La Linea

Governor Rick Perry announced in Houston yesterday that he sent the Texas Rangers down to the border to fight the “spillover violence.” You can tell we are hot in the middle of election season when it’s time again for His Hairness to get tough on crime. The only problem is he forgot to tell local law enforcment and border officials that he was sending the Rangers, according to a Houston Chronicle story.  He probably neglected to do so because they would have told him it wasn’t necessary and that would have screwed up a perfectly good press release (and video).

Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada annoyed by Perry’s tough on border crime grandstanding sent out a flurry of emails last night taking issue with the Ranger Recon mission. Ahumada had a few suggestions on what might really make a difference if Perry wanted to fight drug cartel crime:

“What is needed is to continue supporting Mexico’s Mérida Plan to fight the drug trade and work closely with Mexico to combat the drug trafficking, money laundering, and other illegal activity associated with the drug cartels like kidnappings, human smuggling, along with enforcing our laws in the U.S.,” he said. This means weeding out corrupt law enforcement officials, securing the nation’s deep water ports of entry to stop the shipment of drugs in containers, and providing local law enforcement with added resources to assist federal agencies combating drug smuggling.

“To continue to promote a plan that calls for the National Guard or Rangers to secure our border is wasteful and unnecessary spending that in my opinion could be put to better use without hurting local economies along the southwest border region.”

 

But then this isn’t really abut border communities or Mexico. If it were, Perry would have given his press conference in Brownsville or Laredo instead of Houston. Why waste a media event on a bunch of Democrats on the border when you can get tough on crime in front of a room full of Republican voters.

 

 

Immigrant rights activists rejoiced last month when the Obama Administration announced August 6 that it was ready to start fixing the nation’s ailing immigration detention system. Right now we have a crazy quilt of county and privately run prisons. The government very desperately needs to centralize its management and oversight of these far flung detention centers so that immigrants don’t languish in jail for years, or die from maltreatment or lack of medical care in poorly run facilities.The nonprofit Migration Policy Institute released a very interesting report today questioning whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement which oversees the detention facilities is up to the task of overhauling the system. The number of  detainees has nearly doubled since 2001 from 209,000 detainees per year to 378,582 in 2008. Their findings indicate that ICE doesn’t  even have enough information about its own day to day operations to put its house in order.ICE’s startling revelation last month that 10 people had died in its detention facilities between 2004 and 2007 which the agency was not aware of illustrates the Institute’s point. The unaccounted for deaths only became apparent to ICE after agency officials combed through their files in response to an open records request made by the American Civil Liberties Union.Now the announcement this week that Dr. Dora Schriro, who had been tasked with overseeing the overhaul for the Department of Homeland Security, is leaving the Obama Administration seems like another warning sign that a remedy won’t come anytime soon. According to a New York Times story she will be taking a job as the Commissioner of Corrections for New York City to be closer to a sick family member.Schriro, 59, who formerly ran the Arizona Department of Corrections under then Governor Janet Napolitano (now Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano) was appointed just 8 months ago as Special Advisor on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Detention & Removal.  On August 6, Schriro was picked by Napolitano to become the director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning. Her task  was a 6-month review of the nation’s immigrant detention facilities and recommendations on how to fix the  burgeoning immigrant detention crisis.At the moment there doesn’t seem to be anyone at hand to take Schriro’s place. Matt Chandler, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in an email that DHS and ICE will “begin a national search to identify Dr. Schriro’s permanent replacement as head of the ICE Office of Detention Policy and Planning immediately.”At least before Schriro heads to New York she will deliver her 6-month review to Napolitano and ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton. My guess is they’ll have to double the salary of whoever takes Schriro’s place, because it’s going to take a Herculean effort to overhaul this system.

Two interesting pieces in the El Paso online news journal Newspaper Tree today about the cartel battles being waged in Mexico. The first one is an editorial by El Pasoan Martin Paredes about his day traveling with an international news crew in Juarez looking for bodies in the drug war. What’s interesting about it is he gives you more of an insider look into reporting in Juarez and what the vibe is like there right now. Paredes says that there were shady characters keeping an eye on them at each of the crime scenes they visited with the news crew. Paredes says he felt relatively safe, but he was only there for one day. Imagine being a reporter living in Juarez? i’m really in awe of the men and women working there under the constant threat of being hurt or killed.

The second piece is by Jorge Castañeda former Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Mexico under Vicente Fox.  Castañeda is a former Marxist and he was an odd fit in Fox’s conservative cabinet. He left after three years and is now trying to run as an independent candidate for the next presidential election. His piece gives some very good perspective from the Mexican political side into what could be done to get out of the endless drug war we’re in. He also explains the various law enforcement agencies at work in Mexico and how they work, or are supposed to work.

