[News] How the U.S. Weaponized the Border Wall

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/10/us-mexico-border-fence-history/


  How the U.S. Weaponized the Border Wall

Greg Grandin - February 10, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Migrants die and disappear_ in staggeringly high numbers along the 
U.S.-Mexico border, as Washington over the years has shut down 
relatively safe, traditional urban entry points, forcing border crossers 
into hostile desert terrain. Migrants also sustain severe 
life-threatening or crippling injuries. They fall into mine shafts and 
break their backs. Dehydration damages their kidneys. Others are bitten 
by snakes or injured in chases. The tall metal fences that run as 
barriers along segments of the border also serve as weapons. Migrants 
sever limbs climbing the barriers and break bones falling off them.

“Border-related trauma is so common,” anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte 
writes 
<https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.12967>, 
“that it has become normalized.”

First responders who work the borderlands around Nogales, Arizona, told 
<https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.12967> 
Jusionyte that they believe the sheet-metal border fence that used to 
separate Nogales from its Mexican sister-city was intentionally designed 
to sever body parts. Border crossers, one Nogales firefighter said, 
regularly used to get their fingers cut off. That fence was replaced in 
2011, but the new high bollard-style fence, 20 or 30 feet high in 
places, frequently causes broken bones when migrants fall from it.

In recent months, Border Patrol agents and federal troops have festooned 
<https://www.gvnews.com/news/despite-complaints-soldiers-add-more-wire-to-nogales-border-fence/article_cff744ae-d913-5bd1-8047-2b392103af39.html> 
long stretches of the border fence with razor wire, including in 
Nogales. “That wire is lethal, and I really don’t know what they’re 
thinking by putting it all the way down to the ground,” Nogales’s mayor 
complained. Now, six coils of concertina wire cover the fence like vines 
<https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/despite-complaints-soldiers-add-more-wire-to-nogales-border-fence/article_d4397ff2-28b7-11e9-94ff-e36237f3a29f.html>, 
facing a residential neighborhood, onto a street that serves as a route 
for school buses. Every weekday, the city’s children look out and can 
imagine that they are living inside a concentration camp. More than two 
years into the administration of Donald Trump, such gratuitous displays 
of cruelty are common, working to wear down on the nation’s moral 
sensibility.

But the use of border barriers to inflict pain, in the hope that news of 
injuries and deaths will serve as a deterrent to other would-be 
migrants, long predates the Trump presidency. The idea reaches back at 
least to the 1970s, to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when the U.S. 
began to turn its attention away from Vietnam toward its southern 
border. A weaponized fence is a feature, not a bug, of federal policy.


      Carter’s Fence

In 1978, Carter’s Immigration and Naturalization Service requested, and 
Congress approved, $4.3 million to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexico 
border. The plan 
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978MEXICO17989_d.html> was to 
quietly replace some 27 miles of existing slack, rusted chain-link 
around the ports of entry in San Ysidro, California, and El Paso, Texas, 
and then add a new fence along an additional 6 miles of border.

After consulting with the U.S. Army, the INS hired Potomac Research, a 
Virginia firm, to design the new barrier and then signed a $2 million 
federal contract with Houston-based Anchor Post Products to build the 
fence. The Carter administration had inherited the project from Richard 
Nixon, who was the first president to propose building some kind of 
barrier along the entire 2,000-mile border.

The project moved forward largely ignored by the press until October 
1978. That month, a big-mouthed manager from Anchor Post named George 
Norris told a reporter that the “razor-sharp wall” was designed to be 
bloody, built with “punched-out metal that would leave edges sharp 
enough to cut off the toes of barefoot climbers.” Norris said that his 
company had double-checked with the engineers at Potomac Research 
whether they “wanted the metal deburred (filed) when we first got the 
job.” The engineers, according to Norris, said no. Leave it sharp, they 
instructed, as “part of the deterrent.” The cut metal was meant to sever 
body parts, Norris said; a climber would “leave his toe permanently 
embedded in it.”

