The Border: Exploring the U.S.-Mexican Divide

Danelo

PROLOGUE

The border between the United States and Mexico is the most frequently traversed national boundary in the world. Over 250 million people legally transit the U.S.-Mexico border each year. An unknown number—perhaps as many as 10 million—do so beyond the law. For decades, we have not been in complete control of our borders, said President George Bush in May 2007, when advocating an immigration reform bill that stalled in Congress. The president added that many have lost faith in the government's ability to even defend the border at all.

In 2007, I spent three months navigating the 1,951.63 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. I went from the easternmost point, a spit of beach south of Boca Chica, Texas, to Border Field State Park, California, where a rusty fence spills into the Pacific Ocean at the border's western limit. I wandered from Brownsville to San Diego and Matamoros to Tijuana. This can be hazardous country for curious writers; in recent years, journalists have been intimidated, threatened, and even shot along the line that Mexicans call la frontera. Thanks to good fortune and some good advice, I emerged unscathed.

Is it possible to secure one of the most complex borders on the planet? On my first road trip in May, the same month that President Bush was arguing for immigration reform legislation that Congress would eventually reject, I tried to answer this question for myself. Beyond security, I had also wanted to make sense of the border; to find some logical, empirical reason beyond the statistics why McAllen and Laredo were bustling and prospering, why Douglas and Nogales were empty and corrupt, and why the cross-border urbanization of El Paso/Ciudad Juárez had evolved so differently than San Diego/Tijuana.

I talked with small business owners as well as community organizers who framed immigration law, border security, and the North American Free Trade Agreement through the lens of their own experiences. I met a Mexican tourism official who said he had spent almost two decades in jail for murder. I spent a day with three Catholic humanitarians who drop backpacks filled with water and medical supplies along trails in an effort to relieve suffering in the Arizona desert. I watched drugs being smuggled over the border in Nogales.

I wanted to know what the border was, but I found myself stymied each time I attempted to draw conclusions. I returned home with more questions than answers. I consulted a fellow writer for advice, who, in a single-sentence e-mail worthy of an oracle, illustrated both my problem and its solution: Do not understand the border too quickly.

Fortified with that Zen, I plunged back in. The second trip in August and September took me back and forth along the border twice. I met a middle school principal whose students say the pledge of allegiance to the United States in both English and Spanish. I had coffee with the president of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. I was pulled over for speeding by Sheriff Ronny Dodson, whose jurisdiction includes 182 miles of border that is routinely violated by drug cartels and a town whose democratically elected mayor is a beer-drinking goat.

I took an unusual route for a gringo in reporting this story. My background as an Annapolis graduate, Marine Corps officer, and Iraq veteran caused me to reflexively examine the border as a tactical problem. My journalism forays to Vietnam, the Horn of Africa, and Iraq made me see it as an academic and legal one. Having spent much of my youth in San Antonio, I'm comfortable with Cinco de Mayo celebrations, enjoy mariachis, and am thoroughly fluent in Spanglish. Sí, señorita.. Dos fajitas, por favor. Gracias. Unlike some gringos, the growing Latino population in the U.S. does not cause me grave concern.

My slow, poorly accented Spanish should have been a liability, but it turned out to be an asset for the man-on-the-street reporting I did along la frontera. Respect, gesture, and appearance are more universal as communication tools than words. With my big smile, broad shoulders, and a shaved head, the Mexicans I spoke with did not seem to believe I was a writer. They thought I was a businessman's bodyguard, an athlete on vacation, or a hit man. In much of Mexico, those professions are more popular, and safer, than investigative journalism.

There is no other place like it on the planet: this 1,952 mile strip of river and earth where the developed world meets the developing; where rich meets poor; where law can mean so much on one side and so little on another. In some regions, the border is a cultural estuary; 12 million binational residents produce a diverse blend, and the biological fusion becomes impossible to cleanly separate. Others could not seem more divided—by class, by economics, by their legal system. Some Mexican cities survive on the garish border party scene; the (barely enforced) drinking age in Mexico is eighteen. Others have established a thriving middle class through windfalls from NAFTA. Some have become hubs for smuggling marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. Others remain hovels of poverty.

When they flee, they run north. From 2000-2005, the United States accepted more migrants, legally and illegally, than any other country in the world. During those five years, according to the United Nations Population Division, an average of 1.3 million, the majority from Mexico, drifted annually into the United States. By 2007, one in eight people—37.9 million—living in the U.S. was an immigrant. About half had arrived illegally. The runner-up for immigration, Spain, logged a comparatively distant 569,000 migrants per year. No other country came close.

