The imposing new border fence running through Nogales is proving to be a treacherous obstacle for suspected illegal immigrants.

(New Wall 20 feet 6 inches 2011 – Old Wall 15 feet 2010)

A Nogales Police Department report says on Aug. 12, a woman broke her leg after climbing the border fence.

Two days later, officers found a second injured fence climber. And a third, suspected illegal immigrant from China fell and broke his leg on Aug 22.

Nogales Fire Department Chief Hector Robles tells the Nogales International that in addition to the height of the fence, adrenaline and miscalculations in determining the distance and angle of a fall ar potential injury factors.

By: Associated Press

photography – Maurice Sherif

But as the U.S. Border Patrol has reinforced the boundary with a new fence, many of these bi-national monuments have been left entirely on the Mexican side of the barriers.

On the scenic stretch of coast where San Diego meets Tijuana, Mexico, the Border Patrol is making the border fence taller and thicker – impenetrable, it hopes, to drug smugglers and illegal crossers.

But peering through the new vertical bars and double mesh on a recent day, you could still make out a marble, pyramid-shaped monument on the other side.

It marks the precise point where Mexico and the U.S. meet, and visitors on opposite sides of the border were once able to approach the monument from both sides and talk through the fence.

But late last year, the Border Patrol moved its fence three feet to the north, fencing the monument out.

This has been happening at monument sites across the Southwest. It began when border fencing started going up in the early 1990s and has continued since 2006, when Congress approved the construction of 700 miles of new fence.

In 2008, the Border Patrol signed an accord with the agency responsible for maintaining the monuments – the International Boundary and Water Commission – agreeing not to disturb the monuments during fence construction.

So, in many places along the border, like San Diego, the Border Patrol built the fence a few feet north of the actual international boundary.

“The fence itself is constructed inside the United States,” said Jerry Conlin, a Border Patrol spokesman. The agreement between the two agencies, he said: “is that any type of construction around a monument would be set back three feet.”

Sally Spener is a spokeswoman for the boundary and water commission, which reviews the Border Patrol’s plans to ensure the fence is not inadvertently built on Mexican territory. She said commission officials had been willing to work with the Border Patrol to maintain access to the monument in San Diego.

She would not say whether the agency responded, but in any case, bi-national access was eliminated.

Now San Diego activists are hoping to convince the Border Patrol to change its fence design to restore access to the monument from both sides.

“A border monument needs to be on the border, not just on one side or the other. It’s a shared marker between two nations,” said Jim Brown, a local architect and activist. “To have the fence jog around and have it be almost ownership by Mexico doesn’t make any emotional sense, it makes no physical sense, it makes no common sense.”

Brown is a member of the Friends of Friendship Park, a group of activists that takes its name after the area where loved ones used to chat through the border fence until access was blocked.

Brown said he’s come up with a relatively simple design change that would make the monument accessible from both sides again.

Conlin said the Border Patrol was willing to listen, but stressed that border security was the agency’s mandate and priority.

David Taylor, an art professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, has been photographing all 276 monuments since he realized the new fencing was going to make many of them inaccessible from the U.S.

He believes the monuments, once a symbol of bi-national cooperation, have become casualties of the push for greater border enforcement.

“It’s one of those very unfortunate situations where this thing that’s part of our shared heritage with Mexico isn’t easily accessible.”

On the other side, visitors have expressed their thoughts too.

An engraving on the monument warns vandals that defacing it is a crime punishable by Mexico or the United States. But someone recently used purple ink to cross out the words, United States.

Fronteras
January 28, 2012
By Adrian Florido

Project organizers say the experience, from the parachute drop-in to the remote road-building and eventual departure on Feb. 27, mirrors the type of mission the 40 soldiers might conduct if they were deployed to a place like Afghanistan.

“This will prepare them for future deployments, especially in the areas of current contingency operations,” said Armando Carrasco, spokesman for the Department of Defense’s Joint Task Force North (JTF North), the agency that coordinated the mission.

Standing on a hilltop above the work site Friday as heavy machinery dug through a steep slope below her, mission commander Lt. Michelle Zak spoke of the difficulties of maneuvering large earth movers around the mountains, canyons and ravines of western Santa Cruz County.

“It’s been challenging, but also a great opportunity for us to train,” she said.

This effort, along with other military road-building projects that have been conducted in the county in recent years, also provides a great opportunity for agents at the U.S. Border Patrol’s Nogales Station to gain better access to some of their hardest-to-control areas.

“You’ve got to look at it as a win-win situation,” said Agent Steven Passement, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.

“One, for the unit that’s here and the units that will come, it’s real-world training experience,” he said. “And for us, we’re getting infrastructure put in place that’s going to be permanent.”

Those permanent roads, built with drainage culverts to keep them from washing out, helps agents responds faster to illegal activity in the area and provide aid more quickly to migrants in distress. What’s more, Passement said, a better road surface means less wear-and-tear on Border Patrol vehicles, and therefore less expenditures on new tires, shock absorbers and struts.

Local residents and businesses are also benefiting from the arrangement. The current group of 40 engineers is staying at a local hotel and spending some of their pocket money at local establishments.

