La Linea

On Sunday in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua Gov. Cesar Duarte triumphantly announced before the TV cameras that police had finally caught the man who killed well-known activist Marisela Escobedo on the Chihuahua State Capitol steps in December 2010.

At the time of her death, Marisela was holding a vigil to bring her 16-year-old daughter’s killer to justice, one of the dozens of marches and events that made her famous in Mexico for her courage and persistence in seeking justice in the murder of her daughter Rubi Fraire Escobedo.

At a press conference held by the state police Sunday, Jose Enrique Jimenez Zavala, known as “El Wicked,” was presented as the man who shot Marisela Escobedo. According to police, Jimenez is an alleged gunman for the Los Aztecas gang, which are enforcers for the Juarez cartel. In a televised confession, the 29-year-old Jimenez said he carried out Escobedo’s murder on orders from the Zetas and La Linea (gunmen for the Juarez cartel). Jimenez said they wanted her killed because she was drawing too much attention through her protests.

The only problem is that Jimenez isn’t the killer, says Escobedo’s son, Juan Fraire Escobedo. In a press conference Tuesday at the El Paso law office of Carlos Spector, Juan said that his uncle—who was an eyewitness to the murder of Marisela—ID’d the killer but Mexican authorities have done nothing to capture him. Escobedo, who is seeking political asylum in the United States, says the man who killed his mother is an U.S. citizen but works for organized crime in Mexico.

“I’m very sad and angry that they still haven’t resolved my mother’s case,” he said in a telephone interview after the press conference. “We met with the Mexican authorities at the Mexican consulate in El Paso last year and ID’d the criminal. They promised there would be an investigation. But after that they never responded to me again. Jimenez is not the man who killed my mother.”

Mexican authorities have also failed to solve the murder of his sister Rubi, he says, which occurred in 2008.  Sergio Barraza, Rubi’s former boyfriend, confessed to the killing and even led authorities to where he had burnt her body, but the judges declared him innocent for lack of evidence. Marisela began a campiagn for judicial reform and was working to have Barraza arrested when she was killed. According to Juan Fraire Escobedo, Barraza is now a member of the Zetas Cartel.

Fraire Escobedo says the only thing he agrees with from the government’s claims this week is that the orders to kill his mother were given by the Zetas and La Linea. “Jimenez is nothing more than a scapegoat for the authorities,” he says.

To learn more about Juan Fraire Escobedo’s fight for justice for his family hear him speak at a Texas Observer forum last March with the nonprofit group Mexicans in Exile, who are advocating for justice and human rights in Mexico.

Texas is an urban state, and commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture has become one of the more obscure statewide offices. Most Texans don’t regularly think about boll weevil eradication or irrigation issues, especially when they’re sitting in traffic on I-10. Ag commissioner just isn’t the political stepping-stone it once was. So what’s an ambitious politician who wants to run for higher office to do?

For Todd Staples, the answer is to run the Department of Agriculture like he’s Chuck Norris.

Staples, a Republican who’s openly running for lieutenant governor in 2014, has made the threat of narco-terrorism on the Mexico border his central issue. If you’re wondering what narco-terrorism has to do with agriculture, well, Staples claims that drug cartels are threatening Texas farmers and, in turn, our food supply.

In late August, the ag commissioner was the keynote speaker at a narco-terrorism conference at Angelo State University, where he plugged the debut of his 16-part video series titled “Texas Traffic—True Stories of Drug and Human Smuggling.” The department is posting these videos on the ag department’s ProtectYourTexasBorder.com site. Each week, the website features a new interview with a border resident or law-enforcement official.

At the narco-terrorism conference, Staples argued that the federal government hasn’t done enough to secure the border. Among his solutions: triple the number of “boots on the ground,” send surplus military equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan to the border, and categorize cartel violence as “terroristic activity by violent transnational organizations.”

“It’s time for the federal government to answer the call of duty and provide sufficient protection for our citizens and resources,” Staples said in written statement to the Observer about why he created the video series and the website. “Bullet holes don’t lie. The ProtectYourTexasBorder website provides firsthand accounts of the dangers along our border. Farmers and ranchers along the Rio Grande are caught in the middle of a conflict that affects every citizen of our nation. A threat to our food supply is a threat to our homeland security. Texas stands ready to fight these terrorists and protect our residents, but we must have increased federal support to secure our borders, defeat our enemies and safeguard our national food supply.”