The remarks were picked up by Mexican dailies. As outrage spread, 
representatives from the INS and Potomac Research issued denials. 
“Nobody in the INS ever told anyone to design a fence that would hurt 
people,” said one of Potomac Research’s engineers. “We were told 
explicitly that there could be no barbed wire. No barbed tape, no 
electrification.” But, Carter’s head of the INS, Leonardo Castillo, 
admitted, the proposed “steel latticework” did appear “sharper than it 
was intended to be.”

Carter, who would soon visit Mexico City, was caught off guard, telling 
a reporter that he didn’t know anything about the fence and that “any 
sort of fencing device that would injure people is certainly contrary to 
my own inclinations.” The “Tortilla Curtain,” as the scandal was soon 
dubbed, was condemned 
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978TIJUAN00767_d.html> by Mexican 
politicians as an assault on national “dignity 
<https://www.google.com/search?biw=1920&bih=963&tbm=bks&ei=J5VAXKH-K9Hk_AbGyrAw&q=%22Our+government+cannot+remain+impassive+in+the+face+if+this+inhuman+measure%22&oq=%22Our+government+cannot+remain+impassive+in+the+face+if+this+inhuman+measure%22&gs_l=psy-ab.12...7229.9338.0.10094.33.8.0.0.0.0.157.396.3j1.4.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..32.0.0....0.2DZSFoujQZg>.” 
Mexico’s president, José López Portillo, claimed that he first learned 
of the fence from press reports, calling the matter “serious, very 
serious” and criticizing efforts to “form walls of separation in the world.”

“No more walls,” López Portillo said 
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978MEXICO18149_d.html>.

López Portillo was right to fear a new era of geopolitical 
barrier-building. A quick survey of State Department cables from the 
time reveal walls and fences going up in many places — along borders in 
South Africa, India, Israel, and Northern Ireland — with much diplomatic 
energy spent on figuring out how to justify them according to the 
principles of international law.


      The Border Lobby

There existed, in the mid-1970s, a number of domestic constituencies in 
the United States pushing for more stringent border control, of the kind 
that a razor-sharp border fence might provide.

One was the INS itself, which around 1973 had become more vocal in 
lobbying Congress and the public to expand its power. The service was 
notoriously corrupt, involved in many of the illicit moneymaking 
operations associated with border crossing, including migrant, drug, and 
sex trafficking. Operation Clean Sweep 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=s-8Dgc84u8UC&q=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+INS++Murray&dq=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+INS++Murray&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjy_ZjV9o3gAhWJdt8KHU-PDs0Q6AEIOjAD>, 
established by Nixon’s Justice Department in 1972, investigated hundreds 
of agents 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=s-8Dgc84u8UC&q=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+INS++Murray&dq=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+INS++Murray&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjy_ZjV9o3gAhWJdt8KHU-PDs0Q6AEIOjAD>, 
revealing widespread Border Patrol and INS involvement in selling 
immigration documents, smuggling migrants, and running drugs. Agents 
also arranged visits to Mexican brothels for U.S. judges and 
congressmen, and then used knowledge of such visits as kompromat to 
secure favorable rulings and votes.

Operation Clean Sweep might have done to Border Patrol and the INS what 
the Church Committee 
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/05/06/40-years-ago-church-committee-investigated-americans-spying-on-americans/>, 
later in the 1970s, did to the CIA and FBI: reveal to the public rogue 
operations engaged in widespread, systemic abuse. It didn’t. The inquiry 
was sidelined when, as reported 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=ImIPAAAAYAAJ&q=%22chief+pimp%22+crewdson&dq=%22chief+pimp%22+crewdson&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNmbLrvqDgAhWSGt8KHVUVB4UQ6AEIKjAA> 
by New York Times’s John Crewdson, it turned up damaging information on 
Rep. Peter Rodino. An INS official — described by an informant as the 
service’s “chief pimp” whose job was to get U.S. officials “laid” in 
Mexico — had reportedly arranged for Rodino to visit a Juárez brothel. A 
New Jersey Democrat, Rodino was, as Crewdson wrote, too powerful a 
figure to bring down. He not only chaired the House Judiciary Committee, 
which oversaw the INS, but was in charge of the impeachment vote against 
Nixon.