“I know a lot of the soldiers have been out on the town, and they’ve enjoyed the tacos that come from the trucks,” Zak said.

Rancher Dan Bell, who grazes cattle in the same section of Coronado National Forest lands where the road are being built, says he’s seen an improvement in security in the area since the road-building began.

“Prior to these roads going in, there really wasn’t any way to get to the border in a lot of these areas,” Bell said. “It’s allowed (Border Patrol) to actually get down to the border and patrol the actual border rather than a larger area that they’d have to hike or go into on horseback.”

The soldiers themselves are not engaged in any law enforcement activity while on the road-building projects, Carrasco said. That duty is left up to the Border Patrol.

Environmental concerns

Since the construction is taking place on National Forest land, the U.S. Forest Service has been included in the project planning, and an environmental monitor is on hand to make sure the project stays within the construction easement, said Maj. Chris Neels, mission planner for JTF North.

Even so, environmentalists like Jenny Neeley, conservation policy director at the Tucson-based Sky Island Alliance, say they are worried about the long-term effects of border-infrastructure projects that are conducted outside of federal environmental law. Since April 2008, the Department of Homeland Security has operated under a waiver that allows it to build border fencing and related infrastructure in the U.S. Southwest without having to adhere to more than 30 environmental regulations.

“We’re extremely disappointed that none of it is subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act because of the existing waiver along the border,” Neeley said. “Those roads are being installed without any oversight whatsoever, in terms of regulatory oversight or having to follow best practices.”

Neeley said she hadn’t seen the particular roads being built west of Nogales, but she said there have been numerous projects carried out under the waiver that have later led to erosion and flooding. She cited an example from the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where rainwater runoff collapsed a 40-foot stretch of new border fence in August 2010 due to faulty design.

A Department of Homeland Security-sponsored public forum in December 2010 laid out the technical details and environmental analysis that had gone into the planning of the agency’s border road and fence projects in and around Nogales. Still, Greg Gephart, program manager for tactical infrastructure for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, acknowledged that the projects would be conducted under the environmental waiver.

“The waiver doesn’t mean we’re throwing out all environmental considerations,” Gephart said at the time. “It’s just a method that allows us to expedite the construction.”

‘Good feeling’

The 40 Army engineers currently deployed to Nogales work six days a week, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Even so, due to the terrain, theirs is the first of three phases necessary to complete the 0.7 miles of roadway.

What’s more, military units are scheduled to execute four additional engineering missions in the Nogales area in support of the Border Patrol during the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

It’s all organized by JTF North, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, which has been supporting federal law enforcement agencies along the Southwest border since 1989. Working as a liaison between law enforcement and all four branches of the military, JTF North has coordinated engineering missions that built and improved roads and installed border lighting, fencing and vehicle barriers in areas stretching from California to Texas.

The majority of the costs of the projects are paid for with Department of Defense counter-drug funds, JTF North says; the participating law enforcement agency covers only the cost of materials.

For example, Tucson-based Hertz Equipment Rental has been contracted to provide the heavy machinery for the current road effort, as well as training and maintenance. That’s all covered by JTF North, Carrasco said.

As for the price tag for the 0.7-mile road project, Carrasco estimated $400,000 for Phases 1 and 2 and $350,000 for Phase 3 – a grand total of $1.15 million.

Part of the expense includes the cost of housing the soldiers at an area hotel, which is also contracted to provide the team with a hot breakfast and dinner each day. (JTF North declined to name the hotel, citing security concerns.)

“It also creates a good quality of life for them while they’re deployed on this mission,” he said. “Obviously they work very hard, so it’s important that we also take care of them during their down time.”

As for the military engineers, they say they are greatly appreciative of the good meals and soft beds – as well as the warm, sunny weather of Southern Arizona. After all, they left their home base in the middle of the frigid, snowy and daylight-deprived Alaska winter.

Specialist Nickalous Herd, a native of Atlanta, praised the “wonderful weather, wonderful people and wonderful state” as he stood at the worksite Friday under clear blue skies and 70-degree temperatures. And while the local terrain has been a challenge to work with, Herd said, he has also enjoyed its rugged beauty.

“It is beautiful, it is extremely beautiful here,” he said.

Sgt. Everell Gustave, a native of the Boston area, said the experience of coming to a new area and working under new conditions with new equipment has been an important skill-builder for his team, which, if deployed to Afghanistan, might parachute into a remote area to rebuild roads, supply routes and airstrips.

“It is definitely a good feeling for our guys. We are getting the training that we need to be successful anywhere around the world,” Gustave said. “Helping out the Border Patrol is just a plus.”

By Jonathan Clark Nogales International

copyright © Nogales International

Images By Jonathan Clark

Nogales International
Phone number: (520) 375-5760
Address: 268 W. View Point Dr.
Nogales, AZ 85621

If you hadn’t heard, Staples is running for Lieutenant Governor in 2014. For the past year, the Ag Commissioner has been beating the war drums and burnishing his border security credentials. Last March, he unveiled a fancy, new taxpayer-funded Web site called “Protect Your Texas Border” which offers such highlights as night-vision surveillance chases of drug traffickers along the Rio Grande and a video interview with a Texas Ranger who proclaims: “We are in a war and I am not going to sugarcoat it by any means. We are in a war, and it is what it is.”

