The Border Chronicle

This is the second part of The Border Chronicle’s conversation with Sheriff David Hathaway of Santa Cruz County, located on the Arizona-Mexico border. Hathaway talks about “fuzzy” border statistics, which can be used to convey anything a person wants, and his battle to take down a U.S. Customs and Border Protection “spy blimp” over the city of Nogales. He also gets into his opposition to former Arizona governor Doug Ducey’s 10-mile shipping container wall along the border, as well as his support for the protesters who stopped what he calls an “ugly eyesore” of a wall.

You can listen to the first part of our conversation here, where Hathaway talks about his years as a DEA agent and how he assisted in the murder investigation of fellow agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, only to discover that the CIA was involved in Camarena’s death.

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Sheriff David Hathaway is a fifth-generation rancher from the U.S.-Mexico border in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. He’s also a former supervisory agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and he participated in the DEA’s largest-ever homicide investigation, Operación Leyenda, to track down the killers of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in the 1980s.

Hathaway’s participation in Camarena’s murder investigation, and his discovery that the CIA was not only smuggling drugs but also involved in Camarena’s death in Mexico, led Hathaway to conclude that America’s war on drugs is a failure, which spurs government corruption on both sides of the border as illustrated (yet again) in the current trial of former Mexican anti-drug official Genaro Garcia Luna in New York.

Hathaway speaks frankly about U.S. drug policy, the investigation into Camarena’s death (which is now featured in a four-part documentary called The Last Narc on Amazon), and the restorative justice programs* that Santa Cruz County has spearheaded to reduce drug demand in its communities.

*Constructing Circles of Peace, Hope Incorporated, Wellness Connections, and Mariposa Community Health Center.

The second part of this podcast with Hathaway which delves into border militarization, the recent shipping container wall boondoggle, and “fuzzy” border statistics will air next week. Stay tuned!

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One of the best books I read in 2022 was the engrossing and page-turning Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run. Some of you probably heard the interview The Border Chronicle did with author and anthropologist Levi Vonk in June.

Although we do encourage you to listen to the previous interview (and to read the book!), please don’t worry if you haven’t. Today’s interview stands on its own two feet. This time we also feature fellow author Axel Kirschner. Axel was born in Guatemala but grew up on Long Island and was deported as an adult. We are proud to say that this is the first interview Axel has done since Border Hacker was published in April.

Immediately after the book’s publication, Axel had to go into hiding because of threats on his life. Levi had to flee Mexico City for similar reasons, which they both explain in detail during the interview. The book, Axel says, is “costing me my life.”

But that’s not all they talk about. They describe how they met in the chaos of a migrant caravan in 2015, and how they developed a deep and enduring friendship. They talk about how they decided to collaborate on a book and why they felt the need to document what they experienced. They talk about how the book has been received, respond to critiques, and discuss the book’s place in the world. Although the conversation is intimate and frank, be warned that there is also often explicit language.

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Right now there are more border walls on Earth than there have ever been in the planet’s history. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were 15, now there are 77 around the world. As border scholar Jenny Stümer says in the following podcast, “In order to build border walls you need the support of a lot of people, in order to get that you have to tap into a particular imaginary.” The narrative so often depicted in that imaginary is all over the movies and media: as the end of the world looms near, only a wall can “save us.”

You might recognize Jenny’s name from the open thread on “wall sickness” that we did here at The Border Chronicle on November 30. If you haven’t seen that yet, I strongly encourage you to go back and check it out, there was a wealth of information shared by Jenny and the other panelists. That open thread was inspired by a panel titled “The Psychological and Mental Dimensions of Border Walls” from a conference at the University of Quebec in Montreal in October.

Jenny works at the University of Heidelberg in the  Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. Besides being a border scholar, she has a PhD in film and media studies. Her book Walled Life: Concrete, Cinema, and Art (published earlier this year) brings that convergence of film and borders together, especially—as she will explain—in this age of catastrophic climate change.  

In this conversation we begin with the media and movies and actors