The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

332 critical reflections
In recent years, Border Patrol forces have been augmented with National Guard and
military units to protect what all agree are still permeable barriers along the two-thousand-mile-long
border with Mexico. Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and
other human rights organizations charge that Border Patrol agents and federal troops
assigned to border duty have fired on and sometimes killed unarmed Latinos, mostly
Mexican men. They also charge that agents have beaten men and boys, sexually
abused and raped women and girls, and deprived many men, women, and children
of food, water, and medical treatment (Amnesty International 1998b; Human Rights
Watch 1992, 1995; Nagengast, Stavenhagen, and Kearney 1992; Chavez 1992). Hardly
any of the alleged incidents have been explained to the satisfaction of these internationally
renowned human rights organizations, and few of the victims appear to have
been drug runners; none were terrorists. Although large quantities of illegal drugs do
come across the U.S.-Mexico border, a former Drug Enforcement Agency agent notes
that 70 to 85 percent of the total comes through legal ports of entry in large transport
trucks that are exempt from inspection as part of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), an exemption that is currently under review. 7 Drug smugglers
who cross the U.S.-Mexican border on foot are reprehensible and not to be tolerated,
but they are probably responsible for a small proportion of the drugs that enter the
United States.
Several cases of Border Patrol shootings during the late 1990s have been especially
notorious. In May 1997, a U.S. Marine on border duty with the Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS) shot and killed Ezequiel Hernandez near Redford,
Texas, his home along the U.S.-Mexican border. Hernandez was an American
citizen, an eighteen-year-old high school sophomore who was simultaneously
tending his family’s goat herd and hunting rabbits with a .22 rifle, as he did early
every morning before going to school. Although the court eventually instructed the
U.S. government to pay damages to Hernandez’s family, it allowed the government
to do so “without prejudice”—that is, without admitting wrongdoing. The Marines
eventually were officially exonerated of any blame in the shooting because the boy
“fit the profile of a Mexican drug runner,” meaning that he had brown skin, was
young, carried a rifle, and was out and about near the border before dawn.
On September 27, 1998, Border Patrol agents shot and killed a man who had
crossed from Mexico with two others near San Ysidro, California. According to
agents, the three men raced back toward the Mexican side when they realized that
they had been spotted. The Border Patrol caught one man on the U.S. side, while
a second managed to get safely back to the Mexican side. The third man allegedly
turned and charged the agents with a rock in his hand. The agents shot and killed
him, they said, when he refused their order to stop. Eyewitnesses who claim that
the victim only picked up the rock and turned to throw it, presumably in selfdefense,
after agents opened fire on the backs of the running men, however, contradict
the Border Patrol version. On the following day, Border Patrol agents shot
and killed another man under similar circumstances on almost the same spot. In