Extracted from the Antifascist Info-Bulletin.

          ** Topic: Militarizing Mexico-US Border **
  ** Written 12:30 PM Mar 5, 1996 by caq in cdp:covertaction **
 
               MILITARIZING THE MEXICO-US BORDER
                         by Jose Palafox
 
FROM SAN DIEGO TO THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY, US SOLDIERS ARE ON DUTY.
FIRST IT WAS THE "WAR ON DRUGS," NOW THEY HAVE AN ADDITIONAL
MISSION, BLOCKING MEXICO'S EMIGRANTS.
 
In California's Imperial Valley, soldiers from an antidrug task
force hunker over night vision equipment to watch for illegal
border crossings. At the San Diego port of entry, National Guards
inspect vehicles. In the Arizona desert, heavily-armed Marines,
DEA agents, and the Border Patrol conduct joint patrols as 
training exercises.  Inside a nondescript building on an army
base near El Paso, military translators, linguists, and analysts
decipher intercepted messages and feed the results into massive,
interlinked databases. And in night skies across the Southwest,
the drone of military reconnaissance aircraft breaks the desert
silence.
 
These are scenes from an intensifying campaign being waged on the
US-Mexican border. A decade ago, the Reagan administration and an
overwrought Congress drafted the US military to help fight the 
War on Drugs  along the border. Now, in a significant break with
past policy, which officially limited the military's
crime-fighting mission to stopping illegal drugs, the Clinton
administration has broadened the pentagon's role to include
suppressing the flow of undocumented immigrants. 
 
In January, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
unveiled a new  battle plan  to double US military and local law
enforcement along the border. This plan will build on the
formidable joint military-law enforcement infrastructure already
in place as part of the pentagon's antidrug initiatives. In the
San Diego sector alone, some 350 members of Marine and Army units
more than double the current National Guard and pentagon
contingent will help monitor electric sensors, staff night-vision
scopes, assist with communications and transportation, and
conduct aerial surveillance. *1 
 
While the border region, and especially its Latino population,
bears the brunt of this policy, it is but the latest escalation
of military involvement in domestic law enforcement. 
 
According to Mary Cheh, a constitutional and national security
law specialist at George Washington University School of Law,  We
can easily become too comfortable with the integration between
the Army and law enforcement,  she said.  It starts slowly and
imperceptibly, but before you know it, there's very little
difference between [the two]. And that's dangerous.  *2
 
For immigration rights activist Roberto Mart!nez, director of the
American Friends Service Committee office in San Diego, the
concern is less theoretical. The growing military presence at the
border is, he said, a  low-intensity warfare against immigrants.
It's kind of like a war without guns. But then again, the Border
Patrol is already armed to the teeth. What are we going to have
next, an armed military at the border?  *3
 
In fact, traditional bans on using the military as police have
eroded dramatically in the last decade. Exceptions created
expressly for antidrug operations cracked open the door; the
Clinton administration is opening it wider still in the
politically expedient campaign to thwart unwanted immigrants.
 
                    CALL IN THE CAVALRY
 
For more than a century, the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act
of 1878 banned military involvement in domestic law enforcement.
*4 But beginning with the Reagan administration, presidential and
congressional initiatives, abetted by compliant federal courts,
have chipped away at legal protections.
 
The first breach in the firewall came with the Defense
Authorization Act of 1982. To combat  contraband both substances
and people that law permitted the military to provide equipment,
intelligence, and facilities to civilian law enforcement
agencies, and help train them. Although the act gave the military
a role in enforcing immigration laws as well as contraband, its
primary target was the cross-border drug traffic.5 
 
Four years later, the breach grew larger. In 1986, the National
Narcotics Border Interdiction System, headed by Vice President
George Bush and Attorney General Edwin Meese, launched Operation
Alliance to  foster interagency cooperation and interdict the
flow of drugs, weapons, aliens, currency, and other contraband
across the Southwest border.  *6 This ongoing joint operation
coordinates the activities of at least 15 federal, state, and
local agencies, including the INS, FBI, DEA, Coast Guard, Customs
Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Internal
Revenue Service, U.S. Marshals' Service, U.S. Attorney's Office,
and the Secret Service, as well as the Department of Defense and
the National Guard. *7 
 
