[Mb-civic] Down on Border, 'La Linea' Isn't So Clear - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Down on Border, 'La Linea' Isn't So Clear
Bush to Discuss Illegal Crossings and Drug Trade at Three-Way Summit in 
Cancun

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 30, 2006; A04

NOGALES, Mexico -- Troops. Barricades. Guns.

On the border, this is the vocabulary of U.S.-Mexico relations. Here at 
one of the busiest crossing points, dingy metal walls separate the 
United States from Mexico, rich from poor. The walls are spray-painted 
with crude images of American border patrol agents, their pistols 
leveled at brown-skinned men.

Even as differences over immigration and border security -- roiled this 
week by congressional debates and massive protests by Latinos across the 
United States -- threaten to dredge a deeper divide between the nations, 
it is clear that they are increasingly knit by an exchange of business, 
ideas and, above all, human beings.

On Thursday and Friday, when President Bush meets in Cancun with 
President Vicente Fox, there will be no topic more pressing than the 
border -- "La Linea," as Mexicans call it -- a barrier that dominates a 
relationship marked both by enormous potential and overwhelming 
problems. Bush arrived in Cancun Wednesday night.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will also participate in the 
talks at the coastal resort, the second session since the formation of 
the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, intended to 
foster cooperation among the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Historic feelings of mistrust remain strong on the Mexican side of the 
border with the United States. Business is booming, but so is crime, and 
the rapid but lopsided economic development of the region has 
highlighted the persistent differences in living standards between the 
two countries.

In 2005, the United States imported a record $170 billion in goods from 
Mexico and exported $120 billion to its southern neighbor, according to 
the U.S. Department of Commerce. Twelve years after the implementation 
of the North American Free Trade Agreement, American business people tap 
into high-speed, Wi-Fi networks in the lobbies of U.S.-style hotels in 
border towns such as Nogales.

But out in the remote deserts, the border sizzles with a different kind 
of activity. An all-time high of 1.17 million people, the great majority 
of them Mexican migrants, were arrested by U.S. agents for illegal 
border crossing between October 2004 and October 2005. A record 473 
people died while trying to cross, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Uncounted hundreds of thousands more make it into the United States 
illegally and blend into a nationwide pool of surreptitious, cheap 
labor. They work on cleanup crews in Houston, construction sites in 
Virginia and onion fields in California, ever one step ahead of deportation.

At the same time, Mexico remains a major conduit for illegal drugs, 
turning border towns such as Nuevo Laredo and Juarez into virtual 
shooting galleries and further complicating relations with the United 
States.

In the 700-mile corridor between El Paso and Nuevo Laredo, U.S. drug 
enforcement agents seized 1,220 kilos of cocaine in 2005, up from 700 
kilos four years earlier. The amount of methamphetamine confiscated 
between the Texas border cities of Laredo and Brownsville nearly tripled 
in those years, to 354 kilos, while marijuana seizures in the Phoenix 
border-crossing area more than doubled, to 285,000 kilos.

The torrent of drugs and migrants across the Arizona border -- an 
especially hazardous trip because of the dangers of dehydration in the 
vast desert -- has turned that state into a flash point for confrontation.

Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) issued an executive order this month allowing 
her to dispatch more National Guard troops to the border, even as she 
stated that "we are not at war with Mexico." The state legislature has 
tried to take steps of its own to marshal troops, and the volunteer 
Minuteman Civil Defense Corps launched citizen border patrols.

Outside Nogales, a city of 20,000 where the main roads funnel north to 
the Arizona border, the cycle of attempted crossings, arrests, 
deportations and more attempts revolves like a surreal game.

One recent afternoon, Abram Gutierrez, a 23-year-old migrant with 
chipped fingernails and a dirty sweat shirt, devoured a bowl of instant 
noodles outside the building housing Grupo Beta, a humanitarian aid 
program funded by the Mexican government. Hours before, he had been 
caught in Arizona and taken back to Nogales. Now he was plotting a 
second try -- and a third and fourth, if need be.

"We'll see who gets bored first," Gutierrez said, laughing. His friend, 
Lasaroa Damian, 27, said Bush and Fox should realize that migrants "are 
like cats" who find another way into a house after the front door is closed.

In the United States, debate over illegal immigration has become 
super-heated with election-year politics. The House of Representatives 
passed a bill in December that would make it a felony for a person to be 
in the United States illegally, and some members have proposed building 
a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

Now the divisive issue has moved to the Senate, where this week the 
Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would create a large 
temporary-worker program and allow an estimated 11 million illegal 
immigrants to apply for work visas after paying fines. But Majority 
Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has proposed stiffening penalties for 
businesses that hire illegal immigrants, and many conservatives strongly 
oppose any amnesty.

The Fox government took out full-page ads last week in several major 
U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post, urging an immigration 
pact that would allow assimilation of undocumented workers living in the 
United States. "We are your friends and neighbors. Let's work together," 
the ads read.

"Mexico and the U.S., I think, are becoming more aware that they are 
interdependent, and perhaps neither of the countries feels entirely 
comfortable with that interdependence," Geronimo Gutierrez, Mexico's 
undersecretary for North American affairs, said in an interview. "The 
relationship is at a fairly complex moment of catharsis."

But Fox, who cannot run for reelection and will leave office in 
December, has responded angrily to U.S. proposals to tighten the border. 
In a recent speech, he predicted that by 2010, the United States would 
"beg" Mexico for workers in vain, suggesting that by then the Mexican 
economy would generate enough jobs to sustain its 100 million-plus people.

"The rhetoric is more strident. The politics is driving this," Michael 
Shifter, director of the nonprofit Inter-American Dialogue, said by 
phone from Washington. "The U.S. and Mexico have a knack for bringing 
out the worst in each other."

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. When Fox was elected in 2000, 
many here and in the United States predicted an era of what was dubbed 
"ranchero diplomacy," with the two leaders bonding at Bush's Texas ranch 
and Fox's hacienda. On Sept. 5, 2001, Bush declared that Mexico 
represented the most important international relationship for the United 
States.

Six days later, terrorists smashed planes into the World Trade Center 
and the Pentagon, and the U.S. focus shifted to the Middle East and 
South Asia. Mexico later alienated the United States by not supporting 
the war in Iraq.

Mexicans weren't entirely surprised to see their relationship drop from 
the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. But Shifter said that "the 
question Mexicans raise is, did it have to completely disappear?"

A disappearance of another sort, beyond the vigilant gaze of border 
patrol agents, is exactly what Abram Gutierrez wants. For him, the other 
side of the border represents " el color verde " -- the color green, the 
color of money. Sitting in the hot Nogales sun last week, he vowed to 
make it across this time, whether by "holes or tunnels or the desert."

Francisco Loureiro, who runs a shelter in Nogales that has housed 
600,000 migrants in 24 years, recognizes Gutierrez's determination. It 
is a quality, he said, that he has seen over and over in the men who 
pass through his shelter.

Loureiro says the only solution is a broad guest-worker program, 
something the Bush administration recently proposed. But he said his 
expectations are low for the upcoming meeting between the U.S. and 
Mexican leaders.

"Every time they talk, I have hope," he said. "But things are getting 
worse."

When the sun drops, Loureiro's little shelter will be full, as it is 
every night. When Gutierrez disappears, he knows, thousands more will 
follow.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902228.html?nav=hcmodule
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