The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

330 critical reflections
vertising such services had the telephone number blacked out and the words 1–800
EAT-SHIT substituted. Although an America’s Watch investigator complained to
the head of the station, the defaced poster was still there four months later (Human
Rights Watch 1995).
As outspoken defenders of the marked category of Latino in the United States,
Martinez, Jimenez, the American Friends Service Committee, America’s Watch,
and Amnesty International use the legal system and the media to defend the rights
of Latinos and thereby forestall violence against them. Nonetheless, neither their
activities nor Latino inclusion in the United States through citizenship has resolved
the inequalities of a racialized exploitation in a political and economic system that
has been constituted historically by the simultaneous exclusion and demand for the
labor of racialized migrants (Lowe 1996). While the Immigration and Naturalization
Service is charged with upholding the law, Andreas (2000) charges that it also
enforces class and racial hierarchies by targeting more susceptible underclasses. In
the process, people learn what is acceptable from within a narrow range of social
identities and behaviors. Further, when some categories of people are reduced to
a less than human status, it becomes easier for those higher in the hierarchy to imagine
that those lower somehow deserve to be brutalized (Scarry 1985; Nagengast
1994). Thus all are controlled, and hierarchy based on skin color and language, and
less obviously but even more centrally on class, is rendered natural.
THE MILITARIZATION OF THE BORDER
The gradual militarization of the Border Patrol since the 1980s has played an integral
role in the escalation of violence directed toward Latinos and Latino communities,
legal and illegal alike (Heyman 1995; Dunn 1996; Andreas 2000). In 1984,
elite Border Patrol units known as Border Patrol Tactical Teams (BORTAC) began
receiving special paramilitary training similar to that of SWAT teams. The
1986 Immigration Reform Control Act (IRCA) was intended to reduce illegal immigration,
and the federal government was prepared to back it up with force. By
1989 Congress had authorized five thousand federal troops for border duty. According
to a former army officer, “It is...absurd that the most powerful nation on
earth cannot prevent a swarming land invasion by unarmed Mexican peasants.
The U.S. Army is entirely capable of plugging the holes permanently and border
patrol [is] excellent military training” (Bassford 1991 quoted in Andreas 1994). Furthermore,
between 1989 and 1999 the budget and number of Border Patrol agents
increased dramatically. By 1998, for example, 2,350 agents were patrolling a sixtysix-mile
strip of border in San Diego County, California, where there had been
only 890 in 1993.
The presence of army troops and marines and many more Border Patrol agents
has made border crossings more dangerous for migrants than ever before. A 1997
University of Houston study provides the particulars on twelve hundred people,
presumably all or mostly Mexicans, who died between 1993 and 1996 trying to cross