The Web site also hosts a forum where visitors are encouraged to share their views on securing the border. The forum was dinged by the press, however, after a number of posts advocated for vigilante justice offering such gems of advice as “Killem all!!!! They are destroying or great country.”

Now, we have Staples’ “military assessment” advocating for greater militarization of the border, which sets a dangerous precedent and adds to the growing campaign by the GOP to turn Mexico into Afghanistan. In the report written by retired Generals Barry McCaffery and Robert Scales drug cartel operatives are referred to as “narco-terrorists” and U.S. border counties are referred to as the “sanitary tactical zone” where military operations can push back the “narco-terrorists.” The generals applaud the Texas Department of Public Safety’s “comprehensive military-like operational campaign against narco-terrorists” and suggest that Texas serve as the national model for the nation-wide militarization of the border.

“Five years of state operations have yielded valuable lessons and insights that can improve the border security operations of states and U.S. federal agencies. Below are insights shared by senior leaders within the Texas DPS who consider their operations in the war against narco-terrorism to be a model for how war might be prosecuted in a wider, multi-state and national campaign. They accede to the face that much of their effort was derived from experience in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan…”

The only problem is this isn’t a war and U.S. border counties — last I checked — are still considered part of the United States and civilian territory. They also boast crime and murder rates far lower than cities such as Washington, D.C., according to FBI crime statistics.

Despite this fact, GOP leaders are pushing ahead at both the federal and state level to turn the border region into a theater of war. After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to set up internal checkpoints within 100 miles of the international borders where they have the ability to stop people, question them and ask them to prove their citizenship. Now, Staples and other politicians are calling for more militarization which will inevitably deteriorate further U.S. citizens constitutional rights.

I don’t want to understate the growing security crisis in Mexico. It does have an impact on the United States. But a military-only solution doesn’t address the underlying factors that are fueling organized crime’s takeover of Mexico – namely poverty, impunity, government corruption and the U.S’. multi-billion dollar drug market.

It’s a purely cynical and political move to only push for militarization and not address the myriad social, economic and political issues fueling the crisis in Mexico. For Republican candidates such as Staples issues such as combating poverty, immigration reform or revising our outmoded drug laws are not politically expedient. They just don’t draw GOP Primary voters to the election booths like armored cars or boots on the ground, which is a shame for both the United States and Mexico.

Published on: Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Melissa del Bosque has a Masters in Journalism from U.T. Austin and a M.P.H. from the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health.  She spent five years in the Texas Senate as a communications director. Her work has been published in Time magazine and the NACLA Report on the Americas.

Follow @MelissaLaLinea on Twitter.

In his two-volume book, “The American Wall,” Sherif documents the differences in the wall’s structure in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. In some places the wall resembles a non-threatening collection of steel poles on a beach, in others a foreboding 18-foot-high, triple-layer fence between two countries that purport to be allies. Accompanying the photography is a collection of essays, written by people like South Texas College professor Scott Nicol, UT Law School professor Denise Gilman, and author and journalist Charles Bowden.

Sherif spoke with the Tribune this week in advance of his appearance at the 2011 Texas Book Festival in Austin, where he will explain what motivated him to document the historic event, which he believes will only serve to tarnish the image of the United States.

TT: Why did you take this approach where, instead of writing everything about the wall yourself, you broke it up in to essays written by different experts?

MS: Simply for the fact that I am not a specialist on the subject when it comes to dealing with immigration issues. Denise Gilman from the University of Texas, she is much more apt to talk about it. Also, (author and journalist) Charles Bowden knows the subject much better than anybody else in terms of what is going on on the border. So that’s one of the reasons, and there is not one person that would be able to talk about the complex and large topic as the wall and immigration. So I decided to pick the right people to talk about specific events like immigration, the borders, and the timelines. So I think putting this whole team together, we give anyone a clear idea of what is going on on the border, from the environment all the way to the politics.

TT: How is the United States’ proposal to build a fence dividing two countries perceived in Europe and other parts of the world? How does this make the United States look?

MS: They were shocked. Actually, people could not believe it, in the beginning they thought I was just making this up, that this doesn’t exist. And I think it took a while before they were able to digest it, visually, that it’s true: There is a wall. And I think people still have a very hard time accepting it. The Germans reacted much more in disgust and anger than the United States, which really worked so hard on bringing down the wall in East and West (Germany), that they would build one. So, in general, I would say complete bewilderment and shock.

TT: People could argue that part of a democracy is maintaining law and order and people that come here without proper documentation are breaking the law. So, how do you respond to people who say the United States is just doing what it has to do to make sure people follow the laws and enter legally?

MS: The wall has never been an answer to immigration. The same way the wall in Berlin wasn’t. It’s a political answer to a serious problem and nobody wants to take it seriously, so (they say) “We’ll just build a wall so we don’t have to answer the question.”

TT: Did you ever feel as if you were in danger or jeopardy when you were taking photographs of the wall? Danger from spillover violence from the cartels or smugglers, which is a big reason that people say this wall is needed?

