THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minuteman Project blames victims of US foreign policy

By Leila Pine

We stood there in the hot, dusty Border Road near Douglas, Ariz., about 200 feet from an armed Minuteman Project camp, staring at the torn and tattered clothing blowing from a barbed-wire fence. It was evidence that yet another undocumented family of migrants had been forced to shed all their worldly belongings before they got to the “promised land,” according to Mary Adams, a legal observer from nearby Bisbee. The clothing included two cloth diapers, a baby bottle, and a toddler’s jumpsuit, red with little pink, purple, and yellow animals printed on it.  

The “coyotes,” or human smugglers, always demand that the unemployed workers and any family members with them leave all their belongings behind before getting in the van. That’s because the more people they can stuff inside the vans to the border, the more money the coyotes make, Adams told me.  

It was easy to picture the small children and their young parents, frightened, fatigued, and dehydrated as they crossed over the barbed wire. No doubt, she said, they were hoping not to become another set of statistics in the ever-growing number of Mexican and Central American families dying of malnutrition, starvation, and disease since NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) became law 11 years ago.

In April I spent a total of eight days and a few overnights as a legal observer to monitor the Minuteman Project, a group of armed vigilantes and White supremacists who came to “help defend the U.S. border” by bringing weapons and hunting dogs to “assist the Border Patrol.”  

The Legal Observers Project was a joint project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Arizona and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) of Tucson, to monitor the vigilantes and White supremacists. Over 150 volunteers went through the training, and anywhere from 6 to 40 of us per day participated as legal observers. Our main purpose was to be a visible deterrent to any violence by the vigilantes.  

Human rights organizations say that when vigilantes know they are being watched, their level of violence goes down. I’m now fully convinced this was the case — there could have been a bloodbath there, but there wasn’t one shooting, lynching, or beating the entire month while we were there, even though the Minutemen’s guns were clearly visible along with their Rambo-style camouflage uniforms and their hunting dogs and gear.

Ray Ybarra, a dedicated activist and law student at Stanford University who was raised in Douglas and hired by the ACLU through a special fellowship program, organized the project. Caroline Isaacs and Beth Sanders of the AFSC in Tucson also worked hard to maintain the Legal Observers Program. After the training each morning, they paired us up and gave us T-shirts to identify us as legal observers. We also received video cameras, two-way radios, and plenty of bottled water. Then we drove out to the border in caravans to monitor the Minutemen’s interactions with any migrants.  

During the first week of April, two Minutemen forcibly detained a lone undocumented migrant against his will, Ybarra said. They made him put on a T-shirt that said, “Bryan Barton caught an illegal alien and all I got was this T-shirt.” The vigilantes then humiliated him as they photographed him in various poses they ordered him to do, until we heard them over the scanner, called 911, and drove over to videotape the incident. The migrant, a frightened, thin young man named Juan Carlos, told Ybarra in Spanish what had happened to him.

The following week 11 kids coming down from the Huachuca Mountains near Sierra Vista in groups of two or three, mostly teenage boys, were spotted and stopped by the Border Patrol in the late afternoon. Our scanner also picked up the excited whoops and cries of the Minutemen on their radios, who jumped in their trucks and headed over to the section being described. The Minutemen later claimed credit for “capturing 11 illegals,” but both the kids and the Border Patrol told us that it was the Border Patrol stopping them, with the Minutemen driving up later to take pictures.

One day the Minutemen captured a Latino man just south of the Border Road and held a gun to his head as they ridiculed and humiliated him, Ybarra said. He turned out to be a reporter from a Phoenix radio station — and a U.S. citizen.

A couple of weeks later, Ybarra, who was born and raised in Douglas, told us that a few Minutemen had set up their own checkpoint on a dark road outside of Douglas. Shortly after 1 a.m. they stopped a car driven by an Anglo woman, made her roll down her window and then pointed a gun to her head, he said. When they asked her if she was hiding any “illegals” and what she was doing out at 1 a.m., she explained that she was coming home from her job at an all-night convenience store.  “I live in Double Adobe,” she said.  The woman, who was terrified of the gun pointed at her head, managed to get home and call the police, according to Ybarra.  

Minuteman Project leaders boasted in the press that they expected more than 1,000 volunteers from across the country to join them. We saw more like 100 or 200 over the month of April, and never more than 20 or 30 at one time.   

So far, well over 2,000 migrants have died crossing the Arizona border through the mountains and the brutal Sonoran Desert, according to La Coalición de Derechos Humanos (the Human Rights Coalition) and No More Deaths, two of the many border justice groups and churches that work with them.  Most of those have died of heat stroke, dehydration, disease, suffocation, or were attacked and killed by coyotes, vigilantes, White supremacists, and occasionally U.S. Border Patrol agents, human rights organizations say. And Kat Rodriguez of Derechos Humanos points out that that’s just the number of bodies that have actually been found so far — most agree the actual death toll is higher.

It takes a migrant family about six or seven days to make their way across the Arizona/Mexico border on foot, over the mountains and across the Sonoran Desert into southern Arizona, according to AFSC’s Sanders. In the summers, when the desert temperature hits over 100 degrees and there is no hiding from the merciless sun, the death toll always shoots upward, according to No More Deaths.

“Since NAFTA was implemented, we have become a nation that can no longer feed ourselves,” said Erick Quesnel, a national coordinator for the Frente Autentico de Trabajo (FAT), an independent, democratic union in Mexico. I spoke to him in February when FAT gave us a week-long tour of  projects in Mexico City and surrounding rural areas.  

“Workers in the United States were led to believe that NAFTA sent all their jobs to Mexico,” Quesnel said last February. “But what actually happened is that U.S. corporations and multinationals, heavily supported by government subsidies, undermined the Mexican corn producers by selling corn at much lower prices. The same thing happened with our pork producers. Our farmers receive no subsidies, and they just couldn’t compete.  

“Then the small local banks in Mexico that once loaned farmers the capital to plant a new harvest were taken over by multinational banks that      wouldn’t lend them any more money,” Quesnel added. “So when NAFTA took effect, many of our banks and other Mexican industries went out of business, pushing our unemployment rate up to 50 percent, while the World Trade Organization (WTO) forced our wages down through ‘structural adjustments.’  Now our minimum wage is down to the equivalent of 50 cents an hour, and most people either starve or work in the U.S. and send part of their earnings (remittances) back to their families in Mexico or Central America.”

According to the Mexican government, more than 30 percent of the Mexican economy is now dependent upon the remittances their citizens working in the U.S. send back to their families. With so few Mexican jobs available, many workers have entered the underground economy, earning a few pesos a day by washing people’s car windshields while they are stopped in traffic, setting up little lunch carts or racks of used clothing for sale in the street, or playing musical instruments for tips.  

Quesnel strongly agrees with the U.S. labor movement that the passage of CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) would make things even worse for workers in Mexico and the U.S., and that multinational corporations would push out any remaining industries in Central America and the Dominican Republic. This will destroy their local economies and force more Mexican and Central American immigrants to come to the U.S. seeking low-wage jobs, just the opposite of what the Minutemen want.

“The only solution is to globalize the labor movement, to globalize a fair living wage, affordable health care and worker protections in every country, and then to defeat CAFTA and force the U.S. and the captive nations to renegotiate NAFTA,” Quesnel said.

Anyone who wants to send donations to nonprofit human rights or border justice organizations in Arizona, or to travel to southern Arizona to do border justice work with any of those organizations, may contact Leila Pine at lpine@tds.net or 233-5566.

Leila Pine is a longtime labor and human rights activist and a former AFL-CIO Community Services Director who spent January through early May living in Tucson, Ariz.