Mexico recognized the power of song by outlawing recordings of drug ballads – or narcocorridos - in an effort to dampen popular enthusiasm for the violent drug-lord heroes. The U.S. Border Patrol is hoping Border Patrol Ballads – or Migra Corridos – will dampen popular enthusiasm for heading north.
Produced by the D.C.-based Hispanic advertising agency, Elevación, the songs warn of the dangers of crossing.
In one, called The Biggest Enemy, a singer called Abelardo from the Mexican state of Michoacan and his cousin Rafael set off to cross the border.
They reach the US but nature defeats them, as they wander the desert without water. Exhuasted they lie down with Abelardo waking later to find his cousin dead by his side:
“He decided to come back/ And have a burial in their town/ And as a vow/ He told his dead cousin/ If God will take my life/ That it be in my beloved land.”
An initial 5-song album was distributed free to Mexican radio stations two years ago. The U.S. Border Patrol and Elevación are set to release a second in May.
For many immigrants the recession means it’s time to head home. With unemployment among Mexican immigrants at 9.7 percent in January (up from 4.5 percent last March) Foreign Policy reports expert predictions of an exodus of nearly three million people.
Mexico’s central bank announced in late January that 20,000 of the migrants who returned for Christmas won’t go back to the United States. Officials in Mexican states such as Michoacán, Puebla, and Zacatecas, which send some of the largest numbers of migrants north each year, are predicting a mass return as more migrants give up on the land of opportunity. Fewer migrants than ever are leaving Mexico, too, according to the Mexican government, with the emigration rate dropping 46 percent since 2006.
Posted in Ben, Clara on December 1st, 2008 by Border Stories
We’ve just wrapped up a visit to Turkey where we attended a conference sponsored by Koç (pronounced “coach”) University. It went under the title “Irregular Migration at Two Borders: The Turkish-EU and Mexican-USA Cases”. If that seems like an ambitiously broad scope for a one and a half day conference, that’s because it is. The goal of the university is to eventually compile the research of the conference’s participants as well as the round table discussion into some sort of publication, so we’ll keep you updated.
But for now, we wanted to highlight a report Human Rights Watch presented at the conference which brought the differences between the U.S.-Mexico and E.U.-Turkey borders into focus.
A person seeking asylum is a rare thing on the U.S.-Mexico border. In the 1980s, refugees from Central American conflict were common, and in the past few months the flow of refugees fleeing drug violence has increased. But the number of Iraqis, Afghans and others flowing into Turkey and to the limits of the E.U. is in the thousands. The Human Rights Watch report notes that instances of migrants apprehended in Greece seeking asylum have risen substantially over the past few years: 5 times more 2007 than in 2003. During that time, the majority of these potential refugees came from Iraq.
The report focuses on the treatment of those apprehended in both Greece and Turkey. Through numerous interviews, it uncovers a pattern of systematic abuses in both countries. The report’s author, Bill Frelick, said he saw Greek police loading up boats with migrants and shoving the oar-less craft across the Evros river onto Turkish shores. It is likely that some in those boats had legitimate claims to political asylum in the EU. The human rights guarantee of asylum is that a person not be sent back to a country where they will face persecution, degrading treatment, or worse. The report notes that in Greece a whopping %0.04 of asylum claims are approved. Sadly, Greece is handling a large amount of EU asylum seekers.
Geographically, Turkey is the perfect funnel for migrant traffic from the middle east to the EU via land or sea, and the European asylum system forces refugees to apply for asylum in the first place they arrive. So, between the difficulties of making their way into Europe and those associated with actually being approved for asylum in Greece, refugees are stuck as the Spanish expression goes entre la espada y la pared, between the sword and the wall.
A last ditch effort by environmental groups to block the Department of Homeland Security from waiving federal laws to build the border fence faltered today. The Supreme Court won’t take the case.
I’m a law student to be, and I find it difficult to find support for the legal reasoning behind the Justices’ decision. The organizations bringing the appeal – the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife – were claiming that Chertoff’s waiver unconstitutionally undermined the separation of power by depending on the REAL ID act, which claims executive power to override federal laws in the interest of national security. Under the REAL ID act, the executive branch can essentially tell the Congress to go stuff it. Their laws don’t matter in national security situations.
