Frontera NorteSur

Editor’s Note

Swine Flu, Border Security and Public Priorities

It couldn’t have struck at a worse moment. Reeling from economic crisis and public insecurity, Mexico was now faced with a public health emergency of unknown proportions. Across the country, from Tijuana in the north to Tapachula in the south, schools were closed, masses canceled, restaurants and nightclubs shuttered, museums and libraries shut down, and workplaces put on reduced hours.

Slammed with travel warnings and restrictions from abroad, Mexico’s important tourist industry, already teetering on the brink, was threatened with a coup de grace from the deadly hand of the swine flu.

Aguascalientes’ beloved San Marcos National Fair, the country’s largest spring festival, was canceled in the middle of festivities. Ironically, it was the controversial pop star Gloria Trevi (locked up for several years in a Chihuahua prison accused of corrupting minors before being acquitted) who delivered the final performance. The loss of an annual spring rite replete with love, wine, song and dance was added to the heartbreak of dying or sick relatives and friends.

In Mexico, the spring flowers withered and died this year.

In almost surrealistic fashion, an April 27 earthquake reportedly killed two people in the state of Guerrero and rattled Mexico City. Interviewed in a city which suffered major water shortages prior to the swine flu outbreak, a young woman described the feeling in the Mexican capital as apocalyptic.

It is still too identify the origin of the Mexican swine flu epidemic, but news reports link the possible start of the health crisis to a huge, runaway US pig farm located in the Veracruz-Puebla borderlands. The farm in question is owned in part by US-based Smithfield Foods, the largest hog and pork producer in the world and a company with a record for environmental violations on this side of the border.

Residents of the community of La Gloria have long protested unsanitary conditions, thick clouds of flies, unrelenting odors, and groundwater contamination allegedly coming from the factory farm. In response, the state governments of Veracruz and Puebla have slapped protestors with legal charges and sent in the police to arrest them.

Early this week, Smithfield Foods said tests found no evidence of swine flu in its employees or animals. Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said it was “adventurist” to blame the Veracruz countryside for the health epidemic and, in a comment sure to surprise many US health officials, added that swine flu was present in California and Texas before it was in Mexico.

Another high Mexican health official, Miguel Angel Lezana, expounded on the theme. Dissociating the pig farm from the killer virus sweeping the country, Lezana said it was difficult to determine where swine flu originated and may have in fact come from Asia or the United States.

Whatever true story of the swine flu outbreak finally emerges, it is almost certain the public health emergency, which could last for weeks, will have major political, social and economic ramifications for Mexico and its relations with the US and other nations.

Which brings us to the real meaning of border security. In recent months, both Washington and Mexico City have placed heavy emphasis on increasing border law enforcement. Coming from multiple branches of government, proposals are on the table to station more National Guard troops on the border, beef up local law enforcement agencies, set up additional border checkpoints and crack down on allegedly rampant gun running, to name a just a few.

Although the sheer volume of official, security-related statements (frequently contradictory) flowing from corridors of power on both sides of the border is challenging for even a news editor to follow and decipher, it is clear billions of new dollars are in the pipeline to government agencies and private contractors charged with implementing a cross-border security strategy.

Yet new border walls or state-of-the-art cameras didn't stop swine flu from crossing the border, south to north or north to south.

All this is not to say that Mexico and the US are totally unprepared to handle health emergencies like the swine flu. A healthy degree of cooperation exists among health professionals of the two neighboring countries, though much more remains to be done.

But serious questions about the ability of either country to handle a pandemic are the talk of the press. An individual connected to a major New Mexico hospital acknowledged to a media colleague that the institution would be rapidly overwhelmed if large numbers of people fell ill with swine flu.

The insider’s revelation is not surprising to journalists who probe the vast underbelly of New Mexico outside celebrity-haunted Santa Fe. Despite undergoing much-trumpeted economic growth in recent years, New Mexico has many trappings of the Third World-underdeveloped colonias, mounting water shortages, lousy wages, high prices, rural doctor shortages, few dentists anywhere, and hundreds of thousands of people without health insurance. In numerous ways, New Mexico is not all that far removed from the Mexican reality.

