But This Isn't New....

A reminder that random searches without cause and process have been legal in the US for some time. The Patriot Act has allowed check points within 100 miles of the US Border in what the ACLU has dubbed the "Constitution free zone" - a zone in which most Americans live.



This video was posted in February. The man is a preacher that was beaten at the checkpoint several months earlier.

To see a US Vet harassed, see this.

Military - Rental Truck Complex

If you thought that Ryder was just a truck you rent to pack fertilizer bombs in, you're mistaken. This week the corporation sponsored a conference on border security in Ft. Worth, TX, complete with representatives from the department of homeland security. Says the company's press release:

"Increasing collaboration between government agencies and the private sector is one of the best ways to mitigate security threats against business," said Sanford Hodes, Vice President, Safety, Health & Security for Ryder. "We are grateful for the support of the Department of Homeland Security and Ryder's other security partners at this event and are committed to continuing to share best practices and prevention strategies that improve security throughout our operations and those of our customers."

It appears Ryder and other companies are looking for ways to guarantee that their businesses are not only kept safe from border violence, but are also not used in, well, unsavory border business. Ryder is also a part of the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) - a DHS / Business coalition designed to increase the inspection and security on "the global supply chain." Read more here. Because Ryder is a Third Party Logistics Provider (3PL) - a provider of transportation and warehouse services - it is in a perfect position to inspect goods and storage. It is also a perfect target / tool for smugglers. They are also the kind of company that needs a more free and open border to provide the sort of speed and service they offer customers working in the Maquilas and transporting goods to the US. Ryder is a $1.6 billion (total revenue) company and manages over $4 billion in freight - surely smuggling and the closed border must be costing them a penny or two.

Frontera Santa

El Sol de Toluca reports today that the number of Mexicans able to return to Mexico for Semana Santa is WAY down this year - almost 50%.

El retorno de paisanos en esta temporada vacacional podría caer hasta en un 50%, debido a que les sale muy caro volver a pagarles a los "polleros" para ingresar nuevamente a Estados Unidos, afirmó Alfredo Castañeda, líder de la Unión de Productores Agropecuarios Mexiquenses.

Family friendly and effective, no? Anyway, teaching the Progressive Era this week in class and ran across Teddy Roosevelt's policy on the border. The four border agents that patrolled the border (from San Diego to South Texas) were ordered to keep out Syrians, Greeks, Japanese, and Chinese. Theodore Roosevelt declared the border: “Closed to all but Citizens of Mexico.” Texas students were outraged - I think especially so now that Glenn Beck has given the go ahead to hate TR.

Caution: Two Way Street

Put aside the guns, and most U.S. Americans aren't thinking about smuggling from the United States in to Mexico. This news release from ICE:

LAREDO, Texas - Two businessmen from New Jersey and a California each pleaded guilty on Thursday for their roles in an illegal export scheme. The guilty pleas were announced by U.S. Attorney Tim Johnson, Southern District of Texas. The case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Vahram Aynilian, 59, of New Jersey, and Fred Lukach, 50, of California, each pleaded guilty to one count of illegally exporting goods from the United States into Mexico. Both defendants appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Diana Saldana to enter their guilty pleas.

From 2005 to 2009, Aynilian received about $199,201 for providing and/or allowing fraudulent NAFTA Certificate of Origin documents and fraudulent U.S. invoices to be provided for 243 shipments. As part of his plea agreement, Aynilian agreed to forfeit and will pay to the United States at or before sentencing the $199,201.20 he profited from the scheme. During the same time period, Lukach paid for and obtained fraudulent NAFTA Certificate of Origin documents and fraudulent U.S. invoices from Aynilian for numerous textile shipments. Read more.

A Lesson From Home for ... well, is that for D.C. or D.F.?

This is an interesting post from US News and World Report back in December of 2008. The discussion is of Aurora, Illinois.

The mid-1990s was the height of gang violence, when police logged hundreds of shootings and around two dozen murders per year. Funeral parlors refused to hold services for slain teens, fearing, with good reason, that reprisal gang attacks would come at the gravesides. The local cops, meanwhile, were moving from shooting to shooting so quickly they could hardly keep up, much less close cases. There were so many shell casings at some crime scenes, the old-timers joke, that police started kicking them into the sewers to avoid the crime lab paperwork. "It became so routine," says Police Chief Greg Thomas. "It was shooting after shooting after shooting with no way to break the cycle."

So, is Illinois a "failed state"? Not sure this is really the case. So, how exactly did the ATF deal with the problem in Illinois and reduce the violence.

Gunrunners. The strategy the ATF employed, in concert with local police and federal prosecutors, is one it is using increasingly. Federal agents spend their time on stakeouts, undercover busts, and working informants. They call on regional SWAT teams from the ATF to capture their most high-risk targets. The focus on major gunrunners has made it more difficult for gangs to regularly get their hands on dependable weaponry, experts say. As violence declines, local police and social workers can step in.

They Say You Want a Revolution

This week my students are discussing Daniel Cosio Villegas and the idea of the Mexican Revolution being alive or dead. Some have gotten bogged down with the question as early as 1911, but others are plugging right along in 2008. I am curious about the centennial celebrations, bicentennial celebrations, and the current war with the narcotraficantes that is dominating many of the headlines these days. Is the Calderon push a new Revolution to take Mexico back from organized crime, or is it the effort of a despot looking to stifle a black market economy that provides income for otherwise impoverished sectors? I know I am less convinced of the mafiosos and their altruistic intentions, but it is hard to travel in Chihuahua and not see their hands working to the benefit of local economies on the surface.

