HispanicVista Columnists

What a horrendous start for 2005 between two neighboring countries.

By Patrick Osio, Jr

First Mexico distributes a comic book providing life saving information to Mexican nationals bent on crossing the border through rugged terrain and deadly deserts. Some US elected officials, anti-immigration organizations, popular TV, radio and print anti-immigrant commentators take exception to the comic book saying the Mexican government is promoting illegal entry to the US.  Then the US releases a Consular Information Sheet cautioning US citizens on the dangers of kidnappings and killings in Mexican border cities. Most Mexican officials, TV, radio and print commentators take exception at the release of such “defaming” information suggesting it is “payback” for not supporting US foreign policies.

Justifying the comic book, Mexicans point out that the government spends a great deal of money on radio advertising the dangers of border crossings and recommending their citizens not do it. They set up information kiosks along the Mexican border giving information on the deadly dangers including pictures of human and animal cadavers victims of the desert so as to discourage crossers. But still they cross.

The comic book style booklet, Mexicans say, reinforces that it is against US laws to enter their country illegally and the danger to their very lives posed by human smugglers and desert heat. However, knowing they will still cross and deaths pushing 3000 since 1994, graphic advise is provided on surviving the desert heat, or swimming across treacherous rivers or canals. But it also counsels that for those who make it through, how to avoid detection by obeying local laws, and not going places other than to and from work. In short, avoid contact with others as much as possible.

It’s this last part that raises the dander of so many in the US. "It's an encouragement that will lead to more illegal aliens coming," said Rick Oltman, a spokesman for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a John Tanton founded anti-Mexican immigration organization. The sentiments are echoed by the other Tanton affiliated organizations such as Numbers USA, American Patrol, and politicos like Congressman Tom Tancredo. All of them dismiss the Mexican government’s claim that the 32-page booklet was designed to reduce deaths along the border.

"The idea is to reduce the number of people who die in the attempt," said Alfonso Nieto, spokesman for the Mexican embassy in Washington, D.C. "The main objective of the guide is to inform Mexicans the appropriate way to do it, and the risks of doing otherwise."

Thus the feeling in Mexico is that in the US little care is given that border crossing deaths went over 400 in 2003, continuing an almost 10 percent annual increase. It seems that human value of Mexicans is a low priority.

On the heels of the Mexican booklet, the US Consular Information Service published a Mexico Public Announcement, which in part reads:

“Violent criminal activity along the U.S.-Mexico border has increased as a product of a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade along the border. The leaders of several major criminal organizations have been arrested, creating a power vacuum. This has resulted in a wave of violence aimed primarily at members of those trafficking organizations and criminal justice officials. However, foreign visitors, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region in recent months.”

This type of Public Announcement has the profound effect of discouraging tourism and other commercial activities along the border. It also affects tourism to the interior of Mexico that is the country’s 3^rd biggest industry.

Thus the Mexican government took exception to the “warning.” On the one hand, Mexican say, drugs are bought and used in large quantities by US citizens that in turn has brought Mexico the criminal activity we now suffer. We cooperate and spend a great deal of human and financial resources in the war to stop such illicit activity. Police officers, prosecutors, investigative journalists are killed by drug trafficking gangs in Mexico’s effort to keep drugs out of the US. And this is the thanks we get?

Mexican journalists have gone as far as suggesting that the accusations that American citizens are being kidnapped by “drug traffickers” are false and made up to embarrass the Mexican government and discredit the candidacy of  Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Derbez to the Presidency of the Organization of American States.

Before President Fox announced the candidacy of his cabinet member, Collin Powell had announced the US support for the former President of San Salvador. This was viewed a repayment for that country’s support for the US’s Iraq policies and in fact for sending a token military force to Iraq. So the US saw, it is said, Mexico’s launching its own candidate for the OAS presidency as one more rebuke to the US’s Iraq policies.

Adding credibility to this theory isthat the Americans “kidnappings” in the city of Nuevo Laredo (bordering Texas) was reported by the New York Times (Ginger Thompson) and the Washington Post (Mary Jordan) almost the same day. And apparently the two reporters traveled to the same city at the same time and interviewed the same people, but came out with two versions of the same story.

Al Giordano and Bill Conroy of NarcoNews, an Internet publication, followed up on the story by interviewing some of the same people the NYT and WP reporters had interviewed. They in turn report that the parents of one of the American citizens who disappeared in September of 2004 in Nuevo Leon, have not received a ransom demand and have not heard anything about their daughter since her disappearance. They told the NYT and WP reporters their story, “…but they decided to publish something different.”

Mexican suggest that the US Secretary of State’s office decided to use the NYT and WP stories as the basis for issuing the Consular alert though there is no merit to the drug cartels kidnapping of US citizens. This being the case it is nothing more than a payback to teach the Fox administration who is boss.
 

Meantime, here we are, citizens of both countries who must live with one another until the creator through Mother Nature decides otherwise, held captive to political capriciousness and racial biases.

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Patrick Osio, Jr. is the Editor of HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com). Reach him at PosioJr@hispanicvista.com