For years the Mexicans merely facilitated transshipment of cocaine and marijuana on behalf of the more powerful Colombian cartels.93 In the mid-1990s conditions changed. The Colombian cartels began to fracture. First, the Medellin Cartel’s boss, Pablo Escobar, was jailed, then escaped and was killed by DEA commandos. With that, his organization began to splinter and was superseded by the Cali Cartel, which is said to have opened the route through Mexico; soon that cartel’s leaders were also rounded up.94
A month after Pablo Escobar was killed, the United States and Mexico signed NAFTA. The late Ken Dermota—a great American journalist who interviewed the imprisoned Pablo Escobar and covered the Columbian drug war better than most—reported how the Medellin Cartel awaited free trade with the enthusiasm of children on Christmas Eve. On hearing that NAFTA was coming, a trafficker named Juan Fernando Toro told Dermota, “Soon, I’ll be able to ship through Mexico right to the U.S.!”95
The Mexican adjuncts of the Colombian organizations soon began to mature, becoming more sophisticated and independent.96 The year leading up to NAFTA, 1993, was also the year Amado Carrillo Fuentes, aka “Lord of the Skies,” founded the Juarez Cartel. A year later, the DEA estimated that 80 percent of cocaine destined for US markets was entering through Mexico, making that country the new center of the Western Hemisphere’s narcotics trade.97 A confidential report called “Drug Trafficking, Commercial Trade and NAFTA on the Southwest Border” produced in 1998 by Operation Alliance, a task force led by the US Customs Service, found traffickers were using “commercial trade-related businesses . . . to exploit the rising tide of cross-border commerce.”98 Phil Jordan, a former DEA official, explained, “For Mexico’s drug gangs, the NAFTA was a deal made in narco-heaven. But since both the United States and Mexico are so committed to free trade, no one wants to admit it has helped the drug lords. It’s a taboo subject. . . . While I was at DEA, I was under strict orders not to say anything negative about free trade.”99
Dermota connected the dots: “In the crucial period straddling the inception of NAFTA, Mexico’s imports of legal goods from Colombia increased from $17 million in 1990 to $121 million in 1995, while Mexico’s trade with the United States doubled.” Clearly much of the increased trade was cover for Colombian traffickers, many of whom own and use legitimate companies to move cocaine into Mexico. In 1995, Dermota asked the US ambassador to Colombia if American officials worried that free trade might increase the flow of drugs. The ambassador explained, “It was felt by those who supported NAFTA and by the Clinton Administration that using the argument that any increase in trade could increase drug trafficking and money laundering was not a sufficient argument to overcome the need of the United States for increasing markets for its exports abroad and also to engage in greater trade with countries of the region.”100
By 1996, the DEA described a Mexican drug federation made up of four major cartels: the Tijuana Organization, the Sonora Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, and the Gulf Group. By the end of the decade, the Tijuana and the Juarez cartels were said to be strongest. Cocaine was still produced in the Andes, but heroin poppies and marijuana were being grown and processed in a few regions of central and northern Mexico, particularly in the states of Michoacán, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua. The cartels’ organization and diplomacy allowed the new breed of traffickers to sink deep roots into the political power structure and the fabric of everyday life. Corruption deepened in profound and dangerous ways. The post-NAFTA traffickers became increasingly professional and intertwined with the state.
Robert Collier, then foreign editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, painted a grimly humorous picture of the quotidian police corruption that now marked life: “At federal police headquarters . . . virtually all the agents wear heavy gold jewelry and gold watches and drive their own late-model, four-wheel-drive vehicles. Three shoeshine boys permanently work the station’s hallways, keeping a sparkle on the agents’ alligator-skin boots.” When Collier asked a cop how he could afford a new Jeep Cherokee on merely $500 a month, the officer replied, “I save a lot.” When Collier asked a Federal Police commander, who was busy busting small marijuana farmers, about Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the commander explained, “I’m not aware of any problems with Mr. Carrillo. . . . There are no major trafficking organizations here in this state.”101
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, methamphetamine also became part of the industry. Again, it was a crackdown north of the border that pushed the action south. New restrictions in the United States on the sale of the cold medications ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the primary ingredients for methamphetamine production, pushed much of the industrial scale meth cooking into Mexico, where trade in these legal precursors to the drug was booming.102
Destabilization
The relative stability of these new corporate-style cartels was not to last. First, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died during botched plastic surgery. A power struggle among his lieutenants ensued, and rival cartels attempted to move in on the Juarez Cartel.103 In recent years, the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels and the gangs that work for them, like the Aztecas, have been fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez. After a brief plateau, the violence was again on the rise.
In response to the crisis, rightwing Mexican president Felipe Calderón, who hails from the cowboy culture of Chihuahua, sent in the Mexican army. That might sound like a major step, but it was mere political theater. The deployment came with no real strategy and no additional resources, like extra prosecutors, judges, or development money. Military repression does not set the stage for rebuilding law and order and renovating corrupt civilian institutions. The presence of troops has not changed the fact that very few people are prosecuted for committing murder in Juarez. And the violence only seems to increase.