For every person who emigrates, another is not so lucky. In the same five-year period, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended an average of 1.1 million per year attempting to sneak into the United States from Mexico—more arrests than any other law enforcement organization in the world. Known as La Migra to Mexicans, the Border Patrol creates continuity on both sides of this perplexing piece of terrain. Like an apparition or mythical deity who pays visits with sun, wind, or rain, La Migra has come to personify to the Darwinian cat-and-mouse game a migrant who endures in his or her attempts to find fortune. The undocumented flee La Migra when scrambling for economic freedom, but scream for them when dying of dehydration. In a paradoxical way, the men and women in green offer common ground on both sides of the border in a way that nothing else can. Their existence makes the border a reality.

Throughout the 1990s, demand and supply costs for the illegal commodities of drugs and migrant labor increased. This drove smugglers to establish more robust networks spanning both countries and charge higher rates to move their commodity. Partnerships uniting narcotics and migrant smuggling proliferated, pushing through long-established channels to sate the American appetite for marijuana, heroin, and cocaine (not to mention housekeepers, meatpackers, and strawberry pickers). The Border Patrol fought back with surges of stadium lighting, infrared cameras, and ground sensors. Stretches of fencing made from military scrap metal were installed south of San Diego, Nogales, and Douglas. From 1995 to 2006, funding for the Border Patrol increased tenfold, and the number of agents went from 5,000 to over 12,000.

As Border Patrol initiatives resulted in local success, smugglers adapted to the systemic changes. Operation Gatekeeper (1994; San Diego), Operation Hold the Line (1993-95; El Paso), and Operation Rio Grande (1998; Brownsville-McAllen) pushed the flow of migrants into Arizona's Sonora Desert. Instead of sprinting north through Tijuana along highways or bridges, migrants came through national parks, Indian reservations, and private ranches.

The violation of private land in southern Arizona, coupled with the attacks of 9/11, renewed the public rallying cry to get the borders under control. Terrorists, we were warned, not just drugs, gangsters, or migrants, could stream through our porous south. Despite statements from security experts that the threat of Islamist terror would likely come from Canada—Toronto and Montreal are both less than 400 miles from the heart of Manhattan—the Border Patrol and the electorate remained absorbed with the influx of Mexican migrants.

After 9/11, the Border Patrol, along with several existing federal agencies, was subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security as part of the largest and most expensive federal government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense. Responsible for border security and the 317 air, land, and sea ports of entry into the United States, the Office of Customs and Border Protection bill themselves as America's first line of defense. They have 40,000 employees and an annual budget of $7.8 billion. In 2003, the Border Patrol became the mobile, uniformed law enforcement arm of Customs and Border Protection, making Border Patrol agents, effectively, the Department of Homeland Security's infantrymen. Although their primary task is counterterrorism, agents spend most of their time seizing drugs and illegal aliens.

If Border Patrol agents are the infantry in the war on the border, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, are the spooks and spies. Rival siblings to Customs and Border Protection, ICE special agents investigate smugglers, raid businesses, and deport the undocumented. Their annual budget is also $7.8 billion. Not counting the contributions of other federal agencies, the government spends $15.6 billion per year to prevent people who want to plot terror, sell drugs, or work for almost nothing from entering the country.

Despite the investment, the Border Patrol has only achieved operational control of 449 miles along the border, according to a September 2006 internal report. One reason why authorities say they can regulate only 23 percent of the border is because U.S. government spending pales next to the opposing market forces of labor and narcotics. Mexican expatriates send home $24.6 billion per year, a source of revenue that accounts for 3 percent of Mexico's estimated $840 billion gross domestic product. In 1995, the drug trade brought Mexico an estimated $30 billion; that figure has doubled since the passage of NAFTA. Globally, the drug trade is a $300 billion annual business. In 2007, President Bush asked Congress for a paltry $500 million to fight drugs in Mexico. But next to oil and tourism, drugs are Mexico's leading industry.

After the signing of NAFTA in 1994, it was thought that Mexico's poor would, in fact, run to the north. But they were supposed to stop at Mexico's maquiladoras, working for what bureaucrats promised would be fair wages. Maquiladoras, also simply known as maquilas, are Mexican factories that make raw materials into industrial imports in border cities like Juárez, Tijuana, or Matamoros. This economic development, it was thought, would encourage Mexicans to seek opportunity in their own country instead of a foreign one.