A state that was once considered best suited for atomic bomb tests or treated as a quaint stop-over for Indian curios on the Chicago-LA highway, now ironically stands as the model of development for growing sections of the United States, where the Third World is settling in, too.

Like the financial meltdown of 2008, the swine flu is a wake-up call furiously ringing on both sides of the border. Will protecting public health make it up the list of political priorities for the respective governments?

-Kent Paterson

Editor’s Note-January 2009

The arrival of Barack Obama to the White House has unleashed an avalancheof hopes, expectations and demands for change. On the US-Mexico border,many elected officials, citizen activists, church leaders, and ordinaryresidents seek fundamental reforms in everything from immigration policyto an existing border-crossing infrastructure that leaves a lot to bedesired.

Still unresolved are numerous environmental issues from previousdecades, such as a thorough clean-up of the old Asarco smelter in El Paso.Fast on the heels of the departure of the Bush administration, a freshround of activism is spreading with each passing day.

Publicdemonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, Capitol Hill lobbying and moreexamples of citizen involvement characterize the first days of the Obamaera. In San Antonio, Texas, the Southwest Workers Union and its allies areorganizing a border activists’ assembly between March 27-29 of this year.The event could give birth to a new movement.It seems people are taking seriously the notion, advanced by PresidentObama himself, that real change comes from below and not from above.

Yet it remains to be seen if the basic parameters of the US-Mexicorelationship, shaped by free trade on the one hand and by a US emphasis onborder security on the other, will be tempered in the coming months andyears by action on labor, human rights, environmental and social problemsthat have festered for years.Grassroots activism is also on the upswing south of the border.

FromMexico City to Ciudad Juarez and from Reynosa to Culiacan, farmer, laborand popular organizations are spending the last few days of Januaryprotesting in the streets, occupying government offices and blockadinghighways and border bridges.Their grievances range from the high cost of importing used automobiles tothe seemingly never-ending crisis in the agricultural sector.

A commonthread weaving the protests together is a swelling demand to change the direction of Mexico’s economic policy and even renegotiate the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement.The historic election of Barack Obama is also sending ripples of changeinto Mexico’s political system.

The young US president is extremelypopular in Mexico; many eyes were glued to the tube January 20 south ofthe border as well as north of it.Some Mexican political analysts even wonder who will be Mexico’s Obama in2012, speculating that a young, dynamic candidate with an image of comingfrom outside the traditional political establishment will have the bestchance of becoming the next Mexican president three years from now.Of course, predicting the future is always risky business for journalists.Nonetheless, the year 2009 promises to be an extremely interesting ride.

-Kent Paterson

A Year of War, Recession and Repression

Many people in the borderlands will say good riddance to 2008. On both sides of the border, war, recession and repression were words that will almost certainly stand out in the writings of future historians recapturing a tumultuous year.

Undoubtedly, the narco war in Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and other regions of Mexico ranked high among the top stories of the year. A staid German think tank, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, even put Mexican narco-violence in the same category as conflicts in Colombia and the Middle East.

In Ciudad Juarez alone, approximately 1,600 people were slain. Since December 1, 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon came to office, more than 8,000 people have perished in narco-violence nationwide, according to the latest press accounts.

Although Ciudad Juarez has long been a violent place, several trends made this year’s violence particularly gruesome. Decapitations, public massacres and the gunning down of innocent bystanders shocked even a public accustomed to violence. As warring gangs roamed the streets, reports of kidnappings, bank robberies, arson attacks, and extortions shot through the roof.

The year also stood out for its record toll of women’s homicides. Eighty one women were reported slain by the first half of December, though some accounts put the number far higher. Like their male counterparts, most female victims were linked to gangland violence, but sex-related crimes continued to appear and young women disappear.

Few recall that the first homicide victim discovered in 2008, 20-year-old Joanna Radilla Lucero, was reportedly raped and stabbed to death.

Rolled out as the official response to narco-violence, the Mexican army’s Operation Chihuahua Together was a spectacular failure. Violence actually increased after the army entered the conflict, and some soldiers were implicated in human rights violations.

In short, what little semblance to law and order that existed in Ciudad Juarez went up in a bloody haze of smoke during the War of 2008. Not surprisingly, those with the wherewithal hightailed it of Dodge as fast as they could cross the border; perhaps thousands of Juarenses fled to the United States this year.

