Militarizing the Border Patrol
Nagengast, Carol
As official concerns have shifted toward protecting the nation from the "foreign" threats of terrorism and drugs, federal authorities have increasingly turned toward a military strategy to...
...Recall the anti-gay stance taken by the Boy Scouts in mid-1998...
...citizens...
...Today, these strategies are being utilized against legal and illegal immigrants as well as U.S.-born Latinos in order to regulate labor flows and create a suitable scapegoat on which to blame this country's social and economic problems-a strategy which requires the implicit agreement and cooperation of ordinary people who take myths at face value and do not question the projects through which the state defends the brutal hierarchies of the social order over which it exercises its authority...
...This official gesture, however, obscures an official policy to force border-crossing migrants towards the most dangerous terrains through the strategic construction of walls and checkpoints...
...The Marines responsible for his death were exonerated of all blame because Hernandez fit the profile of a drug runner...
...Such inoculations are crucial because they become part of socially accepted notions of common sense-a kind of social knowledge of the "everyone knows" variety...
...miles of steel and concrete walls that may one day extend from San Diego to Brownsville...
...These strategies were first used extensively by the U.S...
...A large majority of people who cross the border are neither drug runners nor terrorists, but people seeking work and a better life amidst global economic restructuring...
...Fences and walls have gone up as has the number of Border Patrol agents and the institution's budget...
...They are underpaid and exploited by employers who often call the Border Patrol in order to avoid paying them...
...In both cases, Border Patrol agents claimed that the immigrants had threatened them with rocks--a version that, in the first case, has been contradicted by the testimonies of witnesses at the scene...
...This latest round of killings on the U.S.-Mexico border comes on the heels of the widely publicized murder of Ezequiel Hernandez, an 18 year-old high school sophomore who was killed by U.S...
...The production and reproduction of domination and subordination very often rests on the ability of the dominant groups who control the state apparatus to deploy strategies of symbolic violence against subordinate populations...
...By symbolic violence I refer to a set of myths that While the immediate foreign policy goals of the Cold War are no longer in place, the military tactics developed during that period have been reterritorialized within the United States...
...A classic counterinsurgency technique-one taught by the U.S...
...In this context, symbolic violence usually precedes and almost always accompanies manifestations of physical violence...
...der Patrol agents take away their Spanish-speaking colleagues...
...8. This section draws on material that appears in Timothy Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border...
...Marines in May 1997 while he was herding goats near his Red- ford, Texas home along border...
...4. Quoted in Motion Magazine (as it appears on the Internet...
...4 Immigrant rights organizations have established hot lines for those caught in nets of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) who need legal advice or want to voice a complaint...
...depicts certain groups of people as less than human subjects who deserve their subordinate position in society and/or as superhuman beings who are capable of subverting a given social order...
...Thus, even when accused of human rights violations and brought to trial, Border Patrol agents are rarely convicted, since juries seem more inclined to believe Border Patrol officers than Mexicans or "aliens...
...They lump us all together, we are all suspects...
...Part of our work is increasing public awareness that we [Chicanos and Latinos] are an abused community," says Jimenez, director of the Immigration Project of AFSC South Texas...
...territory...
...Where are the laws when people like me are arrested and they try to deport us...
...The idea is to teach the Scouts to be "good" Americans, to build the prestige of the INS and to undermine the work of grassroots, largely Latino community organizations that oppose the militarization of the Border Patrol, support immigrant rights, or have other agendas that are officially defined as anti-American, anti-family or "leftist...
...They arise only in opposition to other, often more powerful social positions...
...Rather, they attempt to create the illusion that there is a social consensus about what is and is not legitimate, and thus about what should and should not be suppressed...
...The INS, in effect, enforces labor management...
...See Dallas Morning Star, May 11, 1998...
...In August, another migrant was fatally shot in Arizona in circumstances that are also unclear...
...In order to understand how social consensus is manufactured and how certain sectors of the population consent to the repression of other sectors of society, the ways in which the state promotes conformity need to be examined...
...Such activities are explicitly intended to draw civilian collaborators into the state's fight against the enemy within-undocumented workers and their children, monolingual Spanish speakers, welfare recipients, the poor and the homeless...
...One of the men was caught, the other ran back to the Mexican side, while the third allegedly charged agents with a rock in his hand and was shot after refusing an order to stop and drop the rock...