A little light reading while you enjoy the last bit of Labor Day.

 

 

Last January, El Paso city councilman Beto O’Rourke sparked controversy when he amended 10 words onto a resolution demonstrating solidarity with the people of Juarez who are experiencing unprecedented narco violence.

Within a couple of hours Lou Dobbs was on air raging about El Paso’s surrender on the War on Drugs. A few days later the city’s state legislators and a federal congressman sent letters threatening the city’s funding if O’Rourke kept pushing his amendment.

So what were these controversial words O’Rourke dared flaunt in public? The councilman asked for an “honest open national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics.”

It’s been 40 years since  “Tricky Dick” Nixon declared the U.S. government’s War on Drugs and we are still waiting for that national debate.  Now in the fourth decade of fighting that war our government continues to invest billions on incarceration.  In 2007, more than 872,000 people were arrested for marijuana violations alone, according to FBI statistics – the highest number in history.

Any suggestion that we divert from the War on Drugs causes politicians to squirm and conservative TV pundits like Dobbs to turn apoplectic

I think border residents know very well the impact that failed drug policies can have. They have only to look across the Rio Grande at Juarez where 1,600 people were killed last year in a battle among drug cartels over drug smuggling routes to the United States.

Eric Sterling, an expert on U.S. drug policy and president of the nonprofit Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, says America’s drug policies haven’t reduced the number of drugs being consumed. In the past 20 years, in fact, the death rate among drug users has tripled instead of declined.

And the War on Drugs has enriched Mexico’s drug cartels, Sterling says. “Are we hurting the criminals who profit from selling drugs? No. It’s a $60 billion a year business that is untaxed.”

If Mexico had any leverage with the United States, Sterling suggests, it would insist we tax marijuana, which is a large portion of what the Mexican cartels sell. “This would significantly weaken the cartels,” he says.

One thing that Mexico has done recently despite past objections from the United States is pass a law to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana and other drugs. The new law emphasizes free government treatment of drug addiction instead of incarceration.

Several other Latin American countries, including Colombia, have also recently passed similar laws. Only time will tell if their policies work, but at least they are trying something different. We are stuck in a multi-billion dollar drug war boondoggle going nowhere. Our jails can’t keep up with the sheer number of drug arrests that are poring into them.

What if we treated drug addiction like a medical condition that deserved treatment instead of locking people up where they can find more drugs and mis-treatment?

Luckily, the attempts made so many months ago to quash those 10 words have been unsuccessful. This month people from around the world will come to El Paso to join in a debate about our failed drug poiicies. September 20-22 the University of Texas El Paso will sponsor a global public policy forum on the War on Drugs.  Among speakers at the event will be the former mayor of Medellin, Colombia and a former national security advisor for Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Tony Payan, a professor at the University, who is organizing the forum along with O’Rourke and others, says the circle is tightening around the United States and its emphasis on incarceration.

“The younger generation is more amenable to the idea of treating drug abuse as a medical problem,” Payan says. “There is a very fragile cultural shift occurring. We are hoping to nurture it so that it takes on a momentum of its own.”

Is the “spillover” metaphor in regards to border violence getting tired? Answer: Yes! Back in April I wrote an article about how the national media was over hyping drug violence spillover into U.S. border towns and scaring the pants off Americans, including my dad who just about flipped when he heard I was driving to El Paso to write the story.

The way the violence had been blown up by the media my dad thought I’d be met with tanks and AK-47s when I entered El Paso’s city limits.

After my piece ran, I received a lot of feedback from border residents who are tired of their communities being described as war zones by the cable media outlets and other national media types. They’re worried that all of the bad press is going to lead to their communities becoming beefed up militarized zones.

I’m not trying to say that there isn’t a horrible wave of senseless and brutal violence happening in Mexico. I hear from friends living in Durango and Monterrey that they have never seen anything like the violence that is occurring at the moment in Mexico.

The problem is that the media in the United States are only telling one side of the story as if it were all Mexico’s problem and that their violence is lapping over our borders and infecting our cities. Who is buying all of these drugs? Who is supplying all of the weapons? Surely, there must also be drug dealers living in the United States who are U.S. citizens? Sito Negron, the editor of the online news journal Newspaper Tree in El Paso, wrote a sharp editorial back in March putting the narco violence into context in the terms of globalization. Negron wrote:

 “The cartels may be made in Mexico, but like the maquila industry, they’re not just Mexican. The capital was delivered through U.S. federal policy, the manufacturing and distribution methods honed in American inner cities where the Drug War has been fought every day for decades, and the parts shipped to Mexico for final assembly. Now it’s being sent back to us.”