The Defense Authorization Act of 1989, passed as a fulminating
George Bush waved bags of crack cocaine at television viewers,
expanded and formalized the military's role in drug law
enforcement. The act assigned the pentagon three statutory
missions: to integrate the various US command, control,
communications and intelligence (C *3I) assets to monitor illegal
drugs; to enhance the National Guard's role in drug interdiction
and enforcement operations; and to serve as the lead agency in
detecting and monitoring the transportation of drugs into the US.
*8
 
Both the House and Senate versions of the act would have given
the military the power to arrest drug law violators. These
provisions were killed in conference committee primarily because
of opposition from the pentagon, which hesitated to take on a
direct policing mission. Also killed in conference was a House
provision that would have required the Defense Department to 
seal  the US-Mexico border. *9
 
The 1991 Defense Authorization Act broadened military drug
enforcement powers still further. It allowed the pentagon to
establish antidrug operations bases and training facilities and
to train federal, state, and local agencies (and foreign
governments). With the 1991 act, Congress authorized the military
to carry out aerial and ground antidrug reconnaissance near and
outside US borders.
 
Unlike National Guard members, who may be deputized, US military
personnel still do not have the power to arrest criminal law
violators with very limited exceptions.10 But after more than a
decade of explicit presidential and congressional orders to
enlist, the pentagon is involved in just about every other aspect
of drug law enforcement. And while soldiers cannot make arrests,
their  rules of engagement  for border support duties permit them
to shoot to kill if they or accompanying law enforcement
personnel are endangered.11
 
In the decade since Operation Alliance began, the pentagon and
federal law enforcers have put in place a joint civil-military
apparatus that can easily adapt to a new mission on the border.
Not only does the military have a working relationship with the
Border Patrol, Customs, the FBI and other agencies, its antidrug
efforts have already indirectly helped curb the flow of unwanted
immigrants. As just one example, when Army engineers build roads
along the frontier to help the Border Patrol catch smugglers,
those roads also enhance the agency's immigration control
mission.
 
                    JOINT TASK FORCE 6
 
The keystone of the pentagon's antidrug effort under Operation
Alliance is the El Paso-based Joint Task Force 6 (JTF-6). Set up
in November 1989 at the Biggs Army Airfield adjacent to Fort
Bliss, JTF-6 grew out of President Bush's National Drug Control
Drug Strategy. According to the US Army, from 1990 to 1993, JTF-6
conducted 1,260 antidrug support missions, most of them
operational,  i.e., patrols, exercises designed to flood drug
smuggling corridors with military personnel, and intelligence
support.12 In a clear sign of the military's rapidly expanding
role even before officially taking on immigration, in the first
six months of 1995 alone, the number of support requests approved
jumped to more than 4,000.13
 
The number of troops involved is substantial. According to Brian
Sheridan, head of the pentagon's Drug Enforcement Policy and
Support Office, on any given day approximately 4,600 soldiers are
working counter-drug operations. *14 (That number is already
increasing as the pentagon takes on immigration.) While many are
soldiers or National Guards on temporary assignments, including
mundane tasks such as motor pool maintenance, several hundred are
on permanent Drug War duty. They include 50 Special Forces
soldiers who provide year-round training to civilian police
agencies. These Special Forces units account for roughly
one-third of JTF-6 antidrug missions.15
 
All told, the pentagon is spending about $800 million a year to
help enforce the drug trafficking laws alone. Its missions,
carried out to assist primarily the Border Patrol and Customs  
the designated lead enforcement agencies on the border fall into
several categories: 
 
* Ground and aerial reconnaissance, including sensors, listening
posts, observation posts, ground surveillance radar, and ground
patrols.
 
* Training in patrol techniques, helicopter insertions and
extractions, operations and intelligence, and Advanced Military
Operations on Urbanized Terrain. 
 
* Logistical support, primarily engineering projects such as
barrier erection, road repair, and range construction.
 
* Research to identify and demonstrate technologies combining
military and law enforcement applications.
 
Describing the relationship between law enforcement agencies and
JTF-6, task force commander Lt. Gen. George Stotser commented:
 Joint Task Force 6's relationship with law enforcement, in my
view, is one of total integration.  *16 
 
     
FROM SAN DIEGO TO THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY, US SOLDIERS ARE ON DUTY.
FIRST IT WAS THE "WAR ON DRUGS," NOW THEY HAVE AN ADDITIONAL
MISSION, BLOCKING MEXICO'S EMIGRANTS.
 