...The way this mission has been adopted by the Border Patrol was clearly illustrated by the role the institution played in the 1992 Los Angeles riots...
...Typically, a state is defined as a set of institutions that exercises power and authority over a bounded territory in the service of the public interest...
...As for terrorists, very few of them are of Latin American origin...
...The state, however, is also composed of cultural and political forms, representations, practices, specific technologies and organizations which define the public interest and make socially constructed identities appear as natural within a given hierarchy of power...
...These agents arrested over 1,000 suspected illegal immigrants, whether or not they were accused of any criminal offense...
...6 These troops are also involved in the construction of A Border Patrol officer talks across tt miles of steel and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico...
...5. See Americas Watch, Crossing the Border...
...Although teachers and medical personnel have largely refused to cooperate, other public-sector workers risk their jobs by not following the program...
...Why aren't they playing by the rules...
...Unsurprisingly, most inmates that come under suspicion are either Spanish-speaking or Asian...
...Up through August 1998, at least 100 corpses had been found along the U.S...
...The same officer stated that Irish, Polish and Italian construction workers who are illegally in the country look on while Borh a display of U.S...
...Within such hierarchies of power, different genders, national origins and skin colors are ascribed unequal value...
...More than 700 of the 1,000 individuals detained were immediately deported, without any charges brought against them and without due process...
...Essential to myth is the process through which the collective imagination is immunized by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil in order to protect it against the risk of generalized subversion...
...Immigrant workers pick fruits and vegetables in Florida and California, slaughter and pluck chickens in Georgia, sew dresses in New York sweat shops, and clean office buildings and the houses of middle-class families everywhere...
...While this may seem paradoxical, it is imperative to recognize that the Army left behind a highly militarized and greatly enhanced Border Patrol, well-trained in low-intensity conflict (LIC) strategies...
...On the evening of September 27, 1998, Border Patrol agents shot and killed a man who was attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border near San Ysidro, California...
...side of the border...
...This perception of an external threat has been fueled by a politically motivated backlash against both legal and illegal immigrants, particularly those of Hispanic origin, as well as U.S.-born Latinos, who through subtle and not-so-subtle forms of symbolic violence have been demonized as an internal threat to the security and well-being of the nation...
...The Border Patrol also sponsors a soccer league in the Laredo area, which gives it a NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON MILITARIZATION benign visibility that masks its more sinister mission...
...These arrests accounted for 10% of all arrests made during the disturbances...
...citizens being stopped, questioned, detained and sometimes even deported, continually having to reinforce our right to be in this country...
...The Border Patrol also has taken to sponsoring Explorer Scout groups in Texas...
...Similar strategies were widely utilized during the counterinsurgency wars both in Southeast Asia and Central America...
...3 Martinez's colleague, Maria Jimenez, agrees...
...6. Dallas Morning Star, November 20, 1997...
...9 Although individuals not of Latin American origin comprise 60% of undocumented workers in the United States, 90% of all persons detained as illegals are Mexican...
...Border with Mexico Persist Amid A Climate of Immunity (New York: Human Rights Watch, April 1995...
...8 LIC involves small numbers of specially trained troops with specific missions that consciously incorporate civilians as collaborators...
...Roberto Martinez, director of the Immigration Project of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in San Diego, notes that "the politicians keep saying this is a country of laws...
...Flores, August 3, 1998...
...tates that purport to be liberal democracies do not typically or openly exercise power through naked and unmediated violence...
...The INS, in effect, enforces labor management, now more efficiently than ever...
...This doesn't happen to other communities...
...So-called peacekeeping operations are also part of LIC...
...Brutality Unchecked: Human Rights Abuses Along the U.S...
...Customs Service, reports that NAFTA is directly linked to the increase in illegal drug traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border...
...A handful of Mexican drug runners or illegal migrants who take the jobs of citizens or a few foreign-born terrorists are sufficient to inoculate a shaky social order with evil...
...We are U.S...
...The overtly coercive methods of counterinsurgency and anti-terrorism tactics are matched by other seemingly more benign measures through which military forces throw their support behind the most conservative social and political forces...
...In the Nogales, Arizona INS office, a poster advertising such services had the telephone number blacked out and the words, 1-800 EAT-SHIT, substituted...
...Border With Mexico (New York: Human Rights Watch, May 1992...