There is certainly a valid argument for an executive powers that can provide for national security, but the Supremes have not yet examined the powers vested in the executive branch by the REAL ID act. It’s time to do so, and this case was a great opportunity.
Disappointing.
As Ben said in the last post, we’re away from the border for the first time in the three months. Look for new stories every two weeks, instead of each week. Tomorrow, we’ll debut one of my personal favorites in the Border Stories series: a profile of a lone Minuteman near Campo, CA.
Think the TV show “Cops,” but the good guys are busting drug smugglers, illegal immigrants and terrorists. ABC network
has ordered 11 hours of “Border Security USA” from executive producer Arnold Shapiro (“Big Brother”). Shot on location throughout the United States, the series will focus on the efforts of border protection agencies to halt illegal smuggling and immigration.
A typical episode might jump from a border patrol in Texas to security screeners at a New York airport to a Coast Guard boat off Puerto Rico (from The Hollywood Reporter).
Best is producer Arnold Shapiro’s description of how Border Security USA will tell the “other side of the story.”
“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” he said. “This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”
We crossed through the San Ysidro – Tijuana port of entry yesterday for the first time. A river of cars, interchanges, pedestrian bridges. This is the border large scale.
The pedestrian plazas on the other side are relics of a time when Tijuana – though tumbledown and perhaps seedy - received enough American visitors to fill the Avenida Revolucion’s bars, cafes, and strip clubs.
No one goes there anymore.
As we made our way south on interstate 5 to the border, Mexican doctors gathered to protest the government’s inability to curb kidnappings. Last month one gunfight left 13 dead. Indeed,
Homicides related to organized crime have jumped 47 percent so far this year: 1,378 deaths compared with 940 in the same period last year. (link)
How to make sense of all this violence? Most agree it’s related to an aggressive crackdown by Mexican President Felipe Calderon on drug cartels that seems to be shaking up the previously established balances of power. State sponsored military might is being met with military-style drug brigades.
All of this was on my mind this morning when I read about New Mexico Governor Richardson’s efforts to urge congress to approve Plan Merida - a bi-national aid package with a heavy emphasis on preparing Mexican police and armed forces to make a real stand against drug cartels. Proponents argue the $1.4 billion three-year plan would improve border security by bankrolling military and law enforcement materiel acquisitions in exchange for Mexican assurances to investigate possible human rights violations by the military. But in the same meeting, Mexican President Felipe Calderon blamed U.S. drug users for creating the voracious demand that fuels the drug trade.
It makes me think about the unified chorus we’ve been hearing lately from anti and pro-immigrant interviewees. Everyone’s against crossing the border illegally. It’s dangerous and there’s just too much money to be made on it by bad people. As far away as a ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ seems at this point, talk of making it less profitable to spirit illegal drugs across the boundary seems confined to some well-justified grousing by a President who will almost certainly take the Merida Initiative money, if it indeed comes down the pipeline.
on Mexican route 2, which takes a straight shot from Sonoyta, Mexico to the two San Luis that provide a port of entry into Yuma, Az. Sonoyta is just south of the border town Lukeville, which we found out has been given the unfortunate handle “Gringo Pass” by the its owner.
At first the van, filled with thousands of dollars of video equipment and computers, growled out gamely into the desert, its occupants in the dreamy haze of the “This American Life” podcast. We shared the narrow strip with fearless semi-trucks and buses out into a harsh landscape, dry desert, with no green accents, mountains like miniature Yosemite-style peaks, places where the hills are so jagged Department of Homeland Security saw no need to fence them. These were the only breaks in the constant tattoo of vehicle barrier or steel fence.
We had just interviewed with Tom and Dena Kay, ranchers near Arivaca who have witnessed gun battles (presumably between drug runners) on their border land, and the car barrier they praised for making their lives safer felt relatively unobtrusive. It’s simply a row of concrete-anchored posts connected by strands of barbed wire, to keep the livestock in.