Nixon resigned in April 1974, and Clean Sweep was shut down for good. 
Hundreds of agents had been investigated for “every federal crime,” as 
its lead investigator, Alan Murray, put it 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=ImIPAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+murray+border&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22bank+robbery%22>, 
“except bank robbery.” Few were indicted.

Rather than facing constraints on their activities — as the CIA and FBI 
soon would — Border Patrol and the INS’s power only increased. Their 
budgets and staff grew and new laws were passed giving them even more 
enforcement authority, and giving corrupt agents what in effect was a 
federally funded monopoly advantage as they competed 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=s-8Dgc84u8UC&q=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+murray+border&dq=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+murray+border&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNu5395f7fAhWsZd8KHe0SBEYQ6AEIOTAE> 
with Mexican criminals over the routes used to traffic migrants and drugs.

A second constituency for border militarization came from Vietnam-era 
research-and-development firms. Founded in 1966, Potomac Research, the 
designer of the controversial fence, was one of many companies looking 
to keep signing federal contracts in the wake of the Vietnam drawdown. 
“War technology is Americanized,” wrote David Rorvik in Playboy in 1974, 
of the move to use Vietnam weapons and surveillance equipment for 
domestic policing. Sylvania Electronics 
<https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-vietnam-war-brought-high-tech-border-surveillan-1694647526> 
successfully pushed for its ground sensors — developed as part of 
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s multibillion dollar project to build 
a physical and electronic fence separating North from South Vietnam — to 
be used on the border. “Vietnam’s $3250 million automated battlefield is 
coming home to America, the land where it was conceived,” wrote 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=Bxr8Sl-tihoC&pg=PA619&dq=%22Smugglers+on+the+US/Mexican+border+are+treading+softly+these+days%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiM_rfS7v7fAhUMSN8KHTtTAJAQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=%22Smugglers%20on%20the%20US%2FMexican%20border%20are%20treading%20softly%20these%20days%22&f=false> 
New Scientist in 1972; “Smugglers on the US/Mexican border are treading 
softly these days, now that the US Board Patrol (an arm of the Justice 
Department) has adopted the same anti-infiltration barrier used by the 
military to detect troop and truck movements on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

A third group that wanted less Mexican migration was organized labor, 
including both the AFL-CIO and the United Farm Workers, since it applied 
downward pressure on wages. For its part, the UFW — largely unprotected 
by New Deal labor laws guaranteeing the right to form unions — feared 
the use of undocumented workers as strikebreakers. For about three 
months in 1975, writes 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=cHsnz5efcMQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Frank+Bardacke%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqrOqij47gAhXomOAKHZaaAqQQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=%22%22If%20you%20got%20picked%20up%20by%20the%20UFW%2C%20you%20were%20on%20your%20own%22&f=false> 
Frank Bardacke, in “Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two 
Souls of the United Farm Workers,” an extralegal “UFW Border Patrol” — 
comprised of between 35 and 300 people paid $10 a day — “hunted 
illegals” near Yuma, Arizona, with federal Border Patrol agents and 
local police officers happy to turn migrant interdiction into an 
intra-racial conflict.

And elected politicians, both law-and-order Republicans and reform 
Democrats allied with organized labor, supported increased border 
control. In 1978, the “unreconstructed 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/nyregion/james-h-scheuer-13term-new-york-congressman-is-dead-at-85.html>” 
New York City liberal, James Scheuer (who, like Rep. Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez today, represented the Bronx and Queens) called for a 
“firm, hard sealing” of the border (it was around this time that the 
verb “to seal” — a phrase usually applied to more militarized, 
war-ravaged border zones, like the one that separated Israel from Gaza 
or West from East Berlin — began to be applied to the U.S.-Mexico 
border). Earlier, in 1964, Democrats pushed for the end of the 
guest-worker Bracero Program and, in 1965, for an unrealistically low 
quota on the number of visas available to Mexico. And in 1974, none 
other than Rodino, working with Sen. Edward Kennedy, sponsored 
<https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/10/archives/the-flight-of-the-wetbacks-wetbacks.html> 
legislation that would have made it illegal to hire undocumented 
migrants. The bill passed in the House, 336-30, but lost in the Senate.

