Death in the sands: the horror of the US-Mexico border
Death in the sands: the horror of the US-Mexico border
Donald Trump has pledged to build a ‘beautiful wall’ – but America’s frontier with Mexico is already aggressively defended by the drones and fences of the US border patrol. It’s a strategy that is causing ever more migrants to die in hostile terrain
Reece Jones
Tuesday, October 4, 13:00
The Guardian
Fifteen-year-old Sergio Hernandez Guereca and three teenage friends ran across the trickle of water in the concrete riverbed that is the Rio Grande, which marks the US–Mexico border, on a cloudy, hot June day in 2010. The river, which runs between El Paso and Juárez, is only centimetres deep and 15 metres wide at the border, because the US diverts most of the water into a canal before it reaches Mexico. The audacity of the boys’ run, in broad daylight in one of the most heavily patrolled spots along the border, roused bored pedestrians inching along the Paso del Norte Bridge towards the checkpoint. Several turned on their phone cameras to record the brazen act. The videos and the searing images of the aftermath momentarily flooded the media, with channels from CNN to Univision showing the footage.
Exactly what Sergio and his friends had in mind is unclear. Even at their young ages, they had to know that an agent would arrive within seconds of their shoes getting wet. Maybe they were a diversion for some other crossing nearby, or had a small package to drop for a smuggler, or, as their families would suggest later, were just doing something stupid to get their adrenaline pumping. They were teenage boys, after all.
As soon as they reached the fence on the US side, they were forced to retreat. Border patrol agent Jesus Mesa Jr ran in from the north with his gun already drawn. Sergio and two other boys easily evaded Mesa and jogged back across to the Mexican side. The fourth boy put his hands up and was detained. Seeing this, Sergio and his two friends picked up rocks and threw them at Agent Mesa. The detained boy fell to the ground; Agent Mesa dragged him by his shirt collar a few metres toward the Rio Grande, keeping his gun pointed into Mexico at the boys, who were at least 20 or 30 metres away.
The current route of the frontier was established in 1848 and 1853 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase at the end of the Mexican–American war. The expansionary war inaugurated the idea that the Anglo-Saxon people of America had a manifest destiny to expand the US across the continent, from sea to shining sea. About half of Mexico’s territory was transferred, including large sections of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. At the time, these arid and sparsely populated lands were still not firmly under the control of the Mexican state. They included a population of 200,000 Native Americans (or, as the treaty refers to them, “savage tribes”), and 100,000 former Mexican citizens, 90% of whom decided to become US citizens; the rest relocated to the Mexican side of the new border.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/04/us-mexico-border-patrol-trump-beautiful-wall
