THE BORDER REPORT

This story was published April 19, 2007 in the Tucson Weekly. In retrospect, I slammed the Feds pretty hard but neglected to pursue the mainstream press who also bears much of the responsibility for minimizing the murders and promoting the failing efforts of the U.S. government to bring the border under some sort of control. As Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said during the April 3 meeting in Sahuarita, you cannot expect the border to be fully controlled. I concur; but the desmadre people live with every day is barely being mentioned. The story isn't the cut wire fences and the garbage the illegal immigrants leave behind. It's about murders. A lot of them. The media tends to focus on illegal immigration as if it's never occurred to them that someone is profiting - greatly - from the smuggling routes people use along the Sinaloa-Sonora-Arizona corridor.

A rash of bloody violence is taking lives on both sides of the border

Read the full post

THE BORDER REPORT

The Associated Press has published what may be one of the most egregious errors about the U.S.-Mexico border I've seen to date and that's a shame. In a story that's been moved more than 18,000 times since last Saturday, The AP used the numbers provided by the Feds to prove that prosecutions of illegal immigrants rarely happen. The premise is correct; the U.S. Attorney's Office rarely prosecutes illegal border crossers unless the number of attempts get out of hand. With border prosecution offices already taking on large numbers of caseloads; I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon. But the numbers used to derive that point are grossly over-inflated; in short, The AP made the same mistake most news organizations make, mistaking apprehension events for people (ten border crossers captured ten times equals 100 apprehensions not 100 people). "Ninety-eight percent of those arrested between Oct. 1, 2000, and Sept. 30, 2005, were never prosecuted for illegally entering the country, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data. Those 5.2 million immigrants were simply escorted back across the Rio Grande and turned loose. Many presumably tried to slip into the U.S. again," the story states. The number of illegal immigrants prosecuted in fiscal 2005 was 30,848, the story states, and that's probably true, but there certainly weren't 1.17 million people arrested that year which it also states. It's an important point that merits attention every time I see it because apprehension numbers give such a misconception about what happens on the border every day. And it's one not helped by the Homeland Security Department who repeatedly turns down requests for the actual numbers of people who were arrested. They have the actual numbers too; every border crosser is run through the FBI's database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and I'm told that Customs and Border Protection in Washington is keeping track. But The AP is not Homeland; it's a news organization. They should be aware that the numbers cited by apprehensions distort what the American public should know about this place. The misinformation has been going on so long, I wonder if the Homeland Security Department doesn't benefit from the inflated numbers. According to this little gem, the FBI is currently upgrading the IAFIS system to do more than check police jackets and fingerprints and include all the biometric data it can draw, including DNA. The information gathering process is getting better and better but the dissemination is getting worse and worse. So who's benefitting from that? Certainly not the taxpayers.

THE BORDER REPORT

Fresh from a trip to Mexico City to receive a "human rights" award, Tucson's Derechos Humanos co-chair Isabe Garcia is back home, taking a new stand, this time against the Mexican government. The award is a publicity stunt produced by the National Commission on Human Rights, a Fox-legacy commission that is supposed to take on abuses of power against Mexican nationals, but usually justifies its existence by generating headlines. This year, the human rights commission doled out its human rights award to Garica and to Humane Borders founder, the Rev. Robin Hoover. In an interesting aside, the award was actually supposed to go to Hoover this year but because he's not a Mexican citizen, the commission was prevented from handing him the award. Garcia, who is a Mexican citizen, was then chosen to receive the award last August. The commission then created a special award just for Hoover. An even more interesting aside: This is the kind of fiasco the commission usually engages in - the costs involved in the process to choose Hoover, then dump him for Garcia, then create a new award for Hoover, presumably could have created enough economic incentive in Mexico to have saved a few nationals the entire ordeal of crossing the desert in the first place. Pero bueno. The entire award ended in an even bigger desmadre after Garcia complained to the left-leaning newspaper La Jornada that she is being censored by the Mexican government. Apparently Garcia intended to fly down to Mexico and accept this award in order to blast President Felipe Calderon and the country, both countries unless I miss my guess, at the ceremony. From the article, Garcia intended to let loose with all her guns about militarization of the border and the deaths of hundreds of illegal immigrants who tried to cross the Pinacate. Somebody at the Ministry must have gotten wind of this and shut down her chance to speak, and so, taking her lesssons from Andrés Manuel Lopez Obradór, she held an alternative press conference where she expressed her views anyway, this time villifiying the new president's cabinet for "censorship." This is scandalous on so many levels. Mexico and the United States deserve their fair share of criticism for the deaths and exploitation of illegal migrants. But let's leave substance alone for a minute and focus on Garcia's reaction. She was so incensed that when she came back to Tucson, she let the local media know about this censorship. Who paid for the flight down to Mexico City? Who put Garcia and company up at a hotel, hosted a dinner, crafted the award and arranged for the meeting? From the KOLD-tv interview, I see that the biggest commitment she took on for this trip was attending the event. I don't see that Derechos Humanos or Garcia herself actually paid for the trip down. It seems to me that if one is going to be righteous in one's efforts against censorship, the proper gesture would be to reject the prizes of the censoring establishment. If you're going to sign on for the free plane trip and the fancy hotel, you don't have much room left to complain.

THE BORDER REPORT

Mexico President Felipe Calderón is taking much of the same hard line in the drug war as his predecessor but unfortunately, he's having about the same results. By Saturday, newspapers in the state of Michoacán were announcing the deployment of  several thousand soldiers brought in to tame the warring Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Federation. El Universal newspaper automatically questioned the move in its editorial today saying that muscular reactions are great, but need some cerebral backing. And meanwhile, and I'm starting to believe this is the norm, not the exception, the real drama plays out in the shadows of the circus show. A federal judge quietly released Jaime Javier Figueroa Soto, the last of the great druglords to live in the U.S. I guess that's not totally true, it's well-known among agents that El Mayo Zambada's kids attend high school in Phoenix, this despite a $5 million reward on his head. So how clandestine can he possibly be? But Jaime was a little different, a little more brazen, in the end, a little more stupid. The DEA finally caught up to him after receiving reports of a man carrying a large pistol running around Speedway Boulevard in red jockey shorts. There were many who believed he simply was not going to stay in the state prison for very long in spite of the murder charges brought up against him. Shortly after he was deported to Hermosillo from SuperMax in Florence, Colo., Jaime had 15 pairs of exotic cowboy boots handmade for him and brought up to his condo in Hillo. At the time, I thought he was simply relieved to be back in his native Sonora and anxious to return to his picudo boots. I guess he was getting ready to go though. At any rate, even as Calderón generates headlines with military maneuvers, the show does indeed go on.