It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar
through significant parts of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Imagine
instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These
are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican
Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like
dazed versions of U.S. Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border
guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore.
There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash
clothes on rocks.
One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards,
carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the
main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were
in a Middle Eastern war zone.
If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on
the U.S. southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model
the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an
import from the United States.
CESFRONT itself is, in fact, an outgrowth of a U.S. effort to promote
“strong borders” abroad as part of its Global War on Terror. So U.S.
Consul-General Michael Schimmel told a group from the Columbia Law
School Human Rights Clinic in the Dominican Republic back in 2008,
according to an internal report written by the law students along with
the Dominican immigrant solidarity organization Solidaridad Fronteriza.
The U.S. military, he added, was training the Dominican border patrol in
“professionalism.”
Schimmel was explaining an overlooked manifestation of U.S. imperial
policy in the post-9/11 era. Militarized borders are becoming ever more
common throughout the world, especially in areas of U.S. influence.
CESFRONT’s Dajabon commander is Colonel Juan de Jesus Cruz, a stout,
Napoleonic figure with a booming voice. Watching the colonel interact
with those detained Haitian teenagers was my first brush with how
Washington’s “strong borders” abroad policy plays out on the ground. The
CESFRONT base in Dajabon is located near the Massacre River that
divides the two countries. Its name is a grim reminder of a time in
1937 when Dominican forces slaughtered an estimated 20,000 Haitians in
what has been
called the
“twentieth century’s least-remembered act of genocide.” That act
ensured the imposition of a 227-mile boundary between the two countries
that share the same island.
As rain falls and the sky growls, Cruz points to the drenched young Haitians and says a single word, “
ilegales,”
his index finger hovering in the air. The word “illegals” doesn’t
settle well with one of the teenagers, who glares at the colonel and
replies defiantly, “We have come because of hunger.”
His claim is corroborated by every
report about
conditions in Haiti, but the colonel responds, “You have resources
there,” with the spirit of a man who relishes a debate.
The teenager, who will undoubtedly soon be expelled from the
Dominican Republic like so many other Haitians (including, these days,
people of Haitian descent
bornin
the country), gives the colonel a withering look. He’s clearly boiling
inside. “There’s hunger in Haiti. There’s poverty in Haiti. There is no
way the colonel could not see that,” he tells Cruz. “You are right on
the border.”
This tense, uneasy, and commonplace interaction is one of countless
numbers of similar moments spanning continents from Latin America and
Africa to the Middle East and Asia. On one side, a man in a uniform with
a gun and the authority to detain, deport, or sometimes even kill; on
the other, people with the most fundamental of unmet needs and without
the proper documentation to cross an international boundary. Such
people, uprooted, in flight, in pain, in desperate straits, are today
ever more commonly dismissed, if they’re lucky, as the equivalent of
criminals, or if they aren’t so lucky, labeled “terrorists” and treated
accordingly.
In a seminal
article “Where’s
the U.S. Border?,” Michael Flynn, founder of the Global Detention
Project, described the expansion of U.S. “border enforcement” to the
planet in the context of the Global War on Terror as essentially a new
way of defining national sovereignty. “U.S. border control efforts,” he
argued, “have undergone a dramatic metamorphosis in recent years as the
United States has attempted to implement practices aimed at stopping
migrants long before they reach U.S. shores.”
In this way, borders are, in a sense, being both built up and torn
down. Just as with the drones that, from Pakistan to Somalia, the White
House
sends across
national boundaries to execute those it has identified as our enemies,
so with border patrolling: definitions of U.S. national “sovereignty,”
including where our own borders end and where our version of “national”
defense stretches are becoming ever more malleable. As Flynn wrote,
although “the U.S. border has been hardened in a number of ways — most
dramatically by building actual walls — it is misleading to think that
the country’s efforts stop there. Rather the U.S. border in an age
dominated by a global war on terrorism and the effects of economic
globalization has become a flexible point of contention.”
In other words, “hard” as actual U.S. borders are becoming, what
might be called our global, or perhaps even virtual, borders are growing
ever more pliable and ever more expansive — extending not only to
places like the Dominican Republic, but to the edges of our vast
military-surveillance grid, into cyberspace, and via spinning satellites
and other spying systems, into space itself.
Back in 2004, a single
sentence in
the 9/11 commission report caught this changing mood succinctly: “9/11
has taught us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’
should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against Americans ‘over
here.’ In this same sense the American homeland is the planet.”
New World Border
Washington’s response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake provides one
example of how quickly a mobile U.S. border and associated fears of
massive immigration or unrest can be brought into play.
In the first days after that disaster, a U.S. Air Force cargo plane circled parts of the island for five hours repeatedly
broadcasting in Creole the prerecorded voice of Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States.
“Listen, don’t rush [to the United States] on boats to leave the
country,” he said. “If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems.
Because I’ll be honest with you: if you think you will reach the U.S.
and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case.
And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home
where you came from.”