Already elements of elite Mexican army units have gone over to the drug cartels: the Zetas, ex–special forces, who served the traffickers as muscle, have become their own gang and sometimes get directly involved in trafficking. Some thirty thousand deaths later, President Calderón’s crackdown has clearly failed.104 It pretends to offer a solution, but the situation only gets worse.
Anthony Placido, assistant administrator for intelligence with the DEA, told members of Congress, “The single largest impediment to seriously impacting the drug trafficking problem in Mexico is corruption. . . . In actuality, law enforcement in Mexico is all too often part of the problem rather than part of the solution. This is particularly true at the municipal and state levels of government.”105 Perhaps the most spectacular example of this was the arrest of Noé Ramírez, formerly the head of Mexico’s elite antidrug agency. He was charged with accepting a bribe of $450,000 to leak intelligence from his old colleagues to narcos.106 It is now clear: there is rot at the heart of the Mexican state.
Which Way Mexico?
In December 2008, Forbes magazine described Mexico as a “failed state.” Former Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey wrote a memorandum that described Mexico as “fighting for survival against narco-terrorism.” In January 2009, planners with the US Special Forces published a threat assessment report that said, “In terms of worst-case scenarios . . . two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. . . . The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent, by Mexico, into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”107
The Mexican government took immediate, and intense, umbrage at this statement; President Calderón called it “absurd.”108 Jorge Castañeda—the man who interprets all things political and Mexican for the North American chattering classes—also rejected the label, reassuring Americans that Mexico “today controls virtually all of its national territory and . . . exercises a
quasi monopoly on the use of force within its borders.”109
A very different assessment appeared in a front-page editorial in the main Juarez paper El Diario, after sicarios gunned down yet another of its young reporters. An open letter to the city’s drug lords, the editorial was titled “¿Qué quieren de nosotros?” or “What do you want from us?” The most chilling lines, in essence, admitted the defeat of reason and law in Juarez: “What are we supposed to publish or not publish, so we know what to abide by,” pleaded the editorial. “You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling.”110
Mexico is not a failed state, but its formless crisis of violence and lawlessness precludes any rational response, or progressive adaptation, to climate change. It is hard to see how this social structure can survive the next fifty years if emissions of greenhouse gases continue at their current pace along a trajectory of unmitigated fossil fuel consumption. A land of billionaires and hungry masses, of drought and floods, one whose social structure and institutions are infected with the gangrene of narco corruption, is not one that can adapt to rising sea levels, extreme weather, declining crop yields, and the mass migrations these processes will set in motion.
CHAPTER 15
American Walls and Demagogues
Illegal immigration? Put a fence up and start shooting.
—SAM WURZELBACHER , aka Joe the Plumber
JOSÉ ROMERO, an agent with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), drove me along the El Paso sector of the frontier with Mexico—260 miles long, with 86 miles of metal fencing. Not far away, on the other side, lay Tanila Garcia’s shack. Romero was what you would expect: spit-shined, sporting a crew cut and dark brown uniform, a third-generation Chicano, by the book, ideologically all-American, and a nice host.
“If you have an illegal that crosses here, you can pick them up by their tracks if they cross these breaks. Then the agents can move up to the next section to find where they cross again,” Romero said, as he showed me the wide dirt belts, raked bare to catch migrants running north.
Climate change will increase the number of people trying to enter the United States. Recall the estimates that by 2050 as many as 250 million to 1 billion people will be on the move due to climate change.1 Britain’s 2006 Stern Review estimated that by the latter half of this century, climate change will create 10 times the current number of refugees.2 In this context, the border becomes a text from which to read the future—or a version of it. Here we see how the catastrophic convergence simultaneously creates both state failure in the Global South and authoritarian state hardening in the Global North.
Climate change is an increasingly important driver of immigration. Describing the greenwashing of xenophobia in the US Southwest, Andrew Ross wrote, “An estimated 50 million people have already been displaced by the impact of climate change, and the numbers will escalate in years to come. In northern Mexico, a primary source of migrants to Arizona, soil is eroding rapidly from the decline in precipitation, and studies predict that regional rainfall could decrease by 70 percent by the century’s end. Are the emissions pumped into the desert air above central Arizona’s sprawl already responsible, however indirectly, for some portion of the 500,000 undocumented migrants in the state?”3 While the deeper causes of environmental crisis—suburban sprawl and overconsumption—remain unaddressed, repression, surveillance, and violence are emerging as the preferred forms of adaptation. Never mind emissions mitigation as a response to immigration.
