By Chris Hershberger Esh, MCC’s Context Analyst for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Mexico City.
In early September of last year, Guillermo Arevalo Pedroza brought his wife Nora and their two young daughters to a popular picnic spot on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. They were celebrating the close birthdays of his wife and one of his daughters with a barbecue.
As they sat along the riverbanks, a migrant was trying to cross the Rio Grande nearby—a fairly ordinary occurrence along this busy part of the border. U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted him, and drove a boat close to the swimmer to try to apprehend him. Some onlookers on the Mexican side heckled the Border Patrol agents, saying the boat might drown the swimmer. The Border Patrol claims the onlookers threw rocks at them. Then the agents opened fire into the crowded picnic area, fatally wounding Pedroza.
“Everything was covered in blood,” said his wife Nora through tears. “He was already dead. So I started screaming ‘They killed him, they killed him, they have killed him’. The agents heard that I said that they had killed him, and they left.”
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Over the past two years, U.S. Border Patrol agents have killed 18 Mexicans along the border, including 8 for allegedly throwing rocks. Border Patrol policies classify rock throwing as “deadly force,” which means agents are allowed to respond with deadly force.
While most federal agencies in the United States are strapped for cash, however, the Senate recently approved a $46 billion increase in funding to secure the border as an amendment to the immigration reform bill. Most of the money will be used to hire 20,000 more Border Patrol agents and add another 700 miles to the border fence over the next four years. A militarized border might decrease the flow of immigrants into the United States, but in addition to the human cost, there are other unintended consequences. Studies show that undocumented immigrants tend to stay longer in the United States as the border becomes more secure. Further, people continue to cross as long as there is a push/pull to migrate—greater militarization only increases the danger migrants face.
The comprehensive immigration reform bill’s future is uncertain as it awaits passage in the House. What is disconcerting to immigrants rights advocates, however, is that border security seems to be the only piece of reform that receives broad bipartisan support.
When an agency is armed and funded like a division of the U.S. Military rather than local law enforcement, it will behave like an army fighting a foreign aggressor, not citizens looking out for the safety of those around them. The militarization of the U.S./Mexico border puts agents in a war-zone mentality, where security trumps human rights. While the agent that shot Guillermo was acting as an individual, his actions were a symptom of an institutional failure. Mistakes happen, but at some point when those mistakes continue to be repeated over and over within the same agency, the organization must take responsibility.
Last October, Border Patrol agent Nicholas Ivie rushed to a spot near Naco, AZ, where a ground sensor had been tripped. Ivie saw what he thought were two armed smugglers and opened fire, wounding one of them. They fired back, killing Ivie. A few days later, the FBI concluded that the armed figures Ivie fired at were in fact fellow Border Patrol agents on the other side of dense brush. The only people at the scene were two pairs of Border Patrol agents, both of whom thought they were in a shootout with armed smugglers.
Because of the legitimate threat posed by drug cartels and human smugglers (commonly know as coyotes), Border Patrol agents never know what they will find when they respond to a tripped ground sensor or a person trying to jump the fence. In most cases they find harmless migrants entering the United States looking for work, but if the situation is unclear, fear usually trumps rationality and caution. Guns allow a person to feel in control in a threatening situation, and it seems Border Patrol agents have been relying on their guns with increasing frequency.
What would it take to make the border secure? That depends on how one defines “secure.” To the government, “secure” means preventing unauthorized people from crossing the border. By that definition, providing more money to further militarize the border is a reasonable response, no matter the human cost. But if “secure” means “safe” (as most English speakers would agree), militarization leads to insecurity, both for the migrants crossing the desert and the agents in charge of stopping them. The uptick in violence among drug and human smugglers is not a reason for additional militarization, but a response to the militarization that has already occurred. The cartels and coyotes that successfully penetrate the increasingly guarded border can count on an increasingly generous reward for their efforts. Militarization only raises the stakes.
If the United States were to successfully close off its southern border, it would take a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall. “The only nations that have come close to such control were totalitarian,” explains political scientist Rey Koslowski of the State University of New York, “with leaders who had no qualms about imposing border control with shoot-to-kill orders.”
I pray that the United States is not that type of nation.
Check out “A Death on the Border,” by MCC Washington D.C.’s Theo Sitther’s for more on the militarized U.S./Mexico border.
[…] ← The perils of security on the U.S./Mexico border […]