MS: I didn’t have a problem. The only difficulty I had is I spent three days with this woman, Shawna Forde, the woman who assassinated the 9-year-old kid and her father (in Arizona). I spent three days with her and she was actually talking about the idea of forming a new group using American Iraqi veterans to organize a new militia group. And she thought she could get the money, basically, by stealing it. We had a long conversation about this and I tried to discourage her. I never really thought she would do it. And then she spoke about it and I was very surprised when she did it. On the whole I really didn’t feel that my life would be threatened, but I don’t believe there is a narco-problem in Mexico. I think it’s just the Army that is controlling what’s going on, protecting the interest of the oligarch in Mexico. Until the Mexican people wake up and realize the Army is not working for them, it’s working for very few people to protect their interests, they will not do anything about it. Narcos are not a problem. They don’t exist; it’s the Army that does most of the killing. They are equipped to make people disappear; they are equipped to make sure the drugs can cross the border to the United States.

TT: If this is an Army problem, then what’s to be made of the criminals that get paraded in front of the press, that U.S., Mexican, and French press agencies report about as far as these people being the masterminds behind the criminal activity?

MS: It’s theater. The Army would like to make people believe that there is someone behind this. I think people are hypnotized by violence and they really believe there are narcos and until they wake up from this hypnosis, they will still believe what the Army shows them. And it’s true, the Army must really show them there is someone doing this killing and they created this killing. I mean, there are some narcos in Mexico, but not so well organized that they can make people disappear.

TT: Switching to the photography in your book, why did you break it down into the sections that you did, and start from one end and go to the other?

MS: Starting in 2006, the United States was experimenting with what type of fence they wanted to build. If you look at the California side, where I started, they built a lot of triple fencing or double fencing because they were not sure how they wanted to go. It seems that each sector had yet to decide what to do. There was no common policy of how the wall should be applied and how it should be designed from the Pacific to the Gulf. The reason I broke it down that way was because each state had its own design, which never really looked the same. And 60 percent of what you see in the book does not exist anymore. They just rebuilt the fence again. The issue right now is to build a new fence, which is 23 feet high and six inches, replacing the old fence, which I have photographed. So actually the book is obsolete, but it’s a good documentation of what existed.

TT: Was there one particular moment that stands out as more compelling, more heartbreaking, or more light-hearted, above the rest, during your journey to document this steel fence?

MS: No, I felt very sad on many occasions, especially in South Texas because the wall is extremely discriminatory. I met many families where the wall divided them. Very few people know that the fence in South Texas is actually a mile or a mile and a half inside the United States. It divides people on both sides of the wall. So, it’s really very sad because that’s not the case in Arizona, the wall doesn’t cut people on both sides of it, where as in South Texas, it’s dramatic.

TT: Did you have complete access?  Or were you restricted in some places from getting near the fence?

MS: I don’t think the Border Patrol really knew what it was doing. Sometimes they would tell you “Yes, you can” and other times they would say “No, you can’t.” And they would try to discourage you from really documenting the issue. And I could not tell them that I wanted to document it, or that I was making a book, otherwise my life would be very difficult and I would have to file documentation and fill out applications in order to do this project. So I just said “I am just doing a research project on the wall.” But, it was a very complex issue to get very close to it, because they felt if I got close to it I would be passing drugs to the other side, or dropping money or passing arms. But a lot of times it didn’t really matter because there was nobody on the other side.

TT: If this book is a good documentary of what happened but it’s obsolete, do you have plans to follow up and do another project?

MS: Yes, absolutely. And this book is obsolete but at the same time, it is something that has historical value because it (the wall) existed and now it has a different face to it. I was surprised myself two weeks ago when I saw how it looked in Nogales in 2011 versus to the way it looked in 2009. It was 15 feet high, and now it’s 23 feet high. It’s amazing and it’s in the same place.

TT: Is there anything else you want to say, or any commentary you’d like to give about this project? What you think it symbolizes, not just for Mexico and the United States, but for the world?

MS: I think I would like Americans to see that the government has committed itself to this huge project that, for me, is on the same scale as the Panama Canal. It’s an enormous project in terms of finances and resources, instead of using it for the economy or to help people. There are also many families that have been displaced or destroyed by the wall. And that’s what I would like the Americans to understand, it’s an enormous project financially, and it has human consequences to it.

The National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, authored by Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop, would prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior from enacting environmental regulations that hinder the operations of the CBP on public lands within 100 miles of the U.S. border. It was voted out of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources last month — with “yes” votes from Republican Texas Reps. Louie Gohmert and Bill Flores.

The bill, Bishop said, “is a common sense solution that addresses one of the prevailing issues preventing us from gaining full operational control of the border — the U.S. Border Patrol’s lack of sufficient access to millions of acres of federally owned land.”

Environmental groups, however, call the proposal a land grab that would allow the federal government to circumvent environmental regulations whenever it chooses, placing water, fresh air and other natural resources in peril.

“There are literally no checks on the agency. They would have unfettered access and control to do whatever they choose; there would be no oversight in Congress,” said Paul Spitler, senior regional conservation representative for the Wilderness Society. “This bill is a wrong-headed approach to a serious problem. … Overturning the laws that protect Americans, that’s not going to make our border more secure.”

