Tijuana: Reflections on the border

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‘TJ? Really?’ was the response from most people last week when they learned I was heading down south of San Diego for a research trip.

They were right to be cautious. I live in Mexico City -- one of the biggest, baddest towns around -- but still gave Tijuana a second thought. The world’s most famous border city has been getting some bad press of late due to the drug-related violence playing out on its streets.

But what struck me more during my brief trip was the border itself and how it is littered with evidence of its own casualties and conflicts, past and present. The wall is at the center of the current national debate on immigration, and I wanted to see it for myself.

My trip was for field research, and I’d arranged a meeting at the city’s Colegio de La Frontera Norte to discuss the thorny issue of immigration with an academic specialist, Jorge Agustin Bustamante Fernández.

As the MexiCoach shuttle sped me across the border from the car park in San Diego, the landscape rapidly transformed from the First to the Third World.

There is so much of Latin America that is part of the fabric of the United States -- the region’s food, customs, language, and of course its people. But other common features have remained south of the border -- a multitude of stray dogs; littered, unkempt countryside; acute poverty; and building sites that look as if they’re on the brink of collapse.

Heading over to el Colegio at the southwestern edge of the city, I spotted Donald Trump smiling out at me from a billboard overlooking the freeway. The taxi sped by workmen without hardhats laboring on his new Trump apartments, going for $265,000 a pop.

‘Things here are as normal, calm,’ said the taxista Federico as he drove.

Tijuana was once a playground of wild and hedonistic abandon to Americans. Now, the border town has become one of the stages on which Mexico’s powerful drug cartels are playing out their gruesome war, both against each other and the country’s President Felipe Calderon, who has dispatched thousands of Army troops and federal police to tackle them.

This year alone, L.A. Times correspondents north and south of the border have filed grisly reports on the escalating violence. Last month, 11 bodies were found in Tijuana over one three-day stretch. Six of them had been shot execution-style and then set on fire in what appeared to be drug-related violence.

The city’s death toll has reached 260 since January, compared with about 152 homicides at this time last year.

Drug cartels and violence are nothing new in Mexico, but the tourists have started to stay away in droves and locals are skipping town.

But Federico said the violence is between drug gangs from outside who are trying to control the smuggling routes. People living in Tijuana aren’t that affected by the outbursts of violence, he contended.

Middle- and upper-class Mexican ‘refugees’ who have moved to San Diego county, north of the border in an attempt to escape the problems, and those who have had family members kidnapped for ransom, might call that positive spin.

As we continued to head south, the freeway curved off to the left and along the border wall. If you could call it a wall. Crafted out of corrugated iron salvaged from helicopter landing pads from the Vietnam War, the rusty, graffiti-covered barrier that divides Mexico from California seemed more symbolic -- at least in this part -- than practical.

A Mexican Army post along the freeway was perched high on the hill, the first sign of efforts on the Mexican side to control the constant movement of people around the border. The valley dropped off to the side and at the base of it ran the fence, traversed on the other side by a steady stream of white U.S Border Patrol trucks bouncing along the rough gravel lane.

From the taxi, I spotted a group of five men in hooded sweaters carrying plastic bags hurrying along the base of the wall under the nose of the military watch. It was clear they were waiting for their chance to cross the border. The soldiers did nothing. They were more interested when I -- a woman wielding a camera -- stepped out of a cab, rushing to tell me we couldn’t park there.

It’s of no difference to the Mexican Army or police whether their countrymen and other migrants, some from as far south as Nicaragua, cross into the United States. They don’t consider it their problem.

The words of Bustamante Fernández (pictured) during our meeting that morning suddenly seemed so pertinent to me as we drove away from the checkpoint.

He’d said that the United States treats illegal immigration as a criminal problem, whereas Mexico sees it as a human rights issue. That’s true on the part of the United States, but if the Mexican Army is there to watch over the human rights of the migrants, they didn’t appear to be doing a very thorough job.

Bustamante Fernández also mentioned that Mexico’s northern neighbor tends to treat illegal immigration as a domestic issue and something that can be resolved by sealing the border, and making life hard for undocumented migrants living in the U.S so that they will return home to Mexico (the so-called attrition policy).

His criticisms of the United States seemed fair to me. But from where I was standing last week, the Mexican authorities seemed to be doing little to stem the flow of people north. So far, President Felipe Calderon has also given poor, rural Mexican workers little incentive to stay in their homeland since he took power in 2006’s controversial elections.

On top of Mexico’s indifference toward slowing the flow of people north, migrants heading to the U.S. are in many instances actually exploited by Mexico’s corrupt law enforcement branches.

Bustamante Fernández said that the federal police used to sell time slots to local police forces -- a Tuesday afternoon for example -- for them to go into the mountains and rob migrants trying to cross the wall. His language suggested that was something that happened in the past, rather than now.

Central American migrants have an even harder time than Mexicans. They become illegal as soon as they leave their home countries, making them incredibly vulnerable to both the Mexican public and police. Mexicans, on the other hand, who are planning to cross into El Norte illegally can just walk right up to the northern border with the United States.

Last year, Mexico’s national human rights commission even ran a TV advertising campaign imploring the Mexican public to treat migrants from Central America with compassion.

I know Mexicans who have crossed the border illegally numerous times. They tell me that the greatest risk to them wasn’t United States Border Patrol agents. It was other Mexicans lurking around on the other side of the border waiting to rob them. They often carry guns. Sometimes the pollero, or people smuggler, is also in on the scam, tipping off their partners about where they’re going to cross and then playing along with the robbery.

All this ran through my mind as I neared the airport, keen to get a look at the border wall on the other side of the city. For nearly a mile, white crosses made of wood were nailed to the fence. I asked Federico to stop so I could get a closer look, and we pulled onto the hard shoulder. Each of those crosses bore the name of a person and a state, representing someone who died crossing into the United States.

Luciano Limon Sanchez from Sinaloa. Onesino Salazar Cruz from Oaxaca. Maria Isabel de la Cruz. Some simply said ‘inidentificado.’ Unidentified.

Bending down to peek through a rectangular hole in the fence, I could see the new border wall being built by the Department of Homeland Security just 300 yards back. The silver metal fence, topped by razor wire, gleamed bright and hard in the midday sun. Behind it, an American flag fluttered.

Bustamante Fernández described the DHS border wall project as a ‘hostile’ act. I could see what he meant. The wall, which they’re still building, resembles one that you’d expect to see circling a high security prison, but this time they’re trying to keep the ‘criminals’ out rather than in.

Finally, I headed for Tijuana’s beach. I wanted to see the border wall where it slid into the ocean. Families picnicked in the shade of the fence that cuts a line across the pale sand between San Diego and Tijuana. Seemingly oblivious to the black bars looming behind them, they reclined on the sand, chattering and laughing.

The spaces between the bars were almost big enough for me to squeeze through, but a Border Patrol car parked on the top of a bluff on the San Diego side was a constant, silent presence. Middle-aged Mexican men hung around a little plaza high on a bluff on the other side of the fence, at eye level with the Border Patrol. They waited.

A young man on the San Diego side of the fence spoke to me in Spanish. He was guiding a field trip from UCLA, and behind him students giggled and took photos of the fence. We snapped pictures of each other across the barrier.

A sign hung on the Mexico side of the wall just before it entered the water, where it ran a further 50 meters before tapering to an end. ‘There are objects under the water,’ it warned in English and Spanish. They didn’t need to put it on the other side - not many people try to swim from the United States to Mexico.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City