SECRETO A VOCES

Money talks, but sometimes it buys a nice silence as well. A pretty comfortable silence too when considering the latest initiatives undertaken by the United States and Mexico in this beleaguered country’s ongoing fight with drug traffickers. On the one hand, the Bush Administration wants to invest $1.4 billion in an enormous aid package for Mexico, flush with helicopters, airplanes, witness protection programs, military training – though no intervention by U.S. troops – you name it. On the other hand, the U.S. is spreading out a zero-tolerance program along its southern borders, one that started in December 2005. The program, dubbed Operation Streamline, slaps illegal migrants with a misdemeanor jail sentence of at least two weeks when U.S. Border Patrol agents capture them on their first try sneaking into the country. The program started in Del Rio Sector in Texas, then spread out to western Arizona, and is now planned for use in the nation’s busiest corridor for illegal border crossings, the Tucson sector. Frankly, I always wondered why such enforcement wasn’t already being used since the U.S. got into an immigration mess in the first place because there was such lackadaisical enforcement of the existing immigration laws. Pero bueno. What’s somewhat astounding to me is the lack of any substantial complaint by the Mexican government and I’ll tell you why. Back in 2003, the U.S. tried an absurdly over-priced program called interior repatriation where captured Mexican nationals were supposed to be flown back to Mexico City where some would go home and others would have to start all over again. But at the time, the Mexicans refused to allow the flights into Mexican airspace. So, the Border Patrol came up with a new tactic, a kind of migrant shell game, flying the migrants from one side of the country’s border to the other. Those captured in Tucson sector were flown to El Paso, Texas, and scooted into Mexico. The pilot program only lasted a few months and was re-named lateral repatriation. The Mexican government, predictably, raised hell over the program, then cowed to the interior flights – but only if the program was voluntary. So, at $14 million a year, the U.S. was shipping about ten percent of its captured Mexican nationals back into Mexico on a free flight home. Fast forward to March 2005 and you had then-President Vicente Fox railing against the U.S. plans to wall off more of the San Diego border, dropping this beautiful bon mót on a Washington D.C. audience: "No country that is proud of itself should build walls." A group of gun-toting restrictionists decides to hold a border-watch party on the Arizona border and the Mexican government grows livid with the news. Over toward the New Mexico border, somebody screws up and builds up the border wall ten feet into Mexico, another outcry. Who can forget the pepperball incident a few years back when border agents were armed with pepperguns and there was nearly a diplomatic freeze over their use on troublemaking migrants? Most recently, President Felipe Calderón really caused border security enthusiasts’ hearts to quake when he pronounced, “Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.” But as far as criticism against the U.S., that’s as far as it’s gone. Now, silence. The Bush Administration has found the proper way to approach Calderón’s office on illegal immigration controls and the solution seems to be the time-honored waving of a fist full of cash, training and heavy gear. Migrants are being thrown into the federal version of the drunk tank, serving two weeks to six months in jail after being captured on their first try in and their Mexican president seems to be okay with that. Up until now, U.S. border security plans have mostly steered away from the core problem, the migrants themselves. As a result, fences, cameras, vigilantes, and choice of weapons were criticized, and quite heavily, by the Mexican government. Now that the plan to arrest the illegal migrants is spreading out to the busiest corridors of Mexico’s northern border, it’d be in keeping with Mexico’s usual outrage against the U.S.’s plans to raise an outcry heard all the way to the United Nations. But that $1.4 billion will go a long way to bringing back a semblance of control to the country’s precarious law enforcement agencies. And that, it seems, is vastly more important to Calderón’s administration. As for the Bush Administration, in spite of its global failings, it seems to have finally struck a balance between heavy-handedness and diplomatic relations when it comes to Mexico. It just took a few hundred million dollars to make it happen.

-- Michael Marizco