If passed, the resolution would allow the U.S. Border Patrol access to territories like Texas’ Big Bend National Park to build patrol roads and fences and set up surveillance equipment. The proposal also authorizes the use of Border Patrol vehicles and aircraft and the deployment of “tactical infrastructure, including forward operating bases,” according to statement from Bishop’s office. National wildlife refuges, forests and lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management would also be open to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Representatives with the Department of the Interior declined to speak about the proposal, saying the agency does not comment on pending legislation. The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.

But opponents of the measure say it simply isn’t necessary.

“The Border Patrol has been working closely with the land management agencies to ensure that they have the access they need to make the borders more secure, and they’ve testified to this fact,” Spitler said. He cited a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office published last year that showed a majority of Border Patrol supervisors said environmental regulations did not impede their abilities to patrol the border.

“Most patrol agents-in-charge whom we interviewed said that the border security status of their jurisdictions has been unaffected by land management laws,” the report stated. “Instead, factors … such as the remoteness and ruggedness of the terrain or dense vegetation have had the greatest effect on their abilities to achieve or maintain operational control.”

But more than two dozen groups, including the National Border Patrol Council and theNational Association of Police Organizations, support the measure.

“For years, the federal government has used environmental regulations to block access for our Border Patrol agents to the over 20 million acres of federal land along the U.S.-Mexican Border,” the NBPC said in a statement. “This lack of access has resulted in an increase in criminal activities such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.”

Added the police association, “Currently, Border Patrol agents are unable to access portions of the 20.7 million acres along our southern borders and 1,000 miles of our northern borders.”

These arguments haven’t swayed environmentalists with the Rio Grande International Study Center, a Laredo-based conservation group dedicated to preserving the Rio Grande-Rio Bravo watershed. They question the motives behind the proposal.

“This is a bill that would impact such a huge part of the country and so many people in an area that falls outside of [Bishop's] own district,” said Tricia Cortez, the group’s executive director. Cortez adds that, at least in Laredo, federal law enforcement officials work closely with landowners and public officials. “As far as I know there hasn’t been an issue where there are all these kinds of impediments that prevent them from doing their job.”

Spitler said all sides favor a secure border. He said this proposal is really an effort by conservatives to dilute environmental protections.

“It’s part of a pattern of scapegoating environmental laws for any problem by extreme members of Congress,” he said. “Their solutions always seem to be to overturn the environmental laws. Well, the environmental laws aren’t the problem here.”

Officials at Big Bend National Park in West Texas said the current system works quite well.

Chief Ranger Allen Etheridge, who oversees law enforcement operations there, declined to comment on the proposal, but said his agency has an “excellent” relationship with U.S. Border Patrol. Park officials provide the agency access to communications equipment and even to the park’s aircraft for surveillance support. Etheridge says there has never been a situation where park staff has impeded agents from performing their duties, and agents in turn alert Big Bend employees to situations they feel need to be addressed. Agents actually live on park land, he added.

“We help them if our agents encounter [a situation] with immigration concerns … and when Border Patrol encounters resource damage or wildlife crimes, they call us,” he said.

Bill Brooks, the public information officer for Border Patrol’s Beg Bend Sector, declined to comment on the proposal. But he concurred with Etheridge’s assessment of the relationship.

Crystal Feldman, the press secretary for the Committee on Natural Resources, told the Tribune the bill is still pending, and could not comment on when the measure would go before the full House of Representatives for a vote

Probably more than any other U.S. author, he has revealed the intricacies of the violence haunting Ciudad Juárez, most recently in two books, “Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields” and “Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez.” He’s swatted at flies swarming fresh bloodstains and reported from a house where bodies were drenched in acid before burial. One wonders if he didn’t lose a slice of his sanity with each movement of his hand.

He has met with hit men, government officials who know more than they say, pastors struggling to soothe in the war-torn city and Mexican reporters running for their lives.

To recover, Bowden settles back for a while on his land in Patagonia, Ariz., about 20 miles from the Mexican border. That’s where the feed and tripe come in: He drops about $150 a month on his hummingbird feeders and lays out a block of tripe for the ravens. “Then we have coffee together,” he told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. Something simple and beautiful to crowd out the death and despair in his mind, at least for a while.

He keeps connected with nature as a sort of therapy. After unearthing tales of unfathomable human cruelty, he relaxes by watching the black birds gnaw at the bowels of a cow.

Mexicans, he says, are a people discarded by their government — women who prefer to sell drugs so they won’t have to sell their bodies, newspaper vendors gunned down in broad daylight, beauty queens gone mad after being raped for days by police officers, pastors who care for the insane because no one else will. Then he returns to what he says are the “rhythms of the Earth.”

“If you don’t, you’ll go down; you’ll be useless; you’ll be of no use to anyone,” he says.

Bowden spoke for more than two hours about what he saw, what he wants to forget and why he’ll probably go back, even though he dreads even the thought of it. In his desert drawl, with the dust from the graves still fresh in his mind, Bowden explains why the fog of narco-terrorism and corruption make it impossible to fully report the slaughter, why the numbers that spew daily from media and government mean little to him, and why what is heard, and not seen, must be viewed with more than a little suspicion. (Note: The audio contains explicit language.)