Lambasting the federal government for not securing the border has become a tried-and-true talking point for any Republican candidate with aspirations for higher office. Last year, Staples commissioned an $80,000 study by two retired U.S. Army generals that called for turning Texas border counties into “sanitary tactical zones” where military operations can push back the narco-terrorists.

Some border residents aren’t pleased with Staples’ zeal to militarize their hometowns. One of his biggest critics, it turns out, is Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño, who told The Monitor newspaper in McAllen that his border county last year had its second-lowest crime rate in 15 years. “To say the farmers and ranchers have been victimized personally—other than the trespassing—have been assaulted, threatened?” Treviño said. “I don’t have the statistics to support those allegations.”

“People who run into border-related trouble should report the problem to law enforcement,” Treviño told The Monitor, “instead of telling Staples, who isn’t a law-enforcement official and can’t directly tackle the problem. And that’s why I find [it] so frustrating. And I don’t know, maybe Commissioner Staples is looking to beef up his political résumé. Why else would you do something like that?”

Since 9/11, Congress has tripled the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents to more than 21,000. In the scramble to find willing recruits, the Department of Homeland Security sometimes defers background checks and relaxes recruitment standards.

With the increase in agents, there’s also been an increase in complaints from citizens who live along our international borders. Especially the northern border where Border Patrol agents now sometimes staff 911 call centers or respond in remote areas to domestic disturbance abuse calls and other cases normally relegated to the police department or sheriff’s office. For instance, last June a 75-year-old man, Charles Robinson, was fatally shot in Jackman, Maine, after he fired on a Border Patrol agent, who responded to a domestic dispute call at Robinson’s residence.

On the southern border, there have also been deaths. A grand jury has been convened to look into the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas in 2010 by border agents. Hernandez, a citizen of Mexico, was being deported at the San Diego port of entry when he was beaten and tased by over a dozen agents. He died a few days later. Earlier this year, PBS’ ”Need to Know” aired cell phone footage taken by an eyewitness of the incident.

I’ve heard repeatedly from civil rights advocates and border citizens that it’s time that border patrol policies and training be re-examined. But it’s an idea that hasn’t caught up with members of Congress yet.

For the past decade, the political debate over whether our borders have enough “boots on the ground” has been white hot, but a much-needed debate over who fills those boots and how they exercise their authority has been sadly lacking.

The ACLU and a network of civil rights advocates along the border have taken it upon themselves to document patterns of abuse and catalogue repeat offenders with the goal of asking for policy changes in the future.

They’re tracking the complaints in a new database called the U.S./Mexico Binational Abuse Documentation System. For the project, the ACLU’s Regional Center for Border Rights in Las Cruces, New Mexico, created the web-based platform so that advocates can document complaints of abuse or misconduct from wherever they are along the border.

“Across the border there’s the sense that the same types of abuse are occurring from the more mundane of not providing food and water to people in detention to excessive use of force,” says Brian Erickson, an ACLU policy analyst who is overseeing the database project. “This is a tool to see whether the abuses are systemic in nature. The biggest goal is to hold Border Patrol accountable and to offer up policies that we want to see changed.”

Groups in California, Arizona and El Paso have already begun using the database. This week, a civil rights coalition called The RGV Equal Voice Network, announced the start of the project in the Rio Grande Valley.

Mike Seifert, spokesperson for the RGV Equal Voice Network, said the coalition is also promoting a hotline in the Valley where people can report abuses to be collected in the database. “We’re looking at everything,” he says. “Tasings, shooting events because of rock throwing and home invasions. We want to make it clear though that we can’t offer legal advice but we can refer cases to the ACLU.”

The secure database will be private and only available to people in the advocacy organizations who have been trained to use it, says Erickson.

Last May, a riot in a private prison in Natchez, Mississippi, turned deadly when a prison guard was beaten to death. The riot was sparked by undocumented immigrants angered by poor food and medical care and abusive guards. It’s only the latest in a series of riots that have occurred in the booming immigrant detention system in the United States.