On a happier note, I was interested to see the official government site celebrating the Revolution has items on there from Catholic participants. Take a look. The home site can be found here. I'm sure the intro video will be deconstructed in class rooms accross academia using Ilene V. O'Malley and Thomas Benjamin.

Of Cello Bows and Futbol

Sitting alone in a second-rate motel in Flagstaff, Ariz., I started to think about Bruce Chatwin’s classic travel tale, In Patagonia. I’d picked the book up about eight years previous in a fit of homesickness while I was in my Massachusetts Captivity period.

But I’m not from Patagonia. I’m from Montana.

At the time it was something of a riff on the composer Dimitri Tiomkin’s answer to how a Russian could be so comfortable capturing the “feel” of the American prairie: “a steppe is a steppe is a steppe” he quipped. A mountain is a mountain is a mountain, I suppose is what I was thinking, and surrounded by the mole hills of the east coast, that was a particularly attractive thought at the time.

But a few years have gone by, and as I’ve really thought about it, I think what linked me to Chatwin’s description of the peaks and plains of Patagonia was not that a “steppe is a steppe” or a “mountain is a mountain” but that essentially, in the big view, I was reading about the same mountains that I had grown up in when I read Chatwin – just at a point a few thousand miles to the north. Who can’t love an unbroken – or pretty much unbroken (dang you, Panama) – chain of mountains that stretch from the Arctic Circle to Tierra Del Fuego?

These mountains that touch virtually every nation of the American continents (poor, lonely, Uruguay) are really a shared sacred space, beyond all of the meta-geographic impositions of politicians and nationalism. I was thinking about Chatwin because I’d just met Glenn and Janice.

Glenn Weyant is an interesting character: His business card lists him as a sound sculptor, journalist, educator, baker, and instrument builder. What’s that mean? It means Glenn plays the U.S./Mexico border fence with a cello bow. And mallets. And sticks. And an egg whisk. I meant it when I said he was an interesting character.

Looking at the fence between the United States and Mexico in Nogales, Glenn set out to overcome this fairly unnatural divide in the landscape and the people with music, and what better music could their be to bring two sides of a fence together than to play the actual fence. Glenn says on his web site that that he wants the listener to ask themselves “What is it I am hearing? Why do these things exist? Who is kept in and who is kept out?” And in the end, his big vision is to change the wall from “an implement of division” into “an instrument of creation with the power to unite.”

In a way, Glenn’s vision makes sense to me. When I think about that eternal flow of mountains and prairies, a steel wall seems like an ugly scar ripped across the belly of society by some act of unnatural and incomprehensible violence.

A fence across the Americas?

Native Americans from Alaska to Patagonia have carved out their own cathedrals of sacred space in the towering peaks and roaring waterfalls of the great range of mountains that linked them together. The Salish found solace in the peaks of what are today known as the Mission Mountains while the Andes were dotted with sacred points connected by invisible lines of power known as Zeq’e by the Inca. Later Catholicism introduced a maze of shrines in sacred locations from Argentina to Canada, and nineteenth century Mormon pioneers referred to the mountains as those “everlasting hills” in Biblical prophesy. Surely, they thought, something so wondrous and grand stretching from north to south was a sign that God favored this land.

But I haven’t yet mentioned Janice, or why she and Glenn put me in this reflective funk in Flagstaff.

Janice is a professor at a small university on the high northern plains. I met her at a conference and stopped to ask some questions about her research (she works on travel writers) and we ended up having lunch. Over some raw fish and hot tea, I found out that in Janice’s little prairie town, immigration has turned into quite the issue.

It seems that with the general labor drain from the prairie that small farmers are hiring Mexican and other Latin American immigrants to work on sheep ranches or harvesting wheat and potatoes. Their children long since gone to drink Starbucks in Minneapolis or Seattle, farmers and ranchers are importing man power to hang on to the legacy given them by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

What intrigued me most about Janice’s tale was the discussion of a harvest festival in which two neighboring towns get together for a little competition. The game? Soccer. The players? Latinos. The sidelines, said Janice, were lined with older white farmers, ranchers, and town folk all cheering on their champions, while little mestizo children ran around and clapped for their papis to win. You see, when the old farmer’s children go to the city, they take their children with them, and losing them means losing the grand children - losing the future. The men out on the soccer field and the labor they provide aren’t the only necessary import for a small western town.

I can’t help but find a little bit of hope in Bruce, Glenn, and Janice. Close your eyes…a sage filled Patagonian wind fills your nostrils while eerie and ethereal sound sculptures dance along with the breeze. In the background you can hear the laughter of children and the elderly – maybe a few cheers and swears uttered in Spanish – as a small town on the prairie finds hope in the strong backs and smiling children brought to them in the flow of people up the everlasting hills.

Chatwin has been dead for a decade. Glenn has plans to create a trans-border orchestra experience in which the fence is played from both sides. Janice is moving to Morocco. I’m sitting in a hotel room in Flagstaff, staring at headlines about a border fence.