And he weighs in on whether a woman burned alive on July 4, the day of the Juárez elections, was sacrificed as a message to Mayor-elect Hector “Teto” Murguía.

The violence will not end; there’s no reason currently to believe it would, Bowden explains. The shooting and cutting and beating has become thoroughly enmeshed in daily life as jobs disappear, addiction balloons,

gangs multiply and the next generation is poised to take over where the older leaves off  — after it is killed off. He tells about “El Pastor,” a character in “Murder City” who hears why women join the business and how a basic struggle for control of a drug plaza has gone beyond that and entered a new dimension.

Bowden lives in Arizona, the busiest corridor for undocumented immigrants making their way into the U.S. What drives them, he says, is stronger than any force that might deter them. Bowden says he wasn’t raised to “shut the door on poor people,” and so he stocks cans of food and water for those who collapse under his mesquite trees. Half an hour later, he says, the visitors are back on their way. “How the hell do you stop people like that?” First he explains what he thinks would happen to Mexico if every immigrant went back.

Despite the success of “Down by the River,” a tale about the history of the Mexican drug trade and the accompanying U.S. government hypocrisy — told against the backdrop of a murdered brother of a DEA agent — Bowden lives to get back to bankruptcy, he says. He takes magazine stories to get out of debt, but the kind of books he writes hardly makes him a dime.

“If you get used to it, you’re worthless,” Bowden says of the beat. Since his days as a crime reporter for a newspaper, he has found ways to save his sanity, a large part of which depends on how in tune he remains with nature. He leads off by explaining what happens, to most reporters, after time.

Mexican reporters flee across the border or are murdered. They are the courageous ones. He has a three-tiered plan for staying alive, which he says that, as an American, isn’t hard to do.

In “Dreamland,” with artist Alice Leora Briggs, Bowden chronicles the death house where a Mexican informant, working for the U.S. government, participated in the murders of several men. From there, he talks about the valiant Armando Rodriguez, a reporter for El Diario de Juárez gunned down in front of his daughter. She wasn’t harmed — and that was on purpose, Bowden says. He’s come to know what a professional hit looks like, knowledge gained from interviews with one of Juárez’s best assassins.

Bowden has no problems with legalizing pot. The criminal justice system as it stands has created a police state, he says. But he warns of the havoc that would reign — at least temporarily — before that happened.

Racism — that’s the simplest reason for anti-Mexican sentiment, Bowden says. The “tea baggers” and Sarah Palin, when they say they want their country back, mean they want a “white guy as president.” It’s not just here though, Bowden says, urging a close look at how Mexicans treat Guatemalans.

Bowden doesn’t harp too much about what people say about “Murder City,” including those who allege he doesn’t explain the killings. His narratives don’t move in straight lines, he knows, but neither does life in Juárez. If warring cartels make peace, the violence won’t end, he says. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the Juárez cartel, doesn’t order most of the hits. “It’s gone way past that.” Meanwhile, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has opened a Pandora’s box.

By Julian Aguilar – The Texas Tribune 2010

The victims, who include two women and one man hurt during a 10-day span, won’t find much sympathy from the Border Patrol, however. The agency says it’s not responsible for people who tangle with the 23-to-30-foot security fence.

American Wall Project

On Aug. 12, a woman identified only as “Asian” broke her leg after climbing the border fence near East Hudgins Street, according to a Nogales Police Department report.

NPD officers responded to the scene shortly before 9 p.m. and met with Border Patrol agents who were treating the woman, who could not be identified because she could not speak English, the report said. The agents reportedly took the woman to Carondelet Holy Cross Hospital for further evaluation.

Two days later, on the afternoon of Aug. 14, NPD officers encountered another injured fence-climber after responding to a reported burglary on East Street.

The homeowner had called the police after finding 38-year-old Maria Sanchez of Veracruz, Mexico in her house. When the officers arrived, Sanchez told them that she went into the home in search of help after hurting her leg while jumping from the fence.

The Border Patrol took custody of the woman, the NPD said.

Then on Aug. 22, Border Patrol agents from the Nogales Station said they rescued a 21-year-old illegal immigrant from Fujhou, China after he fell from the wall and sustained a compound fracture to his left leg.
Rescue personnel from the Nogales Fire Department responded and took the man to the hospital.

“(The fence) is so high,” NFD Chief Hector Robles said. “We’ve seen some compound fractures, open wounds, a loss of fingers, the knees are blown…”

In addition to the height of the fence, Robles cited adrenaline and miscalculations in determining the distance and angle of a fall as potential injury factors.

Yacumba California - Maurice Sherif 2010

Begun in March and completed in late July, the $11.6-million, 2.8-mile fence ranges from 23 to 30 feet in height and is topped by a 5-foot high, south-facing metal sheet to discourage climbers. The landing mat fence that it replaced measured 10 feet tall, and was also easier to cut through and burrow under.

Asked about the recent injuries, Eric Cantu, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, pointed to the new barrier’s principal purpose: providing better security for the United States.

“The intent of the design, structure and height of the fence is to make it more difficult to climb which gives us as an agency more time to identify, classify and respond to any threats. Which in turn makes us a nation safer, which everybody wants,” said Colleen Angle, another Tucson Sector spokesperson, said did not know how undocumented immigrants are managing to climb the fence.