That disembodied voice from the heavens was addressing Haitians still
stunned in the wake of an earthquake that had killed up to 316,000
people and left an additional one million homeless. State Department
Deputy Spokesman Gordon Duguid
explained the
daily flights to CNN this way: “We are sending public service messages…
to save lives.” Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
quickly dispatched 16 Coast Guard cutters to patrol Haitian waters,
blocking people from leaving their devastated island. DHS authorities
also cleared space in a 600-bed immigration detention center in Miami,
and at the
for-profitGuantanamo Bay Migrations Operation Center (run by the GEO Group) at the infamous U.S. base in Cuba.
In other words, the U.S. border is no longer static and “homeland
security” no longer stays in the homeland: it’s mobile, it’s rapid, and
it’s international.
Maybe this is why, last March, when I asked the young salesmen from
L-3 Communications, a surveillance technology company, at the
Border Security Expo in
Phoenix if they were worried about the sequester — Congress’s
across-the-board budget cuts that have taken dollars away from the
Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security — one of them simply
shrugged. “There’s the international market,” he said as if this were
almost too obvious to mention.
He was standing in front of a black globular glass eye of a camera
they were peddling to security types. It was draped with desert
camouflage, as if we were out in the Arizona borderlands, while all
around us you could feel the energy, the synergy, of an emerging
border-industrial complex. Everywhere you looked government officials,
Border Patrol types, and the representatives of private industry were
meeting and dealing in front of hundreds of booths under the high
ceilings of the convention center.
On the internationalization of border security, he wasn’t
exaggerating. At least 14 other countries ranging from Israel to Russia
were present, their representatives browsing products ranging from
miniature drones to Glock handguns. And behind the bustle of that event
lay estimates that the global market for homeland security and emergency
management will
reach $544
billion annually by 2018. “The threat of cross-border terrorism,
cyber-crime, piracy, drug trade, human trafficking, internal dissent,
separatist movements has been a driving factor for the homeland security
market,” the market research company MarketsandMarkets
reported, based on a study of high-profit security markets in North America, Europe, and Asia.
This booming business thrives off the creation of new border patrols
globally. The Dominican Republic’s CESFRONT, for instance, did not exist
before 2006. That year, according to
Dominican Today, a group of “U.S. experts”
reported that
there were “a series of weaknesses that will lead to all kinds of
illicit activities” on the Haitian-Dominican border. The U.S. team
recommended that “there should be helicopters deployed in the region and
[that] there be a creation of a Border Guard.” A month after their
report appeared, that country, by Dominican presidential decree, had its
own border patrol.
By 2009, the new force had already received training, funding, and resources from a number of U.S. agencies,
including the
Border Patrol itself. Somehow, it seems that what the U.S. consulate
calls “strong borders” between the Dominican Republic and the
hemisphere’s poorest country has become an integral part of a
terror-obsessed world.
When I met with Colonel Orlando Jerez, a CESFRONT commander, in the
border guard agency’s headquarters in the Dominican capital Santo
Domingo, I noticed that on his desk he had a U.S. Border Patrol model
car, a replica of the one that agency
sponsored on
the NASCAR circuit from 2006 to 2008 in an attempt to recruit new
agents. Along the side of the shiny box that held it was this mission
statement: “We are the guardians of the nation’s borders, we are
America’s frontlines.”
When I asked Jerez whether CESFRONT had a relationship with our
Border Patrol, he replied without a second’s hesitation, “Of course,
they have an office in the U.S. embassy.”
Jerez is not alone. Washington’s global boundary-building, its
promotion of those strong borders, and its urge to preempt “terrorism
against American interests ‘over there,’” as the 9/11 commission report
put it, are spreading fast. For example, the Central American Regional
Security Initiative, a $496 million U.S. counter-drug plan launched in
2008, identifies
“border security deficiencies” among
Central American countries as a key problem to be dealt with ASAP. So
the U.S. Border Patrol has gone to Guatemala and Honduras to help train
new units of border guards.
As in Central America, border patrolling’s most vibrant markets are
in places that Washington sees as far too chaotic, yet where its
economic and political interests reside. For six years now, U.S. Customs
and Border Protection (CBP) has sent its agents,
clad in
brown jumpsuits, to Iraq’s borderlands to assist that government in the
creation of a force to police its “porous” borders (where chaos has
indeed been endemic since the 2003 U.S. invasion and subsequent
occupation of the country). U.S. boundary-building efforts began there
in 2004 with an operation labeled
“Phantom Linebacker” in
which 15,000 border guards were trained to patrol in — as the name of
the operation indicates — the spirit of American football.
In 2012, agent Adrian Long
told Frontline,
the CBP’s in-house magazine, that his agency trains Iraqis “in Border
Patrol techniques like cutting sign, doing drags, setting up checkpoints
and patrols.” Long was repeating the same lingo so often heard on the
U.S.-Mexican border, where agents “cut sign” to track people by their
trail marks and do “drags” to smooth out dirt roads so they can more
easily see the footprints of any “border intruders.” In Afghanistan,
Border Patrol agents are similarly training forces to police that
country’s 3,436 miles of frontiers. In 2012, during one training
session, an Afghan policeman even turned his gun on two CBP agents in an
“insider attack,”
killing them and seriously injuring a third.