...As official concerns have shifted toward protecting the nation from the "foreign" threats of terrorism and drugs, federal authorities have increasingly turned toward a military strategy to control the influx of "dangerous" peoples into the United States...
...military in the patrolling of the border...
...These enter public discourse and help build popular consensus around who and what is suspect, who and what ought to be repressed, what constitutes difference and how the state ought to control it...
...His organization is involved in three lawsuits against the police and the Border Patrol for violently breaking into people's homes without search warrants under the pretext of looking for drugs or illegals...
...Teenagers are given uniforms complete with Border Patrol badges and are allowed to accompany agents on patrol...
...Militarizing the Border Patrol 1. See From San Diego to Brownsville: Human Rights Violations on the USA-Mexico Border...
...Some 600 U.S...
...As official concerns shifted towards the protection the national territory from the allegedly foreign threats of terrorA Border Patrol officer wrestles a man to the ground in Nogales, Arizona...
...A border crosser in Tijuana attempts to pry open a locked gate in the 15-foot high corrugated steel fence that separates the United States from Mexico...
...The deployment of these modes of symbolic violence have laid the groundwork for the implementation of LIC strategies along the U.S.-Mexico border...
...A 1997 University of Houston study has documented the deaths of 1,200 migrants between 1993 and 1996...
...2 hroughout the 1980s and 1990s, opinion makers, politicians, and Congress have portrayed the border area and the communities within it as places "infested" with hordes of drug runners, welfare cheats and foreigners looking for a free ride...
...While large quantities of illegal drugs do come across the U.S.-Mexico border, a former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent has noted that 70 to 85% of the total comes in through legal ports of entry in large transport trucks that are exempt from inspection as part of the NAFTA agreements-an exemption that is currently under review...
...Mexico Border: Interview with Roberto Martinez," Motion Magazine, (as it appears on the Internet, July, 1997...
...The institutionalization of Vot XXXII, No 3 Nov/DEc 199839 VOL XXXII, No 3 Nov/DEC 1998 39REPORT ON MILITARIZATION these strategies within the Border Patrol, in effect make large numbers of troops unnecessary...
...Crossing the Border: Human Rights Abuses along the U.S...
...Their objective was to establish and maintain social control over targeted civilian groups in order to further foreign policy aims-to counter Communism and secure the global expansion of capitalism and liberal democracy...
...California's infamous Proposition 187, for example, attempted to enlist health care workers, teachers and social-service agencies in reporting the presence of undocumented workers...
...A Chicano intake officer at a correctional institution in California stated in an interview that he is expected to immediately notify the INS if he suspects that an inmate he is processing is undocumented...
...ism and drugs, federal authorities have increasingly turned towards military strategy as a way to control the influx of "dangerous" peoples into United States...
...In the United States, illegal aliens, immigrant-rights groups, welfare recipients and any persons or organizations perceived as subversive to the liberal capitalist order have been cast as internal enemies of the United Statesthreats to "our" ways of life, "our" social institutions and even to the viability of "our" language...
...Army to generations of military officers from Latin America at special institutions like the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia-is to enlist the domestic police force into military and paramilitary operations...
...Consequently, the institution sees working-class Latino border communities as hostile territory, and Latinos as lesser citizens...
...9. Author's personal interview with R,P...
...capitalist hegemony...
...n late 1998, a Congressional bill to put an additional 10,000 soldiers on the border was voted down in the Senate, and by then, most of the combat-ready troops had been withdrawn...
...The border has been "militarized" with the approval of most citizens, Congress and the President...
...This justifies raids on Latino neighborhoods, discrimination and mistreatment of Spanish speakers and the killing of suspected drug runners...
...There is nothing natural about identities...
...In other words, he was a young Hispanic male out and about near the border before dawn...
...side of the border...
...The Border Patrol, as an arm of the state, has been charged with keeping "our" country safe from these scourges...
...Many border crossers have died as a result of border to a group of adolescents in heat stroke and dehydration produced by extreme desert temperatures...
...3. "Immigration and Human Rights on the U.S...
...Although an Americas Watch investigator complained to the head of the station, the 38NACtA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON MILITARIZATION defaced poster was still there four months later...
...Researchers, moreover, believe that the actual number of fatalities may be much higher...
...umented numerous other incidents in which unarmed men, women and children have been fired upon, beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, water and medical treatment, maimed and killed by Border Patrol agents or federal troops assigned to the U.S.-Mexico border...