It was fifty miles before the scream of the oil level alarm interrupted Ira Glass and brought us to a quick halt on the wrong side of the road. Hot oil was dripping from the back of the car. Diagnosis: a relatively innocuous failure in the tube used to fill up the oil reservoir. Duct tape had us back in action, but assuming we needed more oil than we carried, we tried for an hour to flag down one in a near constant stream of traffic. Finally, a soldierly young man slowed his truck, and cheerfully donated some motor oil.
The wall accompanying the highway 100 yards north then became what DHS calls the pedestrian barrier, a 30-foot high steel post and mesh construction on a sandy desert floor. We parked near it to give rocky a chance to pee. Parked nearly permanently. The rear wheels spin themselves into dry, hot, ditches. We needed a friendly tug out, we decided, preferably from a pickup. No one stopped.
An apricot sun slunk down the horizon, the air was still hot, but now ominous. A rundown truck blew its tires as it passed. The driver pulled over up the road to repair the damage, men piled out. We made a deal, beers for some strong backs and we were back on the road, sipping the night air.
Another sign of lawlessness Ciudad Juarez: gunmen killed the assistant police chief, Juan Antonio Roman, last night. He was the first on a hit list of police officers published by one of the drug cartels last February. Four others on the list have already been attacked, two killed. We mentioned the hit list, known around Juarez by the ominous handle, ‘la lista,’ in our story about Carlos Huerta, a journalist for El Norte de Ciudad Juarez, who received death threats from one of the cartels in January.
Say “border documentary” these days and most people seem to insert the word “fence” right between “border” and “documentary,” a piece of mental approximation soon followed by: “what’shappening with the wall?”
Though we here at Border Stories have a broader focus, federal plans to construct nearly 700 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border are foremost in the minds of many of the Americans we meet here on the border, some of whom are committed to a full-pitched battle against the project. And outside of this region, news reports on the implementation of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 consistently place above the fold.
So what is happening with the fence – and the plans to build it?
In short, the Department of Homeland Security is in a race to build all 670 miles of fence provided for in the Secure Fence Act of 2006 before a Dec. 31, 2008 deadline. The good news, for DHS, is that nearly 240 miles have already been constructed in California, New Mexico and Arizona much of it by the National Guard troops stationed there under Operation Jumpstart.
In Texas, where the Rio Grande traces a ‘friendlier’ border, DHS contractors struggled for months just to get the lay of the land; local landowners slowed progress on the fence by denying federal surveyors access to their land. That well-covered battle appears to be winding down after U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, denied a motion to dismiss a federal condemnation lawsuit against Eloisa Tamez, a Lipan Apache who owns three acres of land on the border in El Calaboz, TX.
Hanen’s decision may quell that legal skirmish, but a larger one is a-brewing. The Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife are challenging DHS’s waiver of a smorgasbord of federal laws under the REAL ID act, including environmental reviews. The Supreme Court may hear the case in its next session.
If the Supremes slow down the race to the Dec. 31 finish line at all, the future of the fence depends on the preferences of the incoming administration, and on the Democratic side it looks like we’d see major changes.
Democratic presidential candidates Senators Clinton and Obama both voted for the fence legislation…
but they sound lukewarm about the actual construction of the fence on the campaign trail. As Clinton says in this clip, they “were voting for the possibility that where it was appropriate and made sense, it would be considered.”
Border Stories is planning to leave El Paso/Juarez this week and enter the western portion of this border, where there is a lot more fencing already constructed. We’ll try get some images of fence construction out to you and spend some time talking to people in communities that already have border fences.
Oh, and by the way. There is a very knowledgeable and engaged someone working on an activist- “border fence documentary,” Nat Stone. Check out his youtube clips here.
There’s really not that many opportunities to connect to the internet in Big Bend and the area west of there. Suffice to say, it’s been beautiful and we’ll break the silence soon.
There’s really not that many opportunities to connect to the internet in Big Bend and the area west of there. Suffice to say, it’s been beautiful and we’ll break the silence soon.