THE BORDER REPORT

With a host of closing ceremonies in western Arizona and a last piece of fencing lain down in the eastern corner of the state, the National Guard concluded its operations along the border with Mexico. The message from the bosses, Mission Accomplished. In many, many ways, it was exactly that. But that success is not gauged by the standards one would normally think. The Guard units, first brought in during the summer of 2006 as part of Operation Jump Start, were supposed to fill in the gap left by job openings at the U.S. Border Patrol. Today, the Border Patrol is only about 1,500 shy of its 18,000 agent goal. Illegal immigrant arrests have dropped, a hugely dubious achievement that the Homeland Security officials like to say means less people are trying to cross into the country but which could also mean less people wanted to cross over because of economic improvements in their own country. The Guard put up miles of new fencing and stadium lighting along the border, bringing the border wall closer to the completion required under the Secure Fence Act. Border officials like Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano are lamenting the departure; that’s got to be a good sign, when your hosts don’t want you to leave, right? The physical successes of the National Guard operation are debatable, if not dubious. No, where they really succeeded was in public opinion. The decision to place them on the border was, politically, a brilliant one. Six thousand National Guard troops had about as much effect on border security as 6,000 Border Patrol agents. But in the psyche of the country, it inspired enthusiasm, that pioneering spirit, that circling of the wagons Americans embrace when confronted with adversity. And that may prove to be the National Guard’s greatest achievement, calming the populace down. A few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of locals in Sonoyta, a Mexican border town south of a federal wildlife refuge on the Arizona-Sonora border, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. I was there to meet with a guy, an old O'odham who supplements his meager tribal income by refurbishing radios to pick up U.S. Border Patrol signals (The bosses say it can't happen, that they operate off secure signals. This guy says different). A cold beer sweating in hand, I offered a pack of cigarettes around to the group, young, bored toughs whose only apparent job is to sit on the border and trash talk whomever happens by. I felt comfortable. It was early morning; everyone had just started in with the beer, too early still to be full-on inebriated. Nothing fills me with dread faster than a bleary-eyed thug whose attention turns on me. A National Guard troop walked by, studiously ignoring the rambling shacks of this chicken-scratch town divided from the protected refuge by four miles of steel vehicle barrier. The conversation paused. Here was something interesting. A woman dressed in fatigues, walking the line toward a waiting Humvee. Her short blonde hair just visible under her baseball cap. “Look at that,” one of the guys says, the rest of his words best not repeated. His friend stared as well, watching her walk away. “Man, she’d lay you out with that rifle in a second,” he said. They remembered I was there. “Is it true the soldados are shooting everyone who goes across, man?” I shook my head, no, of course not. The young tough nodded his head. “I hear they do,” he said.

That, to me, was the Guard’s largest success. Intimidation for Mexican smugglers, a bit of hero worship from Arizona residents who don’t know any better. In the end, the National Guard accomplished a mission, one that someone in Washington, D.C. thought up of years ago. It calmed everyone down for a while.

Of course, now they’re gone and we’re right back where we started, but that’s another story.

-- Michel Marizco