By 1978, no one wanted the controversy sparked by Norris’s confession 
that the fence was meant to maim. But the idea of a fence itself was 
uncontroversial. “The new fences would be no more of a symbol of 
exclusion,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “than are the present barriers.”


      Cheap Labor and Cheap Oil

The weaponized fence was one complaint that López Portillo, the Mexican 
president, presented to Carter, when Carter landed in Mexico City on 
February 14, 1979. Another had to do with oil.

Two momentous events preceded Carter’s visit. First came the 
confirmation, in early 1977, that Mexico possessed much more petroleum, 
in vast onshore and offshore fields, than had heretofore been realized. 
Then, on January 16, 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran, marking 
the triumph of that country’s Islamic Revolution.

Washington already had been pushing Mexico, before the Shah’s downfall, 
to make up for the falling supply of Persian Gulf oil. An alliance with 
the Shah was key to Washington’s post-Vietnam pivot: Iran’s ample supply 
of crude mitigated the worst effects of the ongoing energy crisis, with 
the country’s petrodollars either deposited in New York banks or spent 
lavishly on U.S. weapons. In response to the crisis in Iran, which led 
to a drop in the nation’s oil exports, the Carter administration began 
pressuring Mexico in late 1978 to sell its fuel to the U.S. at below 
global market price. Mexico refused.

Then — just a few days before the story of the border fence’s 
“razor-sharp” design broke in the press — the White House voided a deal 
to buy Mexican natural gas. The move was meant to force Mexico to 
reconsider the asking price for its oil. With a pipeline to the U.S. 
half-finished, where else was the country going to sell its gas? Mexico 
was left “hanging like a paintbrush,” López Portillo said.

Mexico wasn’t a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting 
Countries. And its oligarchy and security forces were brutal to their 
own people. But its political elite were heirs to the economic 
nationalism of the Mexican Revolution. López Portillo was something like 
the Hugo Chávez of his decade, though more mannered: Petroleum, he said, 
was the “patrimony” of all of humanity, and its profits should be used 
to finance the development of “a more just international order 
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978MEXICO17835_d.html>.”

Access to cheap fuel and cheap labor are the two elements absolutely 
essential to the functioning of global capitalism, though they aren’t 
often linked together in discussions of foreign policy. López Portillo 
though, in response to Washington’s demand that Mexico serve as its 
private oil spigot, repeatedly — in discussions with China and Japan, 
even in sidebar talks with California’s governor, Jerry Brown — 
emphasized the connection between energy and migration. Mexico’s 
untapped oil reserves, he said, would help the country “enter the coming 
century as a country that offers full employment to its people. We 
either do that, or we risk a full financial failure and suffer the 
humiliation of becoming a country of wetbacks.”

Other Mexican policy and opinion-makers made similar connections between 
petroleum production and migration. One columnist warned of “big trouble 
along the border” were Mexico to capitulate to Washington and sell its 
fuel at below global market value. Economic inequality between the two 
countries would only grow worse, he said, predicting that by the year 
2000, “Mexicans will flow into the U.S. at the rate of 5 million a year, 
instead of the 1 million a year now.” “Mexico will eat its gas,” said a 
Mexico City banker, “before it will sell it at less than $2.60” — then 
the going global rate.

And so Carter landed in Mexico City on Valentine’s Day to a cold 
welcome. The airport reception was cordial but brief, with López 
Portillo using his lunchtime remarks 
<http://www.memoriapoliticademexico.org/Textos/6Revolucion/1979CJC.html> 
to lecture his U.S. counterpart. Referring to the borderlands as 
“scars,” López Portillo complained of Washington’s “sudden deception” 
and “abuse,” warning that manipulative policies on the part of the 
United States would only worsen the “silent migration” and deepen 
resentment and fear on both sides of the border.

