Up Against the Wall. Peter Laufer

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СКАЧАТЬ Southwest Border Strategy was the brainchild of former El Paso Representative Silvestre Reyes. Reyes held unique credentials for his job. He was the first member of Congress with working experience as a Border Patrolman. He retired after 26 years with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 13 of them as Border Patrol chief in Texas. “The chaos of illegal immigration, uncontrolled and unaddressed, as it existed before I implemented Hold the Line in El Paso, was unacceptable,” Reyes testified. “It was unacceptable to the officers and it was unacceptable to the community.” Even as the deaths mounted in the deserts far from El Paso, Reyes expressed pride and confidence in the strategy.

      I have first-hand knowledge of not only the difficulties and struggles we face on the border, but also of the success we have had with initiatives such as Operation Hold the Line and Operation Gatekeeper. While our Border Patrol has made progress, we all agree that we have a long way to go before we establish control of our 2,000-mile border with Mexico.⁶

      The Border Patrol requires its agents speak enough Spanish to pass the agency’s language tests. That prerequisite is at least partially responsible for the fact that many of the agents are Latino. Some were born in Mexico and became U.S. citizens; some were born in the United States and have lived in Mexico. Others have parents or grandparents who came across the border without proper documents. Veteran agent Marco Ramirez was raised in Mexico, but says he does not let his heritage interfere with his work. “The way I see it,” he explains, “you carry the badge in one hand, and in the other hand, you carry your heart.”⁷

      Immigration invaded presidential politics during the 1996 campaign, with both political parties inciting fear. First Bob Dole blanketed television with ads accusing Bill Clinton of being soft on undocumented immigrants. The pictures accompanying the aggressive narration were of migrants clandestinely crossing into California. Clinton was on the air in retaliation with pictures of a brown-skinned man handcuffed by the Border Patrol, inflammatory images that were punctuated by text claiming a 40 percent increase to the Border Patrol ranks during Clinton’s first term, along with record numbers of deportees.⁸

      Shot Dead

      More Border Patrolmen on the frontier, of course, resulted in increased encounters between them and Mexicans trying to cross into the United States. Over a weekend in late September 1998, Border Patrol agents twice reacted with guns to what they said were threats from Mexicans who were armed with rocks and refused orders to stop. Agents shot both migrants dead. The official Border Patrol explanation was terse, impersonal and clinical: “Fearing for his life, [the agent] brings out the weapon and shoots this person, striking the person in the torso area,” said Border Patrol spokeswoman Gloria Chavez about one of the shootings. Her colleague, Border Patrol spokesman Mario Villarreal said about the other, “The agent ordered him to drop the rock and stop. [The man] went on in an aggressive manner. The agent discharged his service firearm in self-defense, striking the individual in the torso.”⁹

      “Something is going wrong,” was the response of the Mexican consul general in San Diego, Luis Herrera-Lasso, who explained that rock throwing is commonplace along the border and that the Border Patrol need not use deadly force to combat it.¹⁰

      In 1989, the U.S. government sent regular army troops back to the Mexican border, this time with the rationale of fighting drug traffickers. On July 30, 1997, it suspended those border operations, two months after a Marine corporal shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez Jr. as the high school student was herding goats near his hometown of Redford, Texas.

      Redford, understandably, was shocked.

      “The only thing we know is that a good kid is dead who shouldn’t be,” said Hernandez’s English teacher Kevin Stahnke immediately after the killing.¹¹

      The teacher and the rest of Redford—the population in 1997 was 107—soon learned that Esequiel was herding his family’s goats down near the Rio Grande, as usual, the afternoon of the day he was killed. He was carrying his grandfather’s 1910 rifle, as usual, to protect the goats from a pack of wild dogs.¹² He apparently shot a few rounds in the direction of brown shapes moving near his goats.

      Those shapes were four Marines, covered in brush for camouflage, their faces blackened. They were deployed on the border for surveillance duty, assigned to track suspected drug smugglers and report on the traffickers’ whereabouts to the Border Patrol. These Marines were a unit of something called Joint Task Force Six, a Federal agency set-up to coordinate operations between the military and the Border Patrol. The U.S. military is proscribed by law from performing domestic police work. That prohibition was established in 1878 with the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act. But in 1981, federal law was changed to allow for cooperation between the military and civilian police, specifically for the purpose of stopping illegal drugs at the border.

      Joint Task Force Six, known as JTF-6, was the work of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who—along with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell—chose to militarize the border, an escalation of the so-called War on Drugs. Part of their strategy was to deploy the Marines without telling local townspeople. Since Esequiel and the rest of Redford were not informed of the patrol, they also could not know the orders for the Marines’ tour in their neighborhood. Unlike domestic police, the Marines were not to identify themselves. They were not to fire warning shots. And if they felt threatened, they were expected to shoot to kill.¹³ These were their “rules of engagement.” As the months passed following young Esequiel’s death, that term, “rules of engagement,” infuriated the citizens of Redford.

      “What are these ‘rules of engagement?’” questioned a neighbor of the Hernandez family, Diana Valenzuela. “We had no idea we were being engaged in the first place. I was amazed when I heard that the military was walking around the hills in our backyard.”

      Another Redford schoolteacher, Leonel Ceniceros, agreed. “It seems crazy to me now that they were even here. When you think about it, these are young Marines brought in here from out of state. They’ve probably been told there are drug dealers all over the place, you’re in enemy territory, protect yourself. But the result is, this good young man is dead.”¹⁴

      “They say they are trained to kill,” Esequiel Hernandez’s older brother said about the Marines. “They should kill in war, not in towns.”

      The Marines essentially said the same thing in their initial official response to the killing. Marine Colonel Thomas Kelley told a news conference, “If you reach the point where you fire for fear of your lives, then you usually fire to kill.”

      After Hernandez fired his grandfather’s old rifle, the Marines radioed to their Border Patrol associates that they were the targets of his shots. They tracked Hernandez and say he again raised his rifle and aimed at them. That’s when 22-year-old Corporal Clemente Bañuelos fired a single round from his M-16 and saw Hernandez fall. The Border Patrol recovered his body over twenty minutes later. The Marines did not try to save his life after he was shot; their orders did not require such follow-up. According to the autopsy, Hernandez bled to death.

      “These people had no right to be here,” said retired Episcopal priest Melvin La Follete about the Marines. A friend of the Hernandez family, La Follete organized Redford citizens to fight against the militarization of their border town. “The Marines left their observation post, they stalked him, they came onto private property. And then they killed him. We were going blithely about our business, not knowing that Congress had handed away the civil rights of people on the border.”

      Eventually the Hernandez family received $1.9 million dollars from the federal government in compensation for their loss of Esequiel. In return the government admitted no fault.

      “This was a tragedy, not a criminal act,” said Jack Zimmermann, СКАЧАТЬ