While the press dutifully reported the daily body counts, little discussion took place about the wider implications of the carnage. In Ciudad Juarez, for instance, thousands of families are now traumatized from experiencing the loss of loved ones or from simply the threat of becoming the next victim. Some schools have found it difficult to even function. A generation of orphans is being created, and in the case of the long-running femicides, a second generation of survivors is left with persistent emotional and psychological scars.

Across the scooped up, channeled strip of land that sometimes passes as the Big River and which provides a neat division between Mexico and the US, many people like to pretend that they are safely removed from the disaster underway on the other side of the border.

This denial ignores the myriad family, cultural and commercial bonds that tie the borderlands together. What happens on one side inevitably reverberates on the other.

Another, little-examined development could greatly complicate the picture. El Paso will soon host a dramatic expansion of Fort Bliss. The city’s good fathers and citizens welcome the infusion of new money that thousands of soldiers and their families will inject into an always struggling economy But many of the newcomers, returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will struggle with demons of their own as they attempt to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Ironically, they will have plenty of company in the thousands of Juarenses, adults and children alike, who suffer PTSD from a war underway in their homeland, according to Mexican psychologists recently quoted in the press.

Is the Paso del Norte prepared to handle a massive, multi-generational PTSD problem stemming from wars both close to home and in distant foreign lands? What preparations are the schools taking to address the needs of children who suffer from the loss of a relative or the memories of seeing a human being slaughtered before their very eyes? Are governments adequately budgeting for this emergency? Are they even aware of its existence? Will the Paso del Norte one day become known as PTSD Border?

Often, what is not said in the press is just as important as what is said. Many of the international press stories about Ciudad Juarez glossed over or completely ignored the other disaster, the economic one, that also wreaked havoc on the border city in 2008.

Export manufacturing, the city’ s largest legal industry, was hit hard by the US economic collapse, with more than 25,000 workers losing their jobs in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua state this year.

Price increases pummeled workers who were offered a minimum wage increase of roughly 16 cents a day as the year drew to an end. In such a landscape, perhaps it is not surprising that some choose to ease their pain with poppy dreams or cocaine highs.

Ten or fifteen years ago, a popular press narrative framed Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey as glittering examples of the free-trade driven future of a Mexico firmly irrevocably bound to the United States and Canada. The successes of the dynamic northern Mexican cities were contrasted to the impoverished, backward regions of a southern Mexico relatively isolated from the world economy.

The norteno trio was trumpeted as the vanguard of an economic modernization that would shake Mexico out of its “cultural stupor” and begin Mexican workers on the wondrous path to the consumer middle class. In 2008, harmonization was indeed reached for workers on both sides of the border. Long part of the diet south of the border, an economic stew of declining wages, exaggerated price hikes for food and other basic necessities, credit crises, and collapsing banks became the order of the day north of the border too.

Meanwhile, NAFTA’s Three Cities of Gold, the promised Dorados of the 21st Century, were awash in violence, crime, drugs, and corruption. Is this mere coincidence?

Which brings another issue to mind: immigration. Excluded from the North American Free Trade Agreement, the migrant question refused to go away as millions of people, uprooted by adverse economic forces and lacking legal walking papers, desperately sought refuge in the American Dream. Thousands died trying to cross the border north.

In 2008, news stories stressed how the economic crisis and tighter US border controls, including a controversial wall, slowed the passage of undocumented people.

But the year ended with a solution to the fates of nearly 12 million undocumented people in the US still blowing in the wind. As politicians largely avoided the issue, the Bush Administration stepped up incarcerations and deportations of undocumented migrants.

It remains to be seen if a new administration in Washington, led by an African-American elected to office with overwhelming support from Latino and other communities of color, will achieve a new immigration reform or simply put off the issue for another day.

On the border, many are already asking President-elect Obama and his incoming administration to address not only the immigration dilemma, but tackle long-neglected infrastructure needs, environmental crises, economic inequalities and educational deficits as well.

In both the US and Mexico,labor, farm and culture activists demand the renegotiation of NAFTA, but in Mexico City the issue is off the table. Whether the new US president will act on an early campaign pledge to take a second look at the treaty is another burning question awaiting an answer in the new year.

