Life and Death Along the Border

The border between the United States and Mexico is a twilight zone. There but not there, it is, geographically, a wholly invented line of demarcation, respected not at all by nature. It is imposed by conquest and maintained by military power. But unlike the dikes that the Dutch must constantly build and repair to keep out nature in the form of the relentless sea, there is something bizarre in our fitful effort to stem the tide of a Spanish-speaking humanity that seeks to breach our porous common frontier, where the majority is also Spanish-speaking. Four new books and a report by Amnesty International help illuminate the contentious issues that complicate life in that twilight zone.

“Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future” by Charles Bowden uses the riveting work of 13 of the city’s courageous photojournalists to present El Paso’s across-the-Rio Grande neighbor, a city Bowden, a contributing editor of Esquire, describes as “a Marxist caricature, though it’s hard to say whether it is the work of Karl or Groucho.” Bowden has expanded an acclaimed December 1996 Harper’s magazine article into a book-length window on the underbelly of what used to be described, optimistically in the aftermath of the Cold War, as the new world order. Bowden’s book shows us the devastating effects of that order using a single Mexican border city as the petri dish of turbo-charged runaway capitalism.

Filled with dozens of dramatic and disturbing images of everyday violence against the people of Juarez and against the land itself, Bowden’s book acts, in Kafka’s words, as an ax to break up the frozen sea within us. Bowden takes on the heartless production system that uses border cities as “laboratories” to experiment with how much abuse capital can heap on labor and the environment. None of it makes for easy reading or viewing. Bowden knows this and confesses: “I have looked at hundreds of recent photographs from Juarez, many of which you will never see because . . . there is a limit to how much we can stomach, and that goes for you and that goes for me. . . . I am just like you, I constantly take all these things and push them to the edge of my mind and tell myself they are freakish and marginal and not what life or the future or much of anything is about.” But then reality intrudes, and Bowden tells of a friend “talking about the big sale and installation of office furniture in yet one more foreign-owned factory in Juarez, the two married cops telling of their new life in a self-designed fort, the photograph of the dead girl silenced by stone.” And that is when he hears “the roar of the A train knifing through the warm velvet of the hot summer night and making a blood-red tear across the sky.”

Bowden befriended Juarez’s courageous photojournalists, most of whom work for the city’s daily newspapers, earning the equivalent of $50 to $100 per week (although the cost of living in Juarez is nearly that of El Paso). These brave men and women often beat the police to snap their photos of murder scenes. Color slides show images of bloody corpses, victims of drug cartel executioners and gang members. Bowden describes the rotting corpses of more than 100 young women who were abducted, raped and strangled on their way to and from work at the maquiladoras (foreign-owned production subsidiaries often with American partners across the border).

But it is not only the women who have disappeared. The country itself is, in the minds of many Americans, a vanishing act. As Bowden writes, “Mexico has a tendency to disappear . . . just like the dead girls, just like the hundreds of factories paying miserable wages. It can disappear because we do not want to face it because it is a big problem for which we have no answers that we are eager to live with. Mexico is the bridge to the twenty-first century and we are terrified of crossing this bridge. We prefer to retreat into the theology of global capitalism, a gibberish that is unintelligible yet soothing since it says: things will work out somehow.”

The truth of Juarez tells another story. Photographs depict children scavenging for scraps in garbage dumps; an out-of-control chemical blaze; the body of a worker electrocuted when trying to borrow from a live power line. Others show Mexicans climbing fences and wading across the Rio Grande to go to work in El Paso. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan author of the trilogy “Memory of Fire,” writes in an accompanying afterword of the “premise of politicians, rationale of technocrats, fantasy of the forsaken: the Third World will become like the First World, rich, cultured, happy, if only it behaves itself and does what it is told without kidding around or asking embarrassing questions.” Bowden’s book is full of embarrassing questions and is an indispensable starting point for any serious discussion of the issues of the North American Free Trade Agreement, immigration, gangs, corruption, drug trafficking and poverty.

Sebastian Rotella, a reporter for The Times, takes readers into the underworld of crime, where smuggling drugs and people has grown coincidentally with the formal exchange of goods, now eased by the passage of NAFTA, which allows for unimpeded exchange of capital and goods between the two countries. Rotella reminds us that “after the fall of the Iron Curtain, old borders blurred and new ones materialized around the world.” Meanwhile, the Clinton administration seeks to erect a contemporary Berlin Wall at the border to rationalize the flow of people, especially the unwanted and unwashed, while permitting millions of Americans to cross over to shop, drink or cavort at lower prices unconcerned by the consequences derived from abstract concepts like “free trade.” Which, at least in this case, is a euphemism for foreign investment in places that guarantee low-wage labor and no environmental regulation.

Like Juarez and other border cities, Tijuana has been transformed into a hotbed of 200-plus maquiladoras. It has become an arena for the vast commerce that arose as a result of the free-trade arrangements and for organized crime and wholesale corruption. “Mafias, drugs, immigration, globalization, democratization,” Rotella writes, “the tectonic shifts of the 1990s shaped the border, Mexico and the relationship between Mexico and the United States.” Tijuana became a hub of drug and immigrant trafficking, one of the several entry points for the vast quantities of cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines and marijuana that millions of Americans consume each day. It also became a key point for smuggling into the United States immigrants of many nationalities, who are seeking sustenance for their family or opportunity for themselves with, as Rotella observes, “the same aspirations as the North Africans who brave the Strait of Gibraltar to reach Spain in rafts.”