The maquilas have prospered, growing 15.5 percent since the NAFTA treaty. Some border communities in both nations, particularly in south Texas and northeastern Mexico, saw their fortunes increase. Since 1994, Mexican exports to the U.S. have increased fivefold, from $40 billion to $200 billion. The trade agreement has caused the national income for Mexico's richest 10 percent—including Mexican billionaires like Carlos Slim Helú, the third wealthiest man in the world, and Maríasun Aramburuzabala, the richest woman in Latin America—to exponentially rise.

Simultaneously, many critics argue, NAFTA has forced rural Mexican farmers into unfair competition with gigantic American agriculture corporations. Since one quarter of Mexico's 106 million survives on $1 a day, NAFTA did little to staunch the flow of humanity into the world's richest nation. In some places on the border, particularly Arizona, both the trade agreement and stronger border security only caused migration to increase. With both America and Mexico squeezed by globalization, population demographics continue to favor the south. Many Americans fear becoming a bilingual nation.

The United States, however, is not the global giant thwarting the future for Mexican workers. Although NAFTA created 1.3 million Mexican jobs and fueled an export boom, the overall cost of production in the early twenty-first century was still four times higher for a corporation in Mexico—despite its poverty—than hiring a work force in China. In the first two years of the millennium, 300,000 maquila employees were fired; their jobs outsourced across the Pacific. Mexican leaders call on the Americans to scrutinize Chinese labor practices, but critics shrug, saying that Mexico is at fault for the economic loss because they failed to remain competitive. Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1884-1911, summed up the dilemma best: Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States.

I found the exception to this fatalistic despair in northeastern Mexico, a corridor that appeared to represent NAFTA's definitive middle class success story. The links between Houston, Texas, and Monterrey, Nuevo León, have grown to symbolize the degree that the economic fortunes of the U.S. and Mexico are intertwined. From Matamoros to Monterrey and Tampico to Saltillo, the GDP is 2.3 times higher than the rest of Mexico combined. Growth has resulted from the region's connectivity to Texas, the presence of oil in eastern Mexico, the dependence upon Brownsville, McAllen, and Laredo for trade, and the cultural ties that Texans possess as former Mexican citizens.

The border in south Texas—a wide, friendly river—is more stable than the combustible line in the sand separating Arizona's wealth from Sonora's poverty. After seeing the difference, I understood why the Minutemen had trumpeted their call to arms in Tombstone. The Anglos I met in San Antonio, Del Rio, and Eagle Pass abhorred the thought of a border fence, but those in Tucson, Phoenix, and San Diego demanded immediate action against the invasion they confronted daily.

For non-residents of border states, the public view of the U.S.Mexico border is sculpted almost entirely by its westernmost limit. Delegations from every country in the world visit San Diego, California to see how America guards her gates from Mexico. I met with a U.S. Border Patrol medial officer who had talked with officials from Thailand, Australia, Romania, and Poland over the latest thirty-day period. During the carefully scripted tours, visitors take pictures of San Ysidro, the largest non-commercial port of entry on the border, where cars stacked across twenty-four lanes wait hours to cross from Tijuana into San Diego. Dignitaries watch maintenance contractors repair the cuts along the two stacks of mesh wire fencing installed as part of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. They enjoy a night out in San Diego's entertainment quarter called the Gaslamp District. Then, they go home.

In this way, both the U.S. Congress and the Border Patrol's San Diego Sector have colluded in a similar sales operation. San Diego is the only city on the U.S.-Mexico border that offers direct flights to and from Washington, D.C. airports. Congressional delegations can fly out of Washington in the morning, learn the real story of the border in an afternoon, and be back in the capital by dinnertime. At the San Diego Sector headquarters, the Border Patrol has a dozen media representatives, a full-time Congressional affairs staff, and media liaison officers designated for each of the sector's eight stations. This is over four times the public relations staff of any other sector.

The Mexican government casually patrols la frontera, but since crossing from Mexico into the U.S. is not illegal for a Mexican citizen, the federales do nothing to stop migrants. Grupo Beta, a government-sponsored welfare organization for migrants, runs twelve aid stations in cities on Mexico's northern border. Their charter: offer assistance to those preparing to cross or returning from a failed attempt. Some suspect that Grupo Beta's offices are merely fronts for smugglers and coyotes. Absent a law against crossing, enforcement is not a concern.

And why should Mexico's federal police care about stopping migrants from going north? The Mexican government has other things to worry about—primarily the threat of drug cartels. And even the poorest Mexican knows the story of how the United States stole the rich land of El Norte a century and a half ago after the Mexican-American War. For some, this enhances the sense that evading the Border Patrol is also a conquest on behalf of their Hispanic, Latino, or Chicano brethren. Others strive only for the humbler goals of money for home and hearth.