I don’t think the word spillover means anything anymore. It’s become a cartoon word too simplistic to sum up a complex problem. 

Brownsville native Cecilia Balli who has written some really excellent pieces on the border in Texas Monthly and Harper’s magazine sent me an example of the latest spillover story this time from the Washington Post. The story came out last week. The Post has sent two of its top reporters Travis Fox and William Booth down to the U.S.-Mexico border to do a series of stories on drug violence and the impact it’s having on Mexican society.  The series is called “Mexico at War” They are fine writers but Balli takes issue with Booth’s story dredging up the old “spillover” theme again in El Paso.  The story called “Mayhem Crosses the Border With Informers” is about two narcos turned informers in El Paso. One kills the other. Here is an excerpt with the favorite buzzword spillover:

“But in El Paso, where local leaders boast how safe their city is and the 12 homicides this year have almost all been solved, the González slaying was as disturbing as it was sensational. For people here, the blood splashed on a pretty American street was a jarring sign that Mexico’s drug violence is spilling across the border into U.S. suburbia.”

Here is what Cecilia wrote about Booth’s piece:

“My problem with the story is that the writer feels compelled to return to that tired metaphor of a “spillover.” That spillover metaphor is my biggest pet-peeve, because it reinforces the idea that the drug business happens only on the other side, rather than recognizing the vast and well-funded infrastructure on this side that makes up the necessary other half of the business. That’s why I liked Tony Payan’s quote about the all the quiet dealings that go in El Paso just beneath the surface of everyday life, and that everyone simply agrees to keep mum about. The more public, spectacular violence takes place in Mexico, but the business itself is on both sides of the border. The metaphor “spillover” doesn’t do justice to that.”

I have to agree with Cecilia. Narco informants have been living in U.S. border cities for decades. While this is an interesting story, definitely newsworthy — especially since a soldier from the U.S. military was involved — it’s not something that hasn’t happened before so it isn’t really spillover and though awful I wouldn’t characterize it as “mayhem” either as the title so boldly states.

I guess I’ve just read too many spillover stories and I’m ready to turn the page.  It’s time to learn something new about the disastrous War on Drugs. Personally, I think the fact that the University of Texas El Paso is going to have a two-day conference this month on our outdated drug policies is something to look forward to. So that we can look at the complexity of the narco violence and the U.S.’ drug problem.

Freedom Communications, the owner of a string of Rio Grande Valley papers, will file for bankruptcy as early as this week, according to a New York Times story today.Freedom Communications, based in Orange County, California, owns the Monitor in McAllen, the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen and the Brownsville Herald.  The newspaper chain like many other chains has been limping along financially for some time. As a former reporter for the Monitor, it was depressing to see the cutbacks made over the years at the newspaper.  For instance, it made no sense that the paper ran editorials from Orange County, California, that had nothing to do with the communities along the border. The newspaper chose not to hire a local editorial writer in a cost cutting move. We are indeed in the middle of interesting times when it comes to the media. I will be curious to see what comes out on the other side of the bankruptcy. The border needs better and more diverse representation in the media. I believe the Freedom chain hasn’t been providing that for some years. In both coverage and analysis the online newspaper the Rio Grande Guardian has been eating Freedom’s lunch for years. As a journalist, I am trying to take a positive stance when it comes to the future of journalism. Hopefully, in the face of declining newspaper journalism, we’ll have a surge of online journalism where will have more voices coming from the border rather then less. I’m going to leave this post as a “glass half full” post on the declining newspaper industry.

The Juarez daily paper reported today that an investigator from Mexico’s attorney general was gunned down Wednesday. Pablos Pasillas Fong, 33, of Chihuahua City was in Juarez investigating the death of El Diario journalist Armando Rodríguez Carreón who was killed last November as he was walking his 8-year old daughter to school.

According to El Diario de Juarez, Pasillas had not completed his investigation into the murder.  This is not the first assasination in Juarez of an investigator from the federal attorney general’s office, according to the article. Now Rodriguez’s case is in limbo.

The Observer has written about the plight of Juarez’s journalists in the past. Mexico has become one of the most deadly places in the world for journalists. A few months ago I had the privilege of speaking with El Diario’s editor Rocio Gallegos, at a journalism conference in El Paso. Gallegos said that since Rodriguez’s death the reporters have had to significantly change the way they work. Gallegos said reporters often go to crime scenes with reporters from other media outlets if the story is related to narco trafficking. They also run many stories without bylines as well. And they do many of their stories by telephone rather than visit the scene of the crime.

What was especially astonishing to me was how determined Gallegos was to keep working and not let her reporter’s death impact the newsroom. Gallegos also has children. I have a young son, and know how hard it is to be a journalist and a mom — I can only imagine what it must be like to be working in a war zone.

The death counts continue to rise at a sad and sickening pace in Juarez. I hope that the city finds peace someday and that Armando Rodriguez and his family find justice.

 

 

 

Bush’s boys in Homeland Security have been busy since their boss left Washington. Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has formed the Chertoff Group to cash in on the billions to be made in defense industry contracts. Who knows better where those juicy contracts are than the man who used to dole them out?

The Center for International Policy has an excellent post that tracks Chertoff and a few other Bush appointees including Tom Ridge who oversaw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and former Attorney General John “Let the Eagle Soar” Ashcroft.  The competition must be getting fierce out there for risk management and security services. Former New York City Mayor Rudolf Guiliani who has been in the security and risk advising business for a while will have to make room for this new raft of Homeland Security heavies.

Chertoff’s consulting group has an odd logo remniscent of a devil’s picthfork or a gate on a medieval drawbridge. Check out the introductory pitch on his Web site (down below). The real kicker is when it says they have responded to unprecedented natural disasters, with not a single life lost…wha!? I seem to remember a devastating Hurricane called…um, Katrina where a lot of people died. And I’m pretty sure he was the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time. In fact here’s a clip where he tells CNN that they just couldn’t imagine something like Katrina happening, so they just didn’t have a plan. Incredible.

 I also like the bit about the modern-day pirates. Lots of big companies these days willing to pay top dollar to wipe out some Somali pirates. Here’s his pitch below.

 

We’ve been there, on the front lines, dealing with the United States’ most critical security challenges: stopping terrorists before they have a chance to act. Responding to unprecedented natural disasters, with not a single life lost. Detecting and interdicting hackers trying to break into the myriad networks that are the lifeblood of both government and the private sector. Even dealing with modern-day pirates and other threats to trade and travel.

Apparently, the Observer story “Holes in the Wall” which made allegations last year that the border wall skipped the land of wealthy land owners, created some tension in Bush’s Homeland Security agency, according to some documents that were released to a government watchdog group.Scott Nicol at the Web site No Border Wall made me aware of an amazingly powerful nonprofit Web site called GovernmentDocs.org that is loaded with thousands of pages of FOIA documents that can be browsed by anyone. The Web site offers a ray of light into the murky world of Homeland Security.Documents released as the result of a FOIA filed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington show how Homeland Security monitors the media, especially stories criticizing the building of the border wall.  Scott sent me a few documents that related to the Observer story then I did some more searching on my own.  They also monitor activists apparently. Homeland Security had emails that had been circulated by Brownsville landowner Eloisa Tamez’s daughter Margo.

There is  also an email exchange between Jeffrey Self, chief of the Southwest Border Division for the Border Patrol and Randy Hill, Chief Border Patrol agent for the Del Rio sector about Chad Foster, mayor of Eagle Pass. They discuss how to build fence through Eagle Pass before Mayor Foster has a chance to fight it. They also talk about trying to get the State of Texas to pay for it. Brownsville landowner Eloisa Tamez, her daughter Margo and Mayor Foster have all been vocal critics of DHS building the border wall. The story “Holes in the Wall” prompted U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi who is chair of  the Committee on Homeland Security to send a letter to Chertoff asking him to explain why the fence was skipping wealthy landowners. It’s interesting to see how they put together their memo to explain it to the Congressman. What Chertoff does is basically say it was a local decision made by the Border Patrol sector but he never offers any data or specifics as to why a country club doesn’t get  an 18-foot wall, but a working class family gets one right through their  backyard. What’s also notable is how heavily redacted everything is. This has been my experience as well. After waiting a year for FOIA documents from Homeland Security most of what I received was blacked out. I’m really glad that the folks over at No Border Wall showed me this Web site. It’s a powerful tool for Democracy. Being the document and data nerd that I am, I’m looking forward to spend countless hours searching through these documents.

You know you are under a new administration when the Department of Homeland Security creates its own blog and calls it  “Our Border: A Southwest Border Civic Network.” Civic and “border” were never used in the same sentence under George W’s reign. DHS’ new blog has a forum. Apparently, if you comment on their “Introduce Yourself” forum, and if they are suitably impressed you’ll receive a phone call from DHS Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs Alan Bersin. Oooh!! So far, they’ve received a whopping four comments. Two of them sound like border-militia types. Why is it that the anti-immigration and English only types can’t spell “immigration.” One guy even wrote “boarder” instead of “border.” Apparently, they are trying to save the English language by strangling it one word at a time.Maybe I should write in so that I might get a chance to speak with Bersin. I might be doing him a favor and then he can pay me back by dismantling the border wall.