 
                       NO ROOM AT THE PEN
 
In a new tactic unveiled in San Diego's Operation Gatekeeper,
federal attorneys stepped up prosecutions of immigration- related
crimes, and of immigrants with criminal records. As a result,
there were 1,039 prosecutions for felonious entry into the United
States in 1995 alone, equaling the total for the previous nine
years. *34 But that may be just the beginning.
 
A Republican  Congressional Task Force on Immigration Reform, 
appointed by Newt Gingrich and chaired by Rep. Elton Gallegly
(R-Calif.), recently proposed a three strikes law for
undocumented border crossers. It would require the Border Patrol
to hold for prosecution any undocumented immigrant guilty of
violating the same immigration law more than once. Under current
law, undocumented persons are usually detained only until they
agree to voluntary
departure. 
 
According to a San Diego Union-Tribune editorial which projected
the impact of the proposal, in the San Diego sector alone close
to 15,000 undocumented immigrants are apprehended each week. If
20 percent of those are repeaters, the three-strikes rule would
mean adding about 3,000 offenders a week to our already severely
overcrowded jails. *35
 
The Congress is taking steps to address these concerns.
Legislation now pending in the Senate, the Immigration in the
National Interest Act shepherded by Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), would
allow closed military bases to be used as detention centers for
undocumented immigrants. *36
 
The Clinton administration has similarly addressed the looming
prisoner overflow and fears that Mexico's economic crisis would
wash north even more undocumented people. Last year, top
immigration policy-makers practiced an enhanced border control
plan, that includes using military bases as detention centers. In
joint exercises held in Orlando, Florida; Nogales, Arizona; and
McAllen, Texas, INS and military personnel set up holding areas 
on military bases and practiced rounding up and detaining 
prisoners (actually role-playing soldiers and agents). *37 
 
This contingency plan is in effect an extension of Operation
Distant Shores, which directed the military-run camps used to
detain Cuban and Haitian refugees in Panama and Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. Now, Mexico has been added to the list of Distant Shores'
potential source countries, and the military will take over
management of detention centers from the INS in the event of a
Mexican immigration emergency.  *38 
 
This is a prudent military plan to handle a mission already
placed on the military, which is to handle immigration when the
numbers overwhelm civil authorities, commented a US Army officer
involved in the exercise. *39 
 
Immigration emergency or not, Border Czar Bersin has already
received Navy agreement to provide detention space for immigrant
inmates at the Miramar Naval Air Station outside San Diego. *40
 
 
                         DOUBLE BIND
 
US policymakers want it both ways. In their wholehearted embrace
of free trade, they have consistently followed economic policies
that both create the conditions for mass immigration and make the
illicit drug trade an economically attractive option for
dispossessed Mexicans. The NAFTA agreements and the Mexican
bailout are only the sharpest and most recent examples. Economic
dislocations from NAFTA are anticipated to generate significant
numbers of new migrants. And after the peso collapse, in return
for US dollars and loan guarantees, the US Treasury demanded that
Mexico enact harsh neoliberal austerity measures virtually
guaranteed to drive even more Mexicans across the border. *41 
 
At the same time, the US wants open borders only for the flow of
capital and legitimate commerce. In a global economy in which
factories and capital flit across boundaries in the blink of an
eye, people seem to be the only factor of production undeserving
of free transit. Instead, immigration is to be limited and
controlled. 
 
Border Czar Bersin provides the official line:  Our border is
intended to accomplish twin purposes: On the one hand, it is
intended to facilitate trade in order to bring our nation the
significant benefits of international commerce and industry. At
the same time, it is geared to constrain and regulate the free
movement of people and goods in order to block the entry of
illegal migrants and unlawful merchandise. *42
 
To blunt the contradictions inherent in these twin purposes, the
US must militarize the border to protect free trade Yankee style.
The consequences are both immediate and potentially far-reaching.
For immigrants from the south, and for Latinos in general, the
results are already manifest in an increasing hostility,
manufactured in part by officials eager to whip up support for
their solution to the problem. 
 
Roberto Mart!nez, who has documented many abuses along the
border, points out that as the government continues to lump
together undocumented immigrants, drugs, crime, and terrorism to
justify increased enforcement and militarization, attitudes
toward immigrants will not only not change but will continue
translating into open hostility and violence. *43 
 
More broadly, enlisting the military in law enforcement first
limited to drugs, now adding immigration, and next? is an
inauspicious omen. Faced with a self-inflicted rising tide of
disorder, and not just on the border, the only response the state
appears capable of shaping relies on a larger and
better-integrated military-police apparatus.
 
 
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               ** End of text from cdp:covertaction **