Newspapers reported that Carter was “stung” by the criticisms, to which 
he responded with a joke that didn’t go over well: He said he first 
started jogging during an earlier visit to Mexico City, when he 
“discovered I was afflicted with Montezuma’s revenge.”


      Terrorizing the Borderlands

Carter’s fence fiasco receded from public attention, after his 
administration promised a scaled-down, humane design. But the 
controversy, along with diplomatic tensions over energy policy, signaled 
a major realignment of politics on both sides of the border.

In the United States, the rising Chicano movement broke with the 
anti-immigrant position of both the United Farm Workers and the 
middle-class League of United Latin American Citizens (which earlier had 
supported Operation Wetback, as Border Patrol’s mass deportation 
campaign of the 1950s was called). Activists mobilized against the 
fence, and then against INS raids in East Los Angeles, describing them 
as a form of domestic terrorism. One INS officials admitted that the 
“symbolic content” of the green uniform worn by Border Patrol agents “is 
very high, sort of like showing a swastika in a synagogue.” Soon, both 
the United Farm Workers and LULAC (followed years later by the AFL) 
reversed their positions and began advocating on behalf of undocumented 
migrants.

The fence scandal likewise marked the growing importance of Mexican 
migration to domestic electoral politics.

For instance, Sen. Ted Kennedy, in April 1980 shortly after announcing 
that he would challenge Carter for the Democratic Party presidential 
nomination, flew to Mexico City to meet with López Portillo. Kennedy had 
a few years earlier backed legislation meant to crack down on the hiring 
of undocumented workers. Now, in Mexico City, he criticized Carter’s 
“unilateral” approach to border security and said that he favored an 
“amnesty” to legalize the status of undocumented residents in the United 
States. There was, the Massachusetts senator believed, a “growing 
consensus” within his country for such a solution. “Electric fences,” he 
said, are not the answer.

Ronald Reagan, shortly after securing the Republican nomination, also 
jumped on both the fence controversy and the energy crisis. “You don’t 
build a 9-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations,” he 
said on a campaign swing through Texas in September 1980. “You document 
the undocumented workers and let them come in here with a visa,” he 
continued, and let them stay “for whatever length of time they want to 
stay.” Reagan quickly gave up the idea, careful as he was, to thread 
between the business and nativist wings of the Republican Party. But he 
also, in response to the United States’s energy dispute with Mexico, put 
forward the first real proposal for what would evolve into the North 
American Free Trade Agreement.

The details of Reagan’s “North American Accord” were fuzzy, and the 
final NAFTA treaty, as negotiated by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. 
Bush and signed, in late 1993, into law by Bill Clinton, didn’t include, 
as Reagan had suggested, the integration of Mexican, U.S., and Canadian 
fuel markets. The agreement focused mostly on non-energy-related trade 
and investment. But in the decades following ratification, Washington 
steadily pushed to break 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta/nafta-negotiators-seek-to-enshrine-mexicos-energy-reforms-idUSKCN1BD0TS> 
the Mexican government’s monopoly on oil and gas production. That push 
was eventually successful, with Mexico’s Congress passing legislation in 
2014 to open up its energy sector to U.S. corporations, a move which 
hastened the worldwide decline of energy prices.

The cost of labor, too, remains cheap. Back in 1978, the country’s 
“Roma”-era business elites, in contrast to the public indignation voiced 
by Mexico’s politicians, privately told 
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978TIJUAN00767_d.html> U.S. 
diplomats that they supported the idea of a border fence, so long as it 
was put up without fanfare. A hardened border, they hoped, would keep 
their labor costs down. And so after López Portillo, Mexican presidents 
gave up the idea of creating a more just international order and instead 
promoted the opening of its economy, while at the same time, largely 
going along with Washington’s hardening of its border policy.

-- 
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