 
cat-mouse game with the constant threat of violence. The Border 
Patrol's ranks have surged since 2006, and so have concerns about 
poor training and abusive behavior by agents, who have killed at 
least 15 people since 2010. On a sidewalk in Mexico's Nogales, 
flowers and a cross mark the spot where an agent or agents shot 
through the fence in October 2012 and killed a 16-year-old boy, Jose 
Antonio Elena Rodriguez. They said he had been throwing rocks, though 
witnesses in Mexico disputed this.

The agency last month reaffirmed its policy on deadly force, saying 
agents have the right to shoot when their lives are in danger. I 
stood against the bullet-riddled wall where Jose fell, and could not 
imagine throwing a rock that far - across a road, up a 25-foot 
embankment and then over the fence - and hurting anybody. Jose was 
hit by 11 shots, seven of them in the back. The case is under 
investigation. If there is video of the shooting - a surveillance 
tower looms nearby - the agency has not released it.

The Border Patrol says it has improved training and tactics to reduce 
lethal incidents. But there is unavoidable cruelty and death even 
when agents do their jobs professionally and well. The fence shunts 
migrants miles out into the burning, freezing desert. There they die, 
trying to make their way to Tucson, or to Interstate 19, or points 
beyond. The desert is littered with backpacks, jackets, empty water 
jugs. Migrants are often abandoned by guides who have raped and robbed them.

Border agents sometimes save migrants' lives. Luckier ones encounter 
people like Shura Wallin, who lives in Green Valley, a retirement 
community south of Tucson. She is a co-founder of a group of 
volunteers, all retired, who meet for coffee on Tuesday mornings and 
then drive across the border to a shelter for newly deported 
immigrants, who arrive penniless and hungry, with little idea of what 
to do next. The volunteers bring socks and pants, hats and bandages. 
They help the Catholic nuns and lay volunteers of the Kino Border 
Initiative serve beans, squash, tortillas and coffee.

I met an old man from Nayarit at the crowded shelter. He wore straw 
sandals and a filthy jacket, and his hopeless face told of 
abandonment. A nun led a cheerful hand-waving, spirit-lifting 
exercise, and a priest gave a pep talk about dignity and respect.

Ms. Wallin and her group sometimes walk in the arroyos and highway 
underpasses on the Arizona side, searching for the stranded. "Somos 
amigos," she cries, we're friends. Sometimes they find a young 
person, alone and weeping. Sometimes they find a corpse. Ms. Wallin, 
who is tiny and 72, should not have to be doing this. "You can read 
and you can study and you can talk, but until you see things it 
doesn't become reality," Senator Charles Schumer of New York said 
during a visit to Nogales in March, urging passage of immigration 
reform. As he stood with three other senators on the American side, a 
Mexican woman a few yards behind them scaled the fence and made a run for it.

Republicans in Congress have blocked reform and offered no solutions 
of their own. They need to see how their refusal fosters insanity and 
menace on the Southern border. When migrants have no hope of visas, 
the Border Patrol's job is made harder, and the drug lords get 
richer. The United States and Mexico, two friendly nations, sit side 
by side, with compatible labor markets, professing a commitment to 
economic justice and respect for human rights. But in Nogales, north 
and south of the fence, evidence of these things is scant.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom