Collide-a-scape

The movie El Norte has stayed with me a long time. Anyone who has seen it will likely remember one horrifying scene when the two Mayan peasants from Guatemala–a brother and sister–cross the U.S.-Mexico border through a sewer pipe. It’s 1984. California is the border battlefront. And Guatemala, torn asunder by a long civil war and a succession of brutal military dictatorships, is terrorizing the indigenous Mayan population.

Towards the end of the film, the sister says to the brother:

In our homeland there’s no place for us, they want to kill us. In Mexico, there’s only poverty. And in the north, we aren’t accepted. When are we going to find a home, maybe only in death?

If that film was made today, there would have to be at least one horrifying scene set somewhere in the remote desert of southern Arizona, where hundreds of illegal border crossers succumb every year to the harsh elements. Thus far, the most vivid rendering of this tragic (and little known) annal of American history is Luis Alberto Urrea’s book, The Devil’s Highway.

Now comes a powerful story in the September/October issue of Mother Jones, by Andi McDaniel, that will make your heart ache. It’s an understated, beautifully written piece that also showcases the best of humanity. Here’s one passage that chronicles, through a border patrol agent’s voice, how dead bodies are found all too often in the Arizona desert:

Some days, Guerrero is out on rescues, like the one I tagged along on today. Other days he stalks around like a crime detective, following trails of footsteps and bits of torn clothing on barbed wire fences, trying to find migrants whose compañeros had to leave them behind. The father or friend of the person will finally make it to a road, flag down an agent, explain where they left the person, and ask for help.

“Picture this,” Guerrero explains. “You finally make it to the point where the person is supposed to be. And now you see this set of footprints that’s walking away from that spot. They’ve told you everything—’The person is under a tree, we laid a blue shirt on top, they have an orange backpack’—and you confirm that this is the spot because you see the orange backpack and you see the blue shirt up on a tree and you see that the person started walking, and you’re like, okay, this isn’t good.

“You start seeing the person is going left and then a hard right, and then left, and then you see them kind of make a circle. And you know exactly what’s going on. And you keep walking and now you’ve found a belt. And you keep walking and you find a wallet and…shoes. I mean, you’re starting to picture this person—they’re, they’re…they’ve lost it. Their mind is gone. And they’re just aimlessly…just walking. And you know that when you get to them, they’re going to be dead.”

Guerrero’s gaze is still fixed on the road.

“And sure enough, once you find them, they have cholla [cactus] all over their mouth and hands. And they’re already on the ground, and rigor mortis has set in. They’re starting to balloon up and decompose because of the heat. And you can only imagine how much these people suffered. How much they suffered.”

Yesterday I was talking to Kevin Jones, Utah’s state archaeologist, about an unrelated article I’m working on, when he mentioned that “human remains tell a story.” What’s especially poignant about the Mother Jones piece by Andi McDaniel is that she’s telling the story about people who are trying to figure out the identity of each person that dies in the U.S. while crossing the Sonoran desert. (Many of the border crossers are found without any identification documents.) So she profiles people like Chelsey Juarez, a physical anthropologist, who says:

I believe in doing science for the people—breaking out of academia and doing work that’s useful. And even if you don’t think undocumented people should be here, you can agree that dying in a strange country, and losing touch with your family, that’s a tragedy.

Here’s another dispatch from a decades-old war, in which the policy and politics never change. You couldn’t read this kind of story in the country where the war is raging, because of a virtual news blackout, enforced by fear of vicious reprisal. So what does that mean for the people caught in the crossfire? As the NYT reports,

It means that a mother can huddle on the floor of a closet with her daughter for what seems like eternity as fierce gunfire is exchanged outside their home, as occurred here recently, and then find not a word of it in the next day’s paper.

And it means that helicopters can swoop overhead, military vehicles can roar through the streets and the entire neighborhood can sound like a war movie, and television can lead off the next day’s broadcast talking about something else.

Welcome to life in the Mexican border towns, where, as the Times story reports, even the local American media has been intimidated by drug cartels.

As I noted several weeks ago, there’s some nice happy talk about cross-border cooperation on environmental issues. At least that’s one thing journalists on both sides of the border can feel safe to report on.

UPDATE: Over the weekend, three U.S. citizens with ties to a U.S. consulate office in a Mexican border town were killed in an ambush. The AP reports:

The slayings came amid a surge in bloodshed along Mexico’s border with Texas and drew condemnation from the White House. Mexico’s president expressed outrage and promised a fast investigation to find those responsible.

A fast investigation. In that lawless region, any investigation would do, but even that won’t change the facts on the ground. As the AP reports, the U.S. recognizes this:

The State Department authorized U.S. government employees at Ciudad Juarez and five other U.S. consulates in northern Mexico to send family members out of the area because of concerns about rising drug violence. The cities are Tijuana, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros.

I love that The Washington Post has a new blog on Mexico’s drug war, called “Journey Along the Border.”

Too bad it’s slated to last a week and half, the duration of the journalistic journey. Guys, the drug war won’t end when you reach Tijuana, so why fold up shop then? Keep the blog going. Rotate reporters in and out for sustained coverage.

Imagine the histrionics when Lou Dobbs figures out the climate change angle to one of his pet causes. In the meantime, with respect to yesterday’s big report, this is a reasonable take on domestic security issues, particularly those related to the border:

As much as the United States will have its hands full dealing with the impacts of climate change, many Latin American countries will face more severe impacts and will face them sooner, motivating increased migration across our borders. If the politics of immigration are difficult today, imagine a decade hence when millions of South Americans suddenly run out of the glacier water they depend on.

A few years ago, a ranger at Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument told me that this would be a historic trail in fifty years.

In the meantime, the tragedy continues:

Already this year, 79 of the dead have been recovered. The season of death, deep summer, has not even begun.

The allure of technology is so great as the Ultimate Answer that politicians, policymakers and engineers continually chase after it the way a drug addict chases after that first high.

And so, speaking of drugs, we learn today that a squad in the Homeland Security Department is trying out all manner of hi-tech gimmickry to fix that pesky little border problem once and for all.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the government geeks are

not ashamed to admit that they draw inspiration from comic-book superheroes and science-fiction novels as they dream up the gizmos and gadgets they hope will keep bad guys at bay.

One of them is called the Squid, which a guy in Tempe, Arizona dreamed up in 2005 while watching a car chase on TV. He sketched out his idea on a napkin while  smoking cigars and downing pints of Guinness.

Pay attention you science fair whiz kids: Homeland Security liked the additional sketches so much they threw $850,000 at the squid inventor. (As the WSJ piece describes, the squid is “a lightweight disc about he size of a manhole cover, lies on the road and ejects rubbery tentacles on command to ensnare fleeing vehicles and drag them to a stop.”)

Another brilliant but low-tech idea is destined for the environmental engineering annals. It involves a plan

to flood the border with a particular breed of wasp with a taste for Carrizo cane, a massive weed that grows in dense stands along the Rio Grande, providing cover to smugglers…scientists, working with the Department of Agriculture, tracked down the wasps in Spain and have spent two years watching the critters in a secure greenhouse — gauging their appetites, assessing their role in a swampy ecosystem and finally breeding them into a swarm suitable for deployment on the Texas border. The first invasion is set for this summer, near Laredo.

I guess nobody bothered to tell these mad scientists about the law of unintended consequences–more specifically, what happens when exotic species are set loose in the environment to fix a problem.

But that would assume that the people who oversee our policies on illegal drugs and immigration are already familiar with the law of untendend consequences.

We have ample proof that’s not the case.

In 2004, I got a small glimpse of the unseen (and sporadically reported) desperation along the rugged Arizona borderlands when I wrote this small piece on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Nothing’s changed. Yes, billions have since been spent on militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, but to what end?

As this wrenching blog post by Michael Wolcott at High Country News attests, abundant human tragedy still stalks the Arizona desert.

Here on this militarized edge, with its checkposts and spy towers and aerial surveillance, much is revealed. Old notions crumble. The might of the U.S. security state is rendered irrelevant by poor people in sneakers. The shrill debate over immigration is drowned out—by helicopter traffic and by the silence of mourning. Instead there are mere facts: a $500 million-dollar wall and triple-digit temperatures; human desperation licking at finite resources; cartels, coyotes, and luckless poor people dying on the rocks.

The spectral scenes I witnessed five years ago are similar to those that Wolcott describes today in a remote canyon outside Tucson:

Scores of cheap nylon backpacks, heaps of abandoned clothes, empty tins of chilies, sun-bleached plastic jugs, dirty socks hanging from tree branches. Dainty lace brassieres. Stick deodorants, lipsticks, plastic combs, and half-used tubes of toothpaste. A pair of blue satin panties with rose appliqués. Wads of black plastic garbage bags piled against boulders, partly buried by storm-washed gravel. A child’s tiny toy boat.

Wolcott’s guide surveys the heap of trash and says, “This has been cleaned up since the last time I was here. It was knee-deep then.”

When you view scenes like this, when you see such personal items, it’s impossible not to wonder what happened to the people who left them behind. In my head I ran through likely scenarios that, like the images of the trash, stayed with me for months afterwards.

Wolcott’s mind leaps to similarly sad musings:

I look at the packs and know that, for each one, a person has walked away. Who got lost? Who got raped? Who has been deported and is, right now, buying another backpack?

Humans never fail to amaze. When I recently posted about the drug legalization issue and Mexico, I hadn’t yet seen this intriguing column on Tom Tancredo from Sunday’s Denver Post.

Last week, when Time Magazine’s Joe Klein listed all the reasons why legalizing marijuana made sense, somehow he missed this one.

Imagine what making pot legal in the U.S. would do for Mexico too.

It seems that all that frantic fence-building along the U.S.-Mexican border is proving no match for determined drug cartels.

The wildlife, on the other hand, may be having a tougher time.  To document and chronicle this largely ignored story (it’s been two years since Congress, at the height of illegal immigrant hysteria, enacted the Secure Fence Act), a team of conservation photographers and biologists  have just embarked on a three week journey into the borderlands.

For a  glimpse of what may lurk ahead for this bunch, check out Jonathan Thompson’s recent account from the “narco trail.” At the very least, it will make you think twice about making a family stopover in southern Arizona’s backcountry.