Barrier, Call for Boycott Stir Border Anxiety

With rumbles about Mexico-bashing, U.S. blockades and anti-American economic boycotts dominating the feisty local press, the vociferous reaction to the latest border news was predictable.

“The Blockade Intensifies,” one headline exclaimed last week. Newspapers on both sides of the border talked with anger or anxiety about the potential of the boicot being urged by some Tijuana leaders. And one headline even thundered about “Military Maneuvers” on the U.S. side of the international line.

In reality, the Army and Border Patrol had merely begun constructing a steel barrier at Imperial Beach, one of the few unfenced sections of the San Diego-Tijuana boundary, where the border dwindles to an imaginary line in the sand.

But the timing was both suspicious and advantageous to those Tijuana leaders who back the economic boycott of San Diego by Mexicans next month.

The beach barrier represents “an act of ill will,” said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, Baja California’s human rights ombudsman. He supports the boycott, set for Nov. 20 and 21 in response to a series of perceived affronts to Mexico: the immigration control campaign by California politicians, fierce opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Border Patrol’s blockade in El Paso--which some U.S. officials want to impose along the California border.

The boycott proposal reflects concern and exasperation on this side of the border. From the office of Baja California’s governor to the urban beach where scruffily dressed migrants gather to go north, Mexicans say the simultaneous U.S. push for NAFTA and more border control is contradictory.

“It is not consistent,” said Baja Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel in an interview. “If we are talking about establishing mechanisms to exchange our advantages, whether in services or in products, things are happening in the opposite direction, such as these administrative measures . . . by the Border Patrol. It’s as if the mind is going in one direction and the hands are doing something else.”

Ruffo is the first governor in Mexican history representing the National Action Party, a right-of-center opposition party. Like other PAN leaders in the border state, he is pragmatic about forging ties with his U.S. counterpart and tends to refrain from the florid nationalistic rhetoric directed at the United States by some Mexican politicians.

Ruffo emphasized that the good relationship between the two states has not suffered, but expressed disappointment with the anti-immigration measures being advanced by Gov. Pete Wilson and other U.S. politicians.

“It makes the environment more difficult,” Ruffo said. “I hope that in California in particular, this problem will not be used as part of a political strategy.”

While taking pains to avoid direct criticism of Wilson, Ruffo made it clear that Wilson’s suggestion that Mexican authorities help prevent illegal border-crossing in Tijuana is unacceptable and would violate Mexican law. Ruffo said a better solution would be for the United States to consider legalizing undocumented workers who have proven necessary to the economy.

And the governor said he understands the boycott campaign but declines to endorse it.

In Tijuana, the border crackdown is seen by many as part of a cynical cycle in which the U.S. government toughens and eases obstacles to illegal immigrants as they are needed.

“When the fruit is ready for picking, they let us pass,” said Jose Silis, who said he has been crossing since 1966, often using the Imperial Beach route. “The U.S. is paying welfare to a lot of people who just spend the money on drugs and don’t want to work. That’s why they need the Mexicans.”

Silis, a wire-thin 53-year-old with tired eyes, sat on a bluff overlooking the ocean in the Playas de Tijuana neighborhood Thursday afternoon, watching Army construction crews at work on the barrier. He and two other men engaged in an animated discussion about U.S.-Mexico relations, saying the beach symbolizes a history of conflict and tolerance at the border.

In the past, beach-goers of both nationalities flowed back and forth across the line, generally unbothered by Border Patrol agents watching from a hilltop park--unless they tried to sneak north.

Musical trios in cowboy hats serenaded family picnics. Relatives separated by their immigration status talked in the shadow of the bowl-shaped Tijuana bullring. Vendors sold food and drinks to waiting migrants.

“Everything was peaceful,” said Silis, water bottle and duffel bag at his side. “The agents did not bother you.”

At night, however, the scene changes into one of the busiest illegal crossing corridors in Tijuana. Border Patrol agents from the Imperial Beach station intercepted a record amount of marijuana and cocaine this year, often transported in backpacks by drug-runners. There have been violent confrontations between agents and border-crossers at the beach and shootouts with robbers in the dark.

The new barrier was needed, said Border Patrol spokeswoman Ann Summers, “to reduce the risk to the agents as well as the aliens.”

Instead of building a solid fence like the one covering nearly 14 miles of border near here, the Border Patrol is installing closely spaced steel pilings that will extend about 340 feet into the surf and allow for the shift of sand.

Although officials said the start of construction has nothing do with politics, Silis and his friends see it as part of an anti-Mexican attitude in the United States that also encompasses resistance to free trade.

“They should sign the free trade treaty right away,” said one man, a farm worker who asked not to be identified. “That would stop the immigration. They should stop messing around and sign it.”

Nonetheless, the migrants on the beach expressed ambivalence about the proposed boycott of San Diego, which--if successful--would make a dramatic statement: Tijuanans spend about a $2.6 billion a year in the San Diego area, according to one study.

The idea is modeled on a boycott launched by leaders in Ciudad Juarez in retaliation for the El Paso blockade, which has been roundly denounced by Mexico. Although critics pay lip service to the U.S. right to police its borders, they say stepped-up enforcement has hurt legal commerce as well.

Tijuana Mayor Hector Osuna Jaime predicted in a recent interview that widespread participation in the San Diego boycott would not materialize.

“The sentiments of the people of Tijuana are not easily pushed to a radical attitude,” he said.

The potentially explosive mood at the border seems likely to heat up further: The U.S Congress has just approved a major increase in Border Patrol forces and will soon take up the debate on NAFTA.

Some in Mexico predict that rejection of NAFTA would cause profound damage to U.S.-Mexico relations, with top officials hinting at the potential resurgence of fading anti-American sentiment.

Ruffo, on the other hand, said he believes transborder economic and political cooperation will progress, although less rapidly, even if Congress rejects the treaty.

“I know that it will be approved sooner or later,” the governor said. “I hope that we can all understand this and don’t take the events that happen today as determining our future relationship for the next 10 or 15 years.

“We must be reasonable. If today it can’t happen . . . perhaps in five years. We should not close the door.”