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.

The release of the report marks the 15th anniversary of the border enforcement policy Operation Gatekeeper that concentrated border agents and added walls and fencing along populated areas, intentionally forcing migrants to hostile environments and natural barriers that increase the incidence of injury and death.

“The current policies in place on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border have created a humanitarian crisis that has led to the deaths of more than 5,000 people,” said Kevin Keenan, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “Because of deadly practices and policies like Operation Gatekeeper, the death toll continues to rise unabated despite the decrease in unauthorized crossings due to economic factors.

South of Texas

The report analyzes deadly border enforcement policies and practices and their impact on individuals, families and communities and offers concrete recommendations to significantly decrease and possibly end the humanitarian crisis at the border.

Some of the report’s major findings include:

• Border deaths have increased despite the economic downturn, fewer migrant crossers and a steady drop in apprehensions.
• In the last 15 years, the deaths occurring during unauthorized border crossings have been a predictable and inhumane outcome of border-security policies like Operation Gatekeeper.
• Migrants’ risk of death during unauthorized crossings has increased in spite of government programs that attempt to reduce the harmful effects of border enforcement policies and strategies.
• The ongoing deaths of migrants have exposed government incompliance with international law obligations in the treatment of the dead and their families.

Since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect in 1994, an estimated 5,600 migrants have died while attempting unauthorized border crossings. In response to government failures to prevent migrant deaths, many organizations have set up water stations, desert medical camps, humanitarian-aid patrols and other rescue and recovery operations in an attempt to save lives along the U.S.-Mexican border area. As the report details, these activities have been increasingly met with government opposition and punishment.

“By any measure, Operation Gatekeeper is a failure. It didn’t reduce unauthorized border crossings, the economy did. It has, however, cost thousands of people their lives,” said Andrea Guerrero, Field and Policy Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “Instead of policies that foster fatalities, we need sensible, humane immigration and border policies that prioritize human life over death.”

The report recommends actions that the U.S. and Mexican governments should take to protect and advance the human right to life of migrants, including:

• Recognize border crossing deaths as an international humanitarian crisis.
• Adopt sensible, humane immigration and border policies.
• Shift more U.S. Border Patrol resources to search and rescue.
• Support nongovernmental humanitarian efforts at the border.
• Direct government agencies to allow humanitarian organizations to do their work to save lives and recover remains.
• Establish a binational, one-stop resource for rescue and recovery calls and convene all data collecting agencies to develop a uniform system.
• Invite international involvement.

Javier Garcia, whose testimony about his brother who died while crossing the border is featured in the report, said, “I hope that my brother’s case is taken as an example of what should not happen, that things change.”

The report can be found online at: www.aclu.org/immigrants/gen/41186pub20091001.html

Courtesy of ACLU 2010.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of San Diego and Imperial Counties is calling on U.S., Mexican and international officials to recognize the alarming number of migrant deaths at the U.S. – Mexico border as an international humanitarian crisis; address the ongoing violations of the right to life and identify protective measures going forward.

The ACLU joined together with Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (Comision Nacional de Derechos Humanos – CNDH) and sent a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) – a commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). In the letter, they requested that the IACHR get permission from the U.S. and Mexican governments to make an onsite visit to the region. They further requested that once there, the IACHR conduct an investigation on the crisis, issue a report for the General Assembly of the OAS, and identify measures that both countries should adopt to bring them in compliance with their international human rights obligations.

For emphasis, the ACLU and CNDH also provided the commission with the 76 page white paper they drafted documenting the situation: Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border. The release of this report marked the 15th anniversary of the border enforcement policy, Operation Gatekeeper. This policy not only provided a higher concentration of border agents, but added walls and fencing along populated areas, forcing migrants into hostile environments and creating natural barriers that increased the incidence of injury and death. Since the program’s inception, an average of one migrant per day has died.

“More than 5,000 people have died crossing our border, and an estimated seven to eleven percent of them are children,” said Kevin Keenan, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. “Equally alarming are the hundreds of family members who are left in inconsolable limbo, never knowing the fate of their loved one.”

According to their report, family members have no alternative recourse, and are often faced with complex or contradictory methods and red-tape when merely trying to locate a loved one who may be missing or even dead. State obligations to these families with regards to migrant deaths at the border has never been addressed. There is no uniform standard or centralized data base for locating the migrants or identifying their remains. One-quarter of those who perish in transit are never identified, leaving their families behind in a permanent state of anguish.

Ten years ago, the San Diego ACLU submitted a petition to the IACHR alleging that U.S. border enforcement-deterrence strategies under Operation Gatekeeper violated the right to life under Article 1 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The Commission initially expressed concern over the findings, even agreeing to monitor the situation, but eventually dismissed the petition and things have only gotten worse.

“Since the Commission consented to monitor the border situation, we respectfully ask that they now act on their concerns,” said Jose Luis Soberanes, president of CNDH. “When they initially expressed unease, only 300 migrants had died. Today, nearly twenty times that number have died—many of their deaths directly attributable to U.S. border enforcement policies.”

The local ACLU hopes that since the United States and Mexico are bound by the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, they will soon begin to adopt policies or negotiate bilateral agreements to deal with the crisis. Their recent white paper on the situation only highlights the fact that to date, the two countries have seemingly abandoned their obligations under international law to respect and ensure the rights of migrant populations.