Around soccer’s World Cup, which South Africa hosted in 2010, CBP
assisted that government in creating a Customs and Border Control Unit
tasked with “securing South Africa’s borders while facilitating the
movement of goods and people,”
according to
CBP’s Africa and Middle East branch country manager for South Africa
Tasha Reid Hippolyte. South Africa has even brought its
military special forces into
the border patrolling process. Near the Zimbabwean border, its
militarized guards were using a triple barrier of razor wire and
electric fencing that can be set to offer shocks ranging from mild to
deadly in their efforts to stop border crossers. Such equipment had not
been used in that country since the apartheid-era.
In many cases, the U.S. is also training border forces in the use of
sophisticated surveillance systems, drones, and the construction of
fences and barriers of various kinds, largely in attempts to clamp down
on the movement of people between poorer and richer countries. More
than 15,000 foreign participants in more than 100 countries have
taken part in
CBP training sessions since October 2002. It is little wonder, then,
that an L-3 Communications sales rep would shrug off the constraints of a
shrinking domestic national security budget.
Meanwhile, U.S. borders are functionally being stretched in all sorts
of complex ways, even across the waters. As Michael Schmidt
wrote in the
New York Timesin
2012, for example, “An ocean away from the United States, travelers
flying out of the international airport here on the west coast of
Ireland are confronting one of the newest lines of defense in the war on
terrorism: the United States border.” There, at Shannon International
Airport, Department of Homeland Security officials set up the equivalent
of a prescreening border checkpoint for air travelers.
Whether it is in your airports or, as in Haiti’s case, in the
international waters around your country, the U.S. border is on its way
to scrutinize you, to make sure that you are not a threat to the
“homeland.” If you don’t meet Washington’s criteria for whatever reason,
you will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, from entering the United
States, or even in many cases from travelling anywhere at all.
CBP attachés are now detailed to U.S. embassies in Brazil, Mexico,
Kenya, South Africa, Italy, and Canada, among many other countries.
According to an agency publication,
Customs and Border Protection Today, they have been
tasked with
the mission of keeping “terrorists and their weapons from our shores,”
as well as providing technical assistance, “fostering secure trade
practices, and strengthening border authority principles.” The anonymous
writer then typically, if floridly, describes “our country’s border” as
“the armor of the body politic; it protects the systems and
infrastructures that function within. Knives pierce armor and can
jeopardize the body — so we sheath them; keep them at bay; and demand
accountability from those who use them.”
As CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner
put it in
2004, the U.S. is “extending our zone of security, where we can do so,
beyond our physical borders — so that American borders are the last line
of defense, not the first line of defense.”
Perhaps this is why few here batted an eye when, in 2012, Assistant
Secretary of International Affairs and Chief Diplomatic Officer for the
Department of Homeland Security Alan Bersin flatly
declared, “The Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border.”
On the Edge of Empire
As dusk falls and the rainstorm ends, I walk along the river’s edge
where those Dominican border patrol agents are still sitting, staring
into Haiti. Considering that U.S. forces occupied the Dominican Republic
and Haiti numerous times in the previous century, it’s easy to imagine
why Washington’s border chieftains consider this sad, impoverished spot
part of our “backyard.” Not far from where I’m walking is the Codevi
industrial free trade zone that straddles the border. There, Haitian
workers churn out jeans mainly for Levi Strauss and the North American
market,
earning less than three dollars a day.
I approach one of the CESFRONT guards in his desert camouflage
uniform. He’s sitting with his assault rifle between his legs. He looks
beyond bored — no surprise since being suspicious of people who happen
to be on the other side of a border can be deadly tedious work.
Diaz, as his name patch identifies him, tells me that his shift,
which runs from 6 p.m. to midnight, is normally eventless because
Haitians rarely cross here. When I explain where I’m from, he wants to
know what the U.S.-Mexico border looks like. I tell him about the
fencing, the sensors, the cameras, and the agents everywhere you look. I
ask if he has ever met agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.
“Of course!” he says in Spanish, “there have been training sessions.”
Then I ask if terrorists are crossing this border, which is the
reason the U.S. consulate in Santo Domingo gives for supporting the
creation of CESFRONT.
Diaz looks at me as if I’m nuts before offering an emphatic “No!”
No surprise there either. CESFRONT, like similar outfits
proliferating globally, isn’t really about terrorism. It’s all about
Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the planet. It is a response to
fears of the mass movement of desperate, often hungry, people in the
U.S. sphere of dominance. It is the manifestation of a new vision of
global geopolitics in which human beings in need are to be corralled,
their free movement criminalized, and their labor exploited.
With this in mind, the experimental border control technologies being
tested along the U.S.-Mexican boundary line and the border-industrial
complex that has
grown up around
it are heading abroad in a major way. If Congress finally passes a new
multi-billion dollar border-policing package, its effects will be felt
not only along U.S. borders, but also at the edges of its empire.
Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular,
has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more
than 10 years. He has worked on both sides of the border for BorderLinks
in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He now
writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas
and its blog “Border Wars,” among other places. His first book, Border Patrol Nation,
will be published in spring 2014 for the Open Media Series of City Lights Books.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.
Posts
By Michael Snyder, on November 18th, 2013