In Pecos, Texas, riots broke out in 2008 over medical negilgence after a detainee with epilepsy died in solitary confinement. Despite the riots, deaths and documented cases of abuse the number of detention facilities — many of them private jails — increased by 208 percent between 2002 and 2008. The industry has grown massive, fed by Operation Streamline a federal policy expanded in 2005 to detain immigrants who enter the country illegally. People who enter illegally for the first time can serve a 30 day sentence in jail while a repeat offender can serve anywhere from 1 to 20 years in prison.

Since 2001, it has cost U.S. taxpayers $5.5 billion to incarcerate undocumented immigrants yet research shows that it does little to deter immigrants from coming illegally to the United States. Thursday, Austin nonprofit Grassroots Leadership and other civil justice groups will testify at a Congressional Briefing sponsored by U.S. Representative Jared Polis. The briefing will examine human rights abuses and waste, which they say is prevalent in the Federal Bureau of Prison’s “Criminal Alien Requirements” private prison contracting program. “The federal government has another 1,000 beds budgeted for 2013,” says Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership. “Private detention facilities have grown exponentially but research shows incarcerating people doesn’t deter them from coming.The biggest determinant is the economy.”

So many immigrants have been incarcerated for entering the country illegally that it has radically changed the composition of the federal prison population. In 2011, for the first time Hispanics made up 50.3 percent of people sentenced for felonies even though they make up just 16 percent of the U.S. population. Libal and other advocates hope the federal government will consider less costly and more humane alternatives to jail. “We have less undocumented Mexicans entering the country than in decades and we’re still expanding the detention system,” he says. “There has to be a better policy.”

Read a new report released by Grassroots Leadership called “Operation Streamline:Costs and Consequences.”

An U.S. Border Patrol agent has shot another man in Mexico – this time in Nuevo Laredo. Nora Isabel Lam Gallegos reported that her husband Guillermo Arevalo Pedroz, 36, was fatally shot on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Monday at a popular park called “The Skating Rink.” Arevalo and his family were having a BBQ and celebrating a birthday, according to Gallegos who was interviewed by Laredo’s KGNS News.

Gallegos and other witnesses say U.S. Border Patrol agents in a boat were trying to apprehend a man swimming across the Rio Grande to Texas. The man turned back toward Mexico and an agent fired toward the Mexican side of the riverbank hitting Gallegos’ husband at the park. No Border Patrol agents were hurt in the incident.

In a statement from the Border Patrol, the agency said people in Mexico pelted the agents with rocks, reports KGNS News. The Mexican government has repeatedly lodged diplomatic complaints with the United States concerning the “disproportionate use of lethal force” by U.S. immigration agents. Both the FBI and the Mexican government are investigating the incident.

According to El Universal, a Mexico City-based newspaper, an U.S. citizen reportedly filmed the entire incident on a cell phone and turned it over to the Mexican authorities.

This is the second time an U.S. Border Patrol agent in Texas has fatally shot someone in Mexico in the last three months. In both cases, Border Patrol claimed they were being pelted with rocks, which required them to shoot in self defense.

On July 9, an U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot Juan Pablo Perez Santillan. The 30-year-old was standing on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros just across from Brownsville. In a lawsuit filed by his family, they claim Perez Santillan was standing on the riverbank while a group of people swam across the river to Texas. The group was spotted by U.S. Border Patrol agents. In a statement after the shooting, the agency says its agents were pelted with rocks and fired in self defense.

This death in Nuevo Laredo is the fifth time an U.S. border agent has killed someone on Mexican soil in the last two years. Ramses Torres, 17, was shot in Nogales, Sonora, in 2011, and Jose Yañez Reyes was killed that same year in Tijuana. Sergio Hernandez Guereca, 15, was killed in Juarez in 2010 by U.S. Border Patrol, agent Jesus Mesa.

This a disturbing trend that doesn’t bode well for an already tense relationship with Mexico. With the increasing number of fatal shootings in Mexico by U.S. agents and the shooting of two CIA agents in Mexico last week by the Federal Police, Mexico’s incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto has not only domestic woes to contend with but international ones as well.