The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the u.s.-mexican border region 335
so that they are suitable for “enhanced operations.” Federal troops are also involved
in the construction of miles of steel and concrete walls that may one day extend
from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. 10 Most important, when it withdrew, the
army left behind a highly militarized Border Patrol trained in low-intensity conflict
(LIC) military tactics. This makes large numbers of troops unnecessary.
Low-intensity conflict methods were first developed as Cold War tactics and used
extensively by the U.S. military in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. 11 The military objective
was to establish and maintain social control over targeted civilian groups in
order to further foreign policy aims—namely, to counter communism and secure
the global expansion of Western capitalism and liberal democracy. Low-intensity
conflict strategies, which include counterinsurgency, antiterrorism, and peacekeeping,
are based on the premise that it is the “enemy within” that poses the greatest
threat to the national security of any country. Although communism (other than
that emanating from Cuba) is no longer perceived as a threat to the United States,
the orderly reproduction and expansion of neoliberal capitalist hegemony is a major
concern of policy makers. Thus LIC tactics developed during the Cold War
have been updated, reterritorialized, and redeployed in the United States in order
to ensure that American markets and the American “way of life” are protected. Illegal
aliens, immigrant-rights groups, welfare recipients, and any persons or organizations
perceived as subversive to the neoliberal order have been cast as the
enemy within, internal foes of the United States, threats to “our” way of life, “our”
social institutions, and even to the viability of “our” language. If the enemy is everywhere,
the system needs a military that is capable in the name of national security
of intervening in all aspects of domestic politics and social policy.
A classic low-intensity conflict counterinsurgency technique, one taught by the
U.S. Army to generations of military officers from Latin America at special institutions
like the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, is to enlist the domestic
police force into military and paramilitary operations. The widely televised
images of Riverside County, California, sheriff’s deputies chasing down a truckload
of suspected undocumented workers in 1996 and beating unarmed men and
women across the back and head with truncheons poignantly revealed counterinsurgency
strategies in action.
So-called peace-keeping operations are also part of low-intensity conflict measures.
The way this mission has been adopted by the Border Patrol is illustrated by
the role it played in the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Four hundred members of BOR-
TAC, the elite and specially trained Border Patrol squads, were brought in to assist
local police in controlling the looting and burning. BORTAC agents, who were
deployed only in Latino neighborhoods throughout the Los Angeles area, arrested
more than a thousand people whom they suspected were illegal immigrants,
whether or not they had committed or were suspected or accused of committing
any criminal offense. Interestingly, these arrests accounted for 10 percent of all arrests
made during the disturbances. More than seven hundred of the thousand were
immediately subjected to voluntary deportation without any charges whatsoever