Human smugglers might be the ones who could better answer that question, she said.

By JB Miller
For the Nogales International

The first notable thing about the border wall between the United States and Mexico is that the damned thing exists. Unless you live in the most southwestern reaches of America, you may have assumed, as I did, that the whole thing was merely a proposal, one of those preposterous ideas that are floated in Washington by politicians hotdogging for their constituents, only to be shot down by saner minds. But no, there is a wall, or rather, there are several walls, intermittently covering more than 600 miles of the 1,954-mile-long boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, including most of California’s and Arizona’s borders and much of New Mexico’s. (South Texas residents, a formidably independent bunch, have slowed its progress across our state, though some cities, like Brownsville, have been unable to stop the wall from slicing through their community.)

Almost all of it has been built by the Department of Homeland Security in the past four years, under the aegis of the Real ID Act, which granted the Secretary of the DHS an absolute, monarchical freedom to barricade our borders in whatever manner he chose, unhampered by the established laws of the land, including those covering environmental protection, clean air and water, and historical preservation. Starting at the Pacific Ocean, then—or, more accurately, about 450 yards into the ocean, presumably to deter swimmers, but not really strong swimmers—the wall runs over hill and dale, gouging a path through wildlife preservations, Indian reservations, and many poor neighborhoods (though at least one golf club managed to secure a waiver). In some places it’s little more than reinforced hurricane fencing with barbed wire on top, but in most others it’s an imposing structure built of slabs of concrete or steel that extend as high as 25 feet. It has cost over $2 billion to build thus far, and it’s expected to top out at more than $6 billion, not counting future costs for upkeep. An expensive project, and what’s more, ugly, unnecessary, and ineffective. And so we have The American Wall(MS Zephyr Publishing, distributed by the University of Texas Press), a forthright attack on the entire project, composed of two volumes, the first presenting nearly one hundred photographs by the French photographer Maurice Sherif, the second containing seven essays about the wall. The whole thing comes in a slipcase and retails for $150.

If you’re like me, you’ll read the essays first, and while you probably won’t find yourself any more cheerful when you’re done, you’ll almost certainly be better informed. They’re prefaced by a monody from the essayist Charles Bowden, a longtime observer of life and death along the border, and a brief statement from Sherif. Then comes a series of dismaying facts, presented without embellishment.

Anthropologists Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey focus on South Texas, where the wall is seen as an eyesore, an encroachment, and a crude obstacle to communities that have traditionally enjoyed fluid relations with their Mexican neighbors. What’s more, they point out, most of it has been built in urban areas and small towns, forcing illegal immigrants to cross the border in harsh and isolated regions, thereby increasing the number who die along the way. University of Texas law professor Denise Gilman neatly sums up the many ways in which the wall violates American legal precedents and international human rights law. Scott Nicol, an activist with No Border Wall and the Sierra Club, details how it threatens animal species whose existence depends on their ability to roam the lands around the Rio Grande. The last essay is an unfortunately homiletic performance by a doctor named James Tryon, but it’s followed by an exceptionally useful timeline, put together by the researcher Martha Davidson. There you will learn, for example, that barricading the border is utterly irrelevant to about half of all illegal immigrants, who come to the U.S. on legitimate visas and simply stay when they run out, and it’s little more than a speed bump for many of the rest (in four years, the wall has been breached well over three thousand times).

Volume one, which is the impetus for the entire publication, is more of a mixed bag. To be sure, Sherif’s photographs are beautiful, and they’ve been printed in quadratone black and white, an elaborate process that produces an unusually rich tonal range. Together with the translucent negative borders that frame them, this gives the pictures a plush, dreamy quality. Taken as a whole, it’s obviously a deluxe production. And just as obviously, it’s all wrong.

Almost everything about the pictures suggests a will to elegance that’s inappropriate to the matter at hand. Back in the day, black and white film was the standard for both newspapers and art photography. But that changed in the seventies and eighties, and now it looks deliberately archaic and somewhat effete—the photographic equivalent of wearing spats, or using the word “shall.” By the same token, the distorted strips at the edges of Sherif’s photographs indicate that he shot on large-format film, using a discontinued stock called Polaroid Type 55—an expensive and unwieldy process, useful mainly for large reproductions but somewhat pretentious otherwise. Moreover, by printing beyond the boundary of the negative, Sherif proves that he didn’t crop the photos, in accordance with an outmoded notion of authenticity that insists that “real” photographers frame their pictures through the camera rather than in the darkroom. It’s all very precious, “artistic” in the worst way.

As a result, Sherif’s pictures make the wall seem quite lovely as it wends abstractly across the landscape. In his opening statement he asks how “the United States became such an egregious violator of basic human rights.” Yet not one of his images shows a human being; the lives that the wall has degraded have been shut out of the pictures as well. What’s left looks like an art project—something by Christo, say, or a Richard Serra sculpture blown up to enormous scale. But the wall is not a work of art. It’s a crude and wasteful boondoggle. It should have been shot to reflect as much.