-Kent Paterson

Fear of Rain, Love of Money 

In a region defined by drought, you might consider it odd that many people cringe with fear when rain clouds hover overhead. But that’s a common reaction in
the Paso del Norte borderlands during the summer rainy reason. And for good reason.

On the morning of July 28, Mexican authorities evacuated hundreds of families from the El Barreal section of Ciudad Juarez . It was the second time this month El Barreal’s residents watched their homes get flooded.

A collection of subdivisions, El Barreal was settled by maquiladora industry workers, many of whom uprooted their lives in southern Mexico in the perpetual search for a better life on the border. Now, some have lost practically everything.

El Barreal was not a natural disaster, per se. Incredibly, its houses were built on a depressed piece of land, known locally as “Duck Lake,” that indeed turns into a lake when the rain clouds explode in fury, as they dutifully did when the “remnants” of Hurricane Dolly swept through the region last weekend.  

Even before Dolly’s dastardly encore, the local press abounded with stories about alleged improprieties between housing developers and state and local officials, inadequate storm water controls and substandard construction. In the bigger scheme of things, El Barreal, was part of a national housing boom that put low-income working families into tract-style housing built by private developers. Credit, available for the first time to many, underwrote the boom. It was Mexico’s version of the Homeownership Society.  

Quoted in the Norte daily, Jose Luis Rodriguez, a former Ciudad Juarez municipal official, explained the system:  

“This all has a political background, aside from the real estate profiting, the pay-offs to political campaigns. There are landowners who invest heavily in candidates for governor and municipal president and later cash in, putting their own people in key government positions, where they become operators for the benefit of individuals…”

Outraged by their losses and crying fraud, a group of El Barreal’s residents has filed a complaint with the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, which will probe possible influence trafficking and turn over its findings to the state attorney general’s office for legally possible but politically tricky prosecutions against culpable officials. No charges have been announced so far.

Commenting on the controversy, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza was quoted as saying responsible parties should pay for their “broken dishes” but it was more important to address the immediate needs of flood victims.

El Barreal is not unique. Across Ciudad Juarez, scores of neighborhoods suffer flooding every year, even though a plan is on file with the municipal planning department to properly channel the waters that frequently turn a landlocked desert city into a raging, debris-filled river. As news stories report, the city’s archaic storm and waste water drainage system is in a state of virtual collapse. Perhaps symbolically, the historic San Jose Mission, built in the 1700s, collapsed in the most recent storm.

Mexico’s federal government has declared Ciudad Juarez a disaster zone eligible for emergency assistance. But another quick fix begs an important question: What happened to the billions of dollars promised for improving border infrastructure when the North American Free Trade Agreement was negotiated?  

Fifteen years later, Ciudad Juarez’s crumbling basic infrastructure and washed-out neighborhoods stand in contrast with the state-of-the art maquiladora plants, upscale stores and ritzy new hotels that decorate a city pushing two million inhabitants; another reminder that economic growth is not always synonymous with social development.

The US side of the border is vulnerable too, as Dolly’s devilish tail demonstrated.Located northeast of Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, the New Mexico mountain resort of Ruidoso attracts many visitors from the borderlands. A July 26 weekend getaway, though, became a nightmare as fierce rains pounded the town, pushed the Ruidoso River over its banks, washed out bridges, trapped vacationers and killed one man. Preliminary property damages were conservatively estimated in the $15 million range.

More rain fell in Ruidoso in a 24-hour period than during any comparable time frame since 1963, according to press accounts.  Flooding was also reported around El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the city received twice as much rain in one day than it had during the entire year. Similar events punctuated 2006, the year of “Little Katrina.”

Northern Mexico and the US Southwest are in a strange environmental predicament. Climate change scientists and other researchers predict long-term drought on the one hand and more violent weather disturbances on the other. In a cruelly ironic future, the region’s inhabitants could see months go by without any rain only to suffer super-flash floods caused by abnormal amounts of rainfall.

Are El Barreal and Ruidoso harbingers of more climatic destruction yet to come? Are governments on either side of the border seriously planning or budgeting for all the possible consequences?

-Kent Paterson