Beyond economics, historical and cultural factors also explain Mexico's lack of interest in stopping people from leaving their country. Hidden in plain sight is a bizarre but authentic satisfaction in turning our "gabacho" hypocrisy upon us. We consume drugs while spending billions campaigning to stop them. We want clean hotels, cheap food, and our children bathed and clothed by caretakers, but protest when we see too many signs printed in Spanish. Labor and smuggling are not just about providing for family; the narcotraficantes are celebrated on street corners, compact discs, and YouTube. The machismo of personal and national honor plays a role, as does the innate human drive for superiority against a competing tribe.

Ironically, even victory in the border battle brings negative consequences. Stronger border security appears to have brought more chaos to the other side. After the 9/11 attacks, fewer Americans ventured south of the border for weekends or holidays. Lines along the border grew, slowing trade and decreasing tourism. The aggressive approach has also placed Border Patrol agents in an awkward no-man's land. As security has tightened, patrolmen are assaulted with rocks, sticks, and occasionally bullets.

Farmers, growers, and gardeners throughout the U.S. face worsening labor shortages. Some American companies are shifting their operations to Mexico, cultivating crops where the farmers live rather than risking the backlash of immigration officials. It's because of enforcement, said a vice president of a Texas garden produce company in a recent issue of U.S. News and World Report.

In the meantime, this economic vacuum has been exploited by drug cartels. Two years ago, the Sinaloa Federation moved into Nuevo Laredo, killed the chief of police, and imported their own police force. They jockeyed violently for power with the Gulf Cartel, at times using rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles. This city is becoming a ghost town, lamented a sixty-year-old merchant who faces bleak economic prospects because of the drug lords, and worried that I would use his name. If this menace remains, there will be nothing left.

I started out wanting answers, but in the end, I realized that the same questions have been asked as long as Americans and Mexicans have been trying to discover, befriend, conquer, or subvert one another. My journey taught me to distrust anyone with glib responses to immigration, security, drugs, health care, free trade, citizenship, and water rights. Some are local issues; some are regional; some are international. But all are layered with complexity.

The border is entirely a man-made construction: an enormous fissure of nature demarcated by water, steel, concrete, and La Migra. Rising mountains, stagnant rivers, and scorching deserts are traversed day and night by four-wheel-drive trucks, all-terrain vehicles, and even horses as hunters seek their elusive prey. Cameras peer, sensors radiate, helicopters dart, and fences block. Without a Border Patrol, there would only be a mark on a map—no walls, no barriers, no fences. And no illegal aliens.

But even without La Migra and the fortifications, the line would still matter. As long as America exists, admirers and antagonists will classify the border as a beautiful place with a bicameral, binational state of mind. It will remain a point of unity and separation beyond the number of fences erected on either side. Its 1,952 miles mark North America's greatest divide. And her greatest opportunity.

U.S. Border Patrol Sector Map

1

The border begins five miles south of Boca Chica.

Reaching the mouth of the Rio Grande in south Texas means driving thirty miles east until the road ends at the Gulf of Mexico. A stop sign is inexplicably there, as if beach-bound motorists might ignore the obvious and continue driving until plummeting into the ocean. The nearest collection of hamlets, Boca Chica Village, is an eclectic shantytown marked only by a white sign with blue paint, a pile of electric cables, some bamboo poles, and a few rusty cars. The village is less than a mile from the coastline, five miles north of the Rio Grande.*

To get to the actual border, where the Rio Grande empties into the ocean, I turned south at the stop sign and drove along the beach. The tide had scattered seaweed, shells, rocks, and beer cans over the wet, compacted sand. Three tents were pitched on the shore, including one that appeared to be a hobo's permanent dwelling.

There was no signpost or historical placard left here by either Mexican or American authorities. No screaming instructions in Spanish or English to warn the ten bronzed men who were wading toward the United States in chest-deep water that they were about to conduct an illegal crossing. No marker of any kind to say that this place of terra firma was where the southeastern limit of the U.S.-Mexico border began.

The Mexican men sloshing in the Rio Grande were not coming into America to stay. They were fishing. Because the border runs down the middle of the river, they crossed back and forth between countries many times, violating the law with impunity and determination until their nets were full. Segregated by age and gender, their women and children huddled on the Mexican side of the river's mouth around a blue sedan and flatbed pickup, busy with conversations and chores. A few hours later, they got in their vehicles, drove south, and presumably returned to their homes.

There were no Border Patrol agents that day on the beach south of Boca Chica. The group I saw fishing on the American side—thirty-five miles from Brownsville, the largest city within walking distance—was apparently not cause for a security alarm. The vegetation beyond the beach was thick enough, said the Border Patrol, to force people to walk along the road where they have manned a checkpoint if they attempted a permanent crossing. Helicopters with U.S. government markings buzzed every few minutes, watching for signs of infiltration.

Other than helicopters, the only sign that this was anything beyond a normal beach came from a lighthouse on the Mexican side. It was a tall white pillar with a blue platform on top. A small building was next to it. Set against the backdrop of river and sand, the lighthouse reminded me of the minarets I had seen in Iraq jutting skyward next to mosques amid the canals from the Euphrates. The beach on the Mexican side of the river is called Playa Bagdad. No one I spoke with, American or Mexican, knew the name's origin. It gave me déjà vu.

Boca Chica and Playa Bagdad are at the southeastern tip of the Rio Grande Valley. It was hot when I was there, not the dry heat of Arizona's Sonora Desert or California's Mojave, but the sticky humid haze of a subtropical climate. It was the kind of heat that can generate passion, poetry, and hordes of mosquitoes. This sauna is not actually a valley at all, but the northern side of a river delta. Half of the delta is American soil—52.1 percent, according to one hydrology table—and the rest is Mexican. Sediment and nutrients wash into the flats when the river floods, creating a menagerie of life in the resulting estuary of alluvial silt, soil, and loam.

I saw foliage growing in multiple canopies throughout the steamy region, which is home to more bird species than any other part of the United States. According to local legend, the Valley—el Valle for many residents—was so named because original settlers thought the term more inviting than its scientific synonym. They hoped that a valley would draw investors and tourists.

Brownsville, the largest city in the Valley, is about thirty miles from the beach of Boca Chica and an hour east of McAllen. Maj. Jacob Brown, a U.S. Army officer, was killed during the 1845 Mexican-American War at an outpost that was then called Fort Texas. Gen. Zachary Taylor renamed it Fort Brown, and the city grew up alongside the base. During the Civil War, Fort Brown became a Confederate outpost. In May 1865, over a month after the war had officially ended at Appomattox, Virginia, Union forces attacked Confederate troops at Palmito Ranch, a garrison near the fort. The Confederates rallied, killing or wounding over 100 Union soldiers while losing none of their own. It was the last major battle of the Civil War. Two international bridges are now less than half a mile from the site.

In the early twentieth century, Fort Brown made national headlines as the site of the Brownsville Affair, a 1906 racial uprising against an all-black Army regiment. A white bartender was killed, and many locals, lacking evidence, decided to blame his death on the black soldiers. Witnesses told the Army that the men planted spent cartridges at the crime scene and convinced investigators, possibly through bribes, to frame the black men. Against the recommendation of the white officers in the chain of command, and overriding a personal plea from Booker T. Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered 167 soldiers dishonorably discharged. In 1972, almost three decades after the fort shut down, the Army reversed its decision. Although the soldiers' honor was restored, the Nixon Administration refused to grant back pay to the families. Only one man, Dorsie Willis, was alive to receive the $25,000 pension.

Farming has been the economic mainstay of river deltas since the Sumerians and Egyptians developed their respective floodplains, and the Rio Grande Valley is no exception. Parallel levees protect the farms, creating a barrier against the irregularly perennial floodwaters. The levee snakes alongside the river, providing a dirt thoroughfare for farmers, smugglers, and Border Patrol agents. The three disparate groups, I was told, are constantly transiting the area, trying to either find or avoid each other. The felines of the cat-and-mouse game, agents profile their prey as brown, ageless, faceless, and anonymous. The hunters are men and women like Agent Walter King.

Field Operation Supervisor Walter King, Caucasian, fifty-two, had brown eyes, sandy hair, and a dimpled chin. Outside, he wears tinted police sunglasses. He has been with the Border Patrol for almost twenty years and is approaching retirement eligibility, though he plans to stay in as long as he can. King did a stint in the Navy, a few years as a flight attendant, and then burned out as a social worker before he discovered the Border Patrol. He entered the Academy at thirty-two, which was just under the maximum age. King, who is married with two children, told me that the Border Patrol is his dream job. When I said he looked good for an officer his age, he corrected me. We're agents, not officers. He felt strongly about the distinction.

Walter King is a good-humored man who seems wholly identified with his work at the Brownsville Station in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. When he would agree with you on something—your fondness for the coffee he had offered you, or the next order of business for the day—he would reply Ten-four a few times, nodding