To be fair, Sherif has merely fallen victim to one of the commoner paradoxes of the medium: It’s very difficult to take a good picture of an ugly thing—to preserve its ugliness in a photograph that is estimable and compelling. The camera tends to glamorize whatever it sees, making the silkiest images out of those things we should find most revolting. Many photographers have exploited this phenomenon—Sebastião Salgado comes to mind, with his epic and hyper-refined treatment of miserable conditions around the world—and many have been admired for it. But I find it meretricious at best and vile at worst, and in this case it yields an especially cruel irony. As a photo book, The American Wall is very much like the American wall: too big, too expensive, and oblivious to the needs of the people it’s meant to serve.

Read an Excerpt: The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico Copyright (c) 2011. Courtesy of the University of Texas Press. Buy it from University of Texas Press.

NOGALES – The border in Nogales is getting a face-lift that Border Patrol officials say will make it harder on smugglers and keep agents safer.

The agency is replacing 2.8 miles of landing-mat fence erected in 1994 with new, 18- to 30-feet-high bollard-style fencing that is both menacing and functional.

The new fence is much taller and sturdier than the old one. The most noticeable change may be that agents can see through it into Mexico. The square bollards are set apart far enough to see through but not far enough for people to squeeze through.

“You couldn’t see what was approaching the (old) fence or what was hiding on the south side,” said Sabri Dickman, the Border Patrol’s acting patrol agent in charge of the Nogales station. “We had a lot of assaults on our agents. With the new bollard fencing, we have the ability to see what approaches.”

Granite Construction is doing the work under an $11.6 million contract that comes from funds redirected from the SBInet “virtual fence” program, which was canceled in January by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Work began in late March and is expected to be complete by July.

While the new fence will be a thing of beauty for the Border Patrol, not all residents in Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora, like what they see.

“Each country is free to do as it wishes within its own state, but the Mexican government will never be in agreement with a metal border fence,” Jesús Quintanar, an engineer with the Mexico section of the International Boundary and Water Commission said in Spanish. “The last fence looked very ugly, and this one doesn’t have any beauty either.”

The new fence is definitely on U.S. soil, though, Quintanar said. He and members of the U.S. side of the commission did a formal marking of the international line in February before work began and have been monitoring construction.

The Nogales project is the first major border-fence construction in Arizona since the building boom of 2007-2009 came to a close. The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector has 71 miles of pedestrian fence, up from 11 miles in 2000. There are another 183 miles of vehicle barriers, up from two miles in 2000.

Pedestrian fences are 12- to 18-foot-high barriers designed to stop people, or at least slow them down. Vehicle barriers are waist- to chest-high.

The Border Patrol plans to replace sections of landing-mat fence in Douglas and Naco, too, though no plans are in place, Dickman said. The old landing-mat fences were erected in mostly urban stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border during the mid-1990s by Border Patrol agents and Department of Defense soldiers using surplus government materials.

“It served its purpose, but it’s outdated,” Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame said of the old fence. “This is the fence that needs to be in place to keep up with the evolution of border-security issues.”

The newer fencing has been erected with new materials by construction companies paid millions by the federal government. The government spent $2.4 billion to build 264 miles of pedestrian fencing and 226 miles of vehicle barriers in the years 2004-2009, the Government Accountability Office reported in 2009.

At $4.14 million per mile, the Nogales fence-replacement project will cost just slightly more than average for modern fences. The average cost of 140 miles of pedestrian fencing put up under the Secure Border Initiative in 2005-2008 was $3.9 million per mile, with costs ranging from $400,000 to $15.1 million a mile, a 2009 GAO report found.

It will cost an estimated $6.5 billion to “deploy, operate and maintain” the fencing over its estimated life cycle of 20 years, a March 2011 GAO report found. For instance, it cost $7.2 million to repair 4,037 documented breaches to the fence in fiscal year 2010, the report said.

The height of the new fencing in Nogales will range from 18 to 30 feet depending on the terrain, Dickman said. It will stretch from west of the Mariposa Port of Entry to east of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry.

Granite Construction crews have begun working at the east and west ends and will work toward the center, said Mike Tatusko, project executive with Granite. Granite, which has its headquarters in Watsonville, Calif., has built more than 130 miles of border pedestrian fence and vehicle barriers, he said.

With concrete footers 6 to 8 feet deep, the fence should prevent some burrowing and make it more difficult to build tunnels, Dickman said. The old landing-mat fence didn’t have any footer, and smugglers regularly burrowed beneath it.

All but one of the 103 assaults on Border Patrol agents since Oct. 1 in the Border Patrol’s Nogales station have occurred within the 2.8-mile stretch of border in Nogales where the fence is being replaced, Adame said.

Smugglers commonly dispatched several men to throw rocks at agents as a group of three or four illegal immigrants scaled the fence and got past agents, Adame said. With the new see-through fence, agents will know ahead of time if rock-throwers are nearby.

The new fencing will also allow the Border Patrol to move more agents into remote areas east and west of Nogales because it won’t require as many agents in the city, Dickman said.

The Border Patrol knows the new fence won’t stop all illegal entries on its own, but it sure helps, Dickman said.

“It gives us time to get agents in front of them and deter the entry or make the arrest once they do enter,” he said.

Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com