The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the u.s.-mexican border region 333
this fourth fatal shooting in San Diego County, California, in three days, witnesses
also contradicted the Border Patrol version of events.
Finally, in September 1999, agents shot and killed a mentally unbalanced man,
a long-time legal resident of the United States who was originally from Mexico.
The man allegedly had thrown rocks at a water company employee in a remote
area ten miles north of the border, through which undocumented Mexicans sometimes
cross. The water employee sought help from passing Border Patrol agents,
who hunted the man down and opened fire on him after he threw additional rocks
at them. According to the Los Angeles Times, “U.S. officials speculated at the time
that he might have been an illegal border crosser or a drug smuggler” (September
3, 1999:A3, A26, emphasis added).
Each of these incidents is open to multiple interpretations. The Border Patrol
agents might have feared for their lives; some or all of the shootings might have
been the result of errors of judgment or honest mistakes. Nonetheless, “racial” and
ethnic profiling by police and other agents of the state is increasingly recognized
in the United States as a serious problem (Cole 1999), and these incidents and others
may also be part of what critics regard as a larger and disturbing pattern of subconscious
politically motivated violence against Latinos.
In addition to the physical dangers to migrants entailed by the militarization of
the border, there is mounting evidence of other contradictions. Because the border
has become so difficult and dangerous to cross, unauthorized migrants now
tend to stay longer in the United States. Children are born into citizenship and go
to school here. More and more families are bootstrapping themselves out of abject
poverty and, in some cases, becoming vocal critics of a system that deprives
them of rights guaranteed by both the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (Nagengast, Stavenhagen, and Kearney 1992). Those
who are forced to move back and forth across the border depend more on coyotes
(professional smugglers) than they did in the past. As both the physical danger and
the danger of apprehension increase, the price charged by smugglers also increases.
The rate in 1994 was about seven hundred dollars per person for transport from
Tijuana to Los Angeles, payable whether or not the migrant reached his or her destination
(Andreas 1994:232). According to some informants, smuggler fees had increased
to more than a thousand dollars by early 1999. Not only has the border
become a “balloon” (squeeze it in one place and it bulges in another) but official
border policies have helped to create and augment a profitable business in human
trafficking, another area of human rights concern.
Until mid-2000 there had been little public outcry in the United States about
migrant and Latino rights outside the Latino and human rights communities themselves,
in part because the stripping away of peoples’ basic human rights has been
naturalized and rendered acceptable to the greater public. The 1996 changes in
national legislation curtailed the economic rights of migrants/immigrants, and
voter referenda in California have tried to bar the children of migrants from ac