...5 In 1984, elite Border Patrol squads known as Border Patrol Tactical Teams (BORTACS) began receiving special paramilitary training, and by 1989 Congress had authorized 5,000 federal troops for border duty...
...While many studies indicate that migrants contribute more to the economy than they take from it, public sentiment against them has reached frenzied proportions...
...Counterinsurgency, anti-terrorism, and peace-keeping-all LIC missions-are based on the premise that it is the enemy within that poses the greatest threat to the national security of any country...
...While public outrage following the murder of Ezequiel Hernandez led to the removal of combat-ready troops from the border, the military continues to provide assistance to immigration authorities in the areas of aerial reconnaissance,personnel training, engineering and document analysis...
...According to the federal agents at the scene, the victim and two other men ran from the immigration officers on the U.S...
...Marines and army troops, moreover, are building and upgrading helicopter pads and roads, making them suitable for "enhanced operations...
...Washington: Amnesty International, May 20, 1998...
...Others have drowned in the Rio Bravo, or have been hit by cars, in some instances while being chased by the Border Patrol or military operatives...
...similar circumstances...
...Once they cross the border, workers are channeled into low-wage labor markets as agricultural or sweat-shop workers, gardeners or day laborers-jobs he that are largely scorned by U.S...
...7 Of all the drugs that enter the country, the quantity that is carried by drug smugglers who cross the border on foot in remote areas is negligible...
...Over the last decade, however, its mission has been expanded to preventing the entry of terrorists and drugs into the country...
...We're all illegal immigrants, criminals or drug traffickers...
...The discovery of five dessicated corpses in mid-August unleashed a rash of new signs warning about the dangers of crossing the desert...
...It is in this context that the alarming militarization of the border and the escalating repression and violence against Latino immigrants, residents and citizens on the border needs to be understood...
...On the following day, another man was shot and killed in Carol Nagengast is a human rights activist who has worked with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on many issues, including human rights on the U.S.-Mexican border...
...The televised images of Riverside County Sheriff deputies chasing down a truckload of suspected undocumented workers in 1996 and beating unarmed men and women with truncheons poignantly revealed LIC strategies in action...
...7. An independent task force led by the U.S...
...In recent years, Amnesty International, Americas Watch and other human rights organizations have docVOL XXXII, No 3 Nov/DEc 199837 VOL XXXII, No 3 Nov/DEC 1998 37REPORT ON MILITARIZATION Once they cross the border, people are channeled into low-wage labor markets as agricultural or sweat-shop workers, gardeners or day laborers...
...weaponry in San Francisco, California...
...military in Southeast Asia in the 1960s...
...2. See Timothy Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border: 1978-1992 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996...
...It has gone on so long that we no longer see the abuse...
...Four hundred members of the specially trained BORTAC squads were deployed in Latino neighborhoods, where they joined local and regional officers...
...She teaches anthropology at the University of New Mexico...
...By incorporating civilians and local law enforcement agencies into their campaigns, the Border Patrol trains them to participate in the hierarchical categorization of individuals and communities that fuels the institution's policies...
...In San Diego County, for example, the number of agents patrolling the county's 66-mile strip of border has risen from 890 in 1993 to 2,350 in 1998...
...If the "enemy" is everywhere, the system needs a military that is capable of intervening in all aspects of domestic politics and A father and son watch social policy in the name of national security...
...Since its founding in 1924, the Border Patrol's purpose has ostensibly been to prevent the entry of unauthorized persons and materials into U.S...
...While the immediate foreign policy goals of the Cold War are no longer in place, the military tactics developed during that period have been reterritorialized within the United States in order to ensure the orderly reproduction and expansion of U.S...
...Consequently, it is becoming more dangerous than ever for workers to cross the border...
...1 While immigration authorities attempt to portray this growing violence against both legal and illegal immigrants as well as U.S.-born Latinos as a collection of isolated incidents, evidence suggests that this trend is the product of relatively recent transformations within the Border Patrol itself...
...This expansion of institutional objectives has, in turn, led to a dramatic militarization of both its ideology and its policing practices, prompting the direct involvement of the U.S...
...says Martinez...
...These events were widely publicized and presumably approved by the general public, which was led to believe that "illegals" were heavily implicated in looting and burning...
Vol. 32 • November 1998 • No. 3