Already much of the 1,969-mile US-Mexico border resembles the front lines of a quiet war. One side is defined by the misery of the slums packed along the fence in the great border cities like Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Matamoros, and Juarez. Here, people like Tanila Garcia struggle to feed themselves, while a rising tide of violence swamps and incapacitates society. To the north, 700 miles of steel fencing, military-surplus motion sensors, infrared cameras, and a sky patrolled by unmanned aerial drones and National Guard helicopters characterize the line.4
The 1990s were radical growth years for border militarization and all manner of beating up on immigrants. The Department of Justice saw its budget more than double between 1991 and 2002. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the creation of the DHS, funding for anti-immigrant enforcement has only risen. As border scholar Peter Andres explained, “Law enforcement has been the fastest area of federal government expansion since the end of the Cold War, and its biggest components have been immigration control, drug enforcement, and counterterrorism”—all categories that feed parasitically upon “the border” as political project, militarized space, and xenophobic notion.5
Our current style of anti-immigrant policing—of which climate change will surely bring more—is eroding civil liberties and thus fundamentally transforming America, returning the nation to its more primitive condition: a herrenvolk democracy based on segregation and routine violence, in which race and nationality mask raw class power. Border militarization and interior enforcement are the legal gray zone where the US Bill of Rights is most radically curtailed. Immigrants are the canaries in the political coal mine, and immigration is the vehicle by which the logic of the “state of emergency” is smuggled into everyday life, law, and politics.
Spirit of War
The idea of emergency, or the state of exception, is crucial in the political theory of authoritarian states. Carl Schmitt famously theorized the legal basis of dictatorship in Nazi Germany by resort to this notion. In this tradition, emergencies are the means by which democracies smuggle in authoritarian, or absolutist, politics and law enforcement. Political theorist Giorgio Agamben argues that “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.”6 In the United States, the drift toward authoritarianism has so far been driven less by genuine emergencies and more by the crass political theater of posturing candidates and elected officials. Witness, for example, the 2005 declaration of a “border emergency” by then governors Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano, of New Mexico and Arizona, respectively, both Democrats.7
Anti-immigrant policing involves a weird alchemy in which the tools of war and a lack of due process at the border are insinuating themselves into the duties of regular law enforcement and reshaping the everyday practices of state power. Border enforcement involves new equipment, expanded police powers, and unprecedented interagency cooperation. The immigration cops of the Department of Homeland Security—the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP—work in joint task forces with the FBI, DEA, local police, and elements of the armed forces. The whole border region now exists in a legal twilight where the US Constitution no longer necessarily applies.
Consider this: “The border” as a legal space is now a 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the entire land and sea boundary of the United States and thus encompasses two-thirds of the US population—or 197.4 million people and 9 of the nation’s top 10 largest metropolitan areas.
Normally, the Fourth Amendment prohibits random and arbitrary searches. However, when you cross the international line, different rules apply—even citizens do not have full Fourth Amendment rights. To enter the country, one must show identification and allow one’s belongings to be searched. Authorities do not need probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Thanks to post-9/11 administrative changes, similar rules extend to the whole “border region,” though in practice these laws are only used regularly in the Southwest.
Yet, even on the Canadian border, the Border Patrol now stops buses, runs checkpoints on highways, and questions drivers on noninternational ferries in Washington State and on Lake Champlain, between Vermont and New York. Legally speaking, these are “administrative stops” in which the Border Patrol is only allowed to ask for proof of citizenship. But the stops freq
uently go beyond that. A search that begins as administrative can easily escalate as officials find this or that detail suspicious. And when the CBP partners with other police forces, its special border-oriented powers are essentially transferred to their “assisting agencies.”
Urban Border
Urban sectors of the border are now locked down with a penal infrastructure of guard towers, 18-foot-high walls topped in some spots with triple coils of razor wire, infrared TV cameras, hypersensitive microphones, thousands of high-tech motion sensors, and scores of new, mobile, stadium-style klieg floodlights. Patrolling the line are 20,000 Border Patrol agents, supported by more than 37,000 civilian staff and customs inspectors. The CBP has more than 500 pilots and 250 aircraft, making it the world’s largest nonmilitary law enforcement air force.8 Varying numbers of DEA and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents are in the border region at any given time searching for immigrant lawbreakers. So, too, are 6,000 military personal and their equipment: machine guns, Humvees, Stryker vehicles, and aircraft.9 Marine and National Guard engineers build access roads and run surveillance operations, while regular National Guard units use border operations as training for overseas deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. 10 Away from the immediate border—in the barrios of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—multiagency operations often involve heavily armed tactical raiding parties backed up by helicopters and dogs and result in mass arrests.
In early 2006, ICE ordered all of its seven-member fugitive operation teams (FOTs), which are meant to be investigation driven and precise in their methods, to boost their annual arrest quotas from 125 to 1,000 per year! Overnight, they were expected to become eight times more productive. 11 There soon followed a wave of mass raids. Among other locations, the FOTs hit six meatpacking plants in Texas, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Utah, and Nebraska. During one Nebraska raid, 12,000 workers were herded together at gunpoint and denied access to phones, bathrooms, families, and legal counsel while ICE agents interrogated them one by one. In this operation, ICE had a warrant identifying 133 workers who were using stolen identities. As a report by the United Food and Commercial Workers later explained, “The federal agents could have—as they did a week earlier at a Swift plant in Louisville, Kentucky—gone to the Human Resources office and asked that the identified suspects be pulled from the production line, so they could question and, if necessary, apprehend them. But the ICE warrant on December 12, 2006, was used less as an effective law enforcement tool and more as a way to grab headlines and stir hysteria around immigration and immigrants.”12
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