Rotella examines the dangerous world of drug cartel dons shielded by politicians, army and law enforcement officials. We meet a few honest cops and prosecutors, and some courageous journalists, who end up dead or frustrated. Rotella’s Tijuana is a tinderbox of human hopes and strivings with a concomitant bundle of disappointments and relentless misery. “The border breeds street kids, their families wrenched apart by poverty and migration,” Rotella writes of the kids who sell sex in nearby San Diego’s Balboa Park. He also shows how the illegal drug traders have built symbiotic relationships with politicians, military and law enforcement officials. Several chapters of the book show how honest cops and prosecutors were foiled in their attempts to curtail the cartels. Yet Rotella seems surprised as if, in the face of a 70-year-old system of corruption compounded by the coarsening texture of the new world trading order, a few honest cops and prosecutors could somehow turn things around.

While Rotella does a fine job of casting a powerful spotlight on America’s “insatiable appetite” for drugs, which makes the drug issue insoluble, he fails to examine Mexican government officials’ connivance with maquiladora management to break independent unions. Nor does he probe the 1997 Han Young (Hyundai) strike, one of Tijuana’s most important stories, in which truck chassis workers launched a successful drive to establish an independent union.

Similarly, Rotella treads lightly over the environmental challenge, which, like the labor issue, is at the heart of the border problem. The toxic waste pouring out of unregulated factories fills the surrounding land, air and water. Some workers live in areas so littered with corroding batteries their shoes are eaten through. Inside the plants, arc welders work without eye shields; poor ventilation allows noxious gases to fill the production site. The industrial zones on the border have become pollution zones.

But Rotella fails to root this reality in any larger context. To be sure, he mentions Tijuana’s structural inability to deal with the massive migration of people who come to work in the new factories, but unlike Bowden, he does not link the maquiladora economy to the culture of corruption or to the dramatic and growing maldistribution of wealth in Mexico. He picks gently at the roots of the border crisis he describes by pointing a finger at the Reagan administration’s “hurried hiring pushes” to fulfill a promise to “secure the border.” His reporting is undercut by a superficial scrutiny of the underlying factors, which have combined to produce the reality he is otherwise at pains to describe.

Meanwhile, David Burckhalter gives us a series of 53 black-and-white photographs in “La Vida Norten~a,” which tells how Mexicans in the border state of Sonora cling desperately to their distinct culture in the face of modernism’s onslaught. In one photograph, for example, a figure carries water up a dry hill; the accompanying text by Thomas Sheridan interprets the image as revealing “the tenacity of people trying to scratch a living from ground so bare it couldn’t support a coyote or a goat.” Sheridan adds that “there is hunger in these photographs, for land, for a better life, for life itself.” Burckhalter’s melancholy portraits are excellent and he is a photographer of the first rank. His book is a broadside against “the encroaching shopping culture that threatens to erase ancient wisdom with its glitter and glare.”

In “Bordertown,” Barry Gifford joins with David Perry to sketch some quotidian vignettes about how two gringos discover poverty, misery, love, fun and violence on the other side of the Rio Grande. Gifford begins by reminding us that “in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States provoked a war with Mexico and seized control of much of the country: lands that became New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California.” Then, 150 years later, after agreeing to a free trade arrangement with Mexico, the American public apparently grew frightened of our new “democratic” partner. Indeed, just as President Clinton put his signature to the trade treaty, xenophobia reared its ugly head to warn of the dangers of millions of “undesirable” (i.e. poor) Mexicans infiltrating the United States, debasing the nation’s morality and sucking precious funds from the public till. Some of the same Californians--and voters in other states--who favored free trade also backed a proposition that would make life beyond difficult for those of our Mexican partners who look for work here “illegally.”

Finally, Amnesty International released just last week a chilling document that focuses on recent incidents of brutality by officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS in its zeal to close the border and wage a war on drugs--with the assistance of the army--has clearly aggravated the historic turbulence and friction along the border, according to the report. “The recent history of the U.S. military’s involvement along the U.S.-Mexico border,” the report notes, “dates back to 1981 when President Reagan’s administration loosened and began to circumvent the historic Posse Comitatus Act of 1879 which had formerly prohibited the use of the military for domestic law-enforcement. Military personnel were now permitted for the first time to assist civilian law enforcement agencies and were enlisted in the so-called War on Drugs along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Juxtaposing specific incidents--beatings, rape, denial of food and water--with various international covenants on civil and political rights, the organization makes a compelling case for an overhaul of INS policies and procedures. And none too soon: The border patrol wants to increase its staff from 6,300 agents today to 10,300 by the year 2001.

“The West is living the euphoria of victory,” concludes Eduardo Galeano in Bowden’s book. “In the West: justice sacrificed in the name of freedom, on that altar of the god of Productivity. In the East: freedom sacrificed in the name of justice, on the altar of the god of Productivity. In the South, we still have the chance to ask ourselves if that god deserves our lives.” Taken together, the quintet of books under consideration here ask that terrible question. The answer, one suspects, will comfort no one.