First border fence: fewer migrants, more violence

Barrier near Tijuana has turned area into a battleground.

[statesman.com] TIJUANA, Baja California — There is a moment each evening, as the sun melts into the Pacific, when Colonia Libertad is at peace.

The dimming light blurs the hilltop slum’s rough edges, camouflaging
piles of trash in long shadows and making it difficult to tell that
some of the tightly packed homes clinging to vertical canyonsides are
made of old packing crates and cast-off plastic tarps.

The stadium lighting that towers over the corrugated metal wall
marking the U.S.-Mexico border is dark, permitting residents a bird’s
eye view of Tijuana, where lights are blinking on, blanketing hills
that lead toward the ocean. Farther inland, the dark shadows of
mountains are sketched across the sky.

There are no helicopters reverberating overhead, no drone of
all-terrain vehicles. Even the guard dogs chained outside their homes
respect the silence. Fathers stroll lazily behind children who steer
beat-up tricycles along the rutted dirt paths that serve as streets.

For a moment, residents are reminded of what it was like before the
wall, when children ducked under a barbed wire fence to play soccer in
U.S. territory and returned home for dinner. When smuggling meant
giving directions to migrants who simply outran border agents and
melted into the crowds of tourists.

But it is only a moment.

The floodlights click on, bathing the neighborhood in light. The
helicopters return, clattering past. And the smugglers arrive with
their ladders and blow torches and groups of people desperate to escape
a fate similar to the one residents of Colonia Libertad long ago
accepted.

As the U.S. government battles environmentalists and residents to
build hundreds more miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico
border, both sides might be well served to take a long look at Colonia
Libertad — Freedom Neighborhood.

In the early 1990s, Colonia Libertad became one of the first places
to coexist with the recycled, corrugated-iron barrier that has become a
symbol of the conflicted relationship between the superpower United
States and the developing nation that lives in its shadow.

The fence didn’t stop the migrants. It didn’t stop the drugs. It
merely pared down the crowds that used to flood San Diego hillsides,
diverted the drugs underground and into the mountains, and helped
create a smuggling industry dedicated to beating the U.S. Border Patrol
at its own game.

But that’s not to say the sections of fence that have been built
haven’t been successful. The barriers, combined with high-tech security
measures such as surveillance cameras and ground sensors, have made
getting into the U.S. more difficult.

And as security has increased in recent years, the number of people trying to cross has fallen dramatically.

The downside, residents on both sides say, is that the border has
become a battleground, shattering a shared American and Mexican history
that is blind to things such as fences and borders.

Once, the only barrier between Colonia Libertad and San Diego was a barbed-wire fence.

Residents would squeeze between its rusty spikes, escaping the
crowded barrio for the open hillsides of U.S. territory. Adults roasted
meat in barbecue pits while children ran free.

"It used to be fun because we’d cross and play soccer or baseball or
volleyball," said Jaime Boites, 35, whose home is steps from the
border. "Nobody cared. When we were done, we’d just go back to our
houses in Mexico."

U.S. Border Patrol agents left the picnickers alone.

They were more concerned with the other side of Colonia Libertad,
the smugglers who used the neighborhood as a staging ground for
vanloads of people or drugs or some other kind of contraband that the
gringos legally didn’t want but were always willing to pay for.

It wasn’t hard to get to the United States, which had few agents and
little security. Sometimes migrants gathered at the border in large
groups to rush past outnumbered guards.

Others packed into vans that were used to bring drugs or people across the hills.

"Back then, there used to be vans going through U.S. territory, just
like nothing," Boites says. "Vans full of people, any time of day."

That was the main reason the wall went up: to stop the vehicles.

The first stretch of wall was made of material recycled from landing strips left over from Vietnam.

Little changed in Colonia Libertad. Smugglers cut holes in the fence
and drove their vans through. Migrants scrambled over the wall, using
the corrugated ridges like the steps of a ladder.

U.S. officials saw the fence as a necessity because millions of
undocumented workers and tons of illegal drugs were streaming into
their cities.

But it had consequences they never intended: Seasonal workers unable
to easily go back and forth built permanent lives north of the border.
Migrants were pushed into the searing desert of Arizona, and more than
1,600 have died, often of thirst and exposure.

In Tijuana, the United States kept increasing security, using the
area to test new anti-smuggling methods and expanding the ones that
worked. It added a second layer of fencing at some points, redesigning
each barrier to make it more difficult to overcome.

Smugglers responded by charging migrants more money and becoming
more violent. They used slingshots to launch rocks, bottles,
nail-studded planks, Molotov cocktails.

Sometimes they wanted to hurt border agents, but mostly they were
trying to create diversions while they moved people or drugs across at
another point.

Source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/09/28/0928lifewithfence.html