<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/10/us-mexico-border-fence-history/">https://theintercept.com/2019/02/10/us-mexico-border-fence-history/</a></font>
<h1 class="Post-title">How the U.S. Weaponized the Border Wall</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Greg Grandin - February 10,
2019</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div>
<p><u>Migrants die and disappear</u> 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.</p>
<p>“Border-related trauma is so common,” anthropologist
Ieva Jusionyte <a
href="https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.12967">writes</a>,
“that it has become normalized.”</p>
<p>First responders who work the borderlands around
Nogales, Arizona, <a
href="https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.12967">told</a>
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.</p>
<p>In recent months, Border Patrol agents and federal
troops have <a
href="https://www.gvnews.com/news/despite-complaints-soldiers-add-more-wire-to-nogales-border-fence/article_cff744ae-d913-5bd1-8047-2b392103af39.html">festooned</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/despite-complaints-soldiers-add-more-wire-to-nogales-border-fence/article_d4397ff2-28b7-11e9-94ff-e36237f3a29f.html">cover
the fence like vines</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Carter’s Fence</h3>
<p>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 <a
href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978MEXICO17989_d.html">plan</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”<br>
</p>
<p>
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 <a
href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978TIJUAN00767_d.html">condemned</a>
by Mexican politicians as an assault on national “<a
href="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">dignity</a>.”
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.”</p>
<p>“No more walls,” López Portillo <a
href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978MEXICO18149_d.html">said</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>The Border Lobby</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <a
href="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">Operation
Clean Sweep</a>, established by Nixon’s Justice
Department in 1972, <a
href="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">investigated
hundreds of agents</a>, 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.</p>
<p>Operation Clean Sweep might have done to Border Patrol
and the INS what the <a
href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/05/06/40-years-ago-church-committee-investigated-americans-spying-on-americans/">Church
Committee</a>, 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 <a
href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ImIPAAAAYAAJ&q=%22chief+pimp%22+crewdson&dq=%22chief+pimp%22+crewdson&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNmbLrvqDgAhWSGt8KHVUVB4UQ6AEIKjAA">reported</a>
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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ImIPAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22operation+clean+sweep%22+murray+border&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22bank+robbery%22">put
it</a>, “except bank robbery.” Few were indicted.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="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">competed</a>
with Mexican criminals over the routes used to traffic
migrants and drugs.</p>
<p>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. <a
href="https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-vietnam-war-brought-high-tech-border-surveillan-1694647526">Sylvania
Electronics</a> 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,” <a
href="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">wrote</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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, <a
href="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">writes</a>
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.</p>
<p>And elected politicians, both law-and-order Republicans
and reform Democrats allied with organized labor,
supported increased border control. In 1978, the “<a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/nyregion/james-h-scheuer-13term-new-york-congressman-is-dead-at-85.html">unreconstructed</a>”
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, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/10/archives/the-flight-of-the-wetbacks-wetbacks.html">sponsored</a>
legislation that would have made it illegal to hire
undocumented migrants. The bill passed in the House,
336-30, but lost in the Senate.</p>
<p>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.”<br>
</p>
<h3>Cheap Labor and Cheap Oil</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978MEXICO17835_d.html">a
more just international order</a>.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.memoriapoliticademexico.org/Textos/6Revolucion/1979CJC.html">remarks</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h3>Terrorizing the Borderlands</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The fence scandal likewise marked the growing
importance of Mexican migration to domestic electoral
politics.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta/nafta-negotiators-seek-to-enshrine-mexicos-energy-reforms-idUSKCN1BD0TS">break</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978TIJUAN00767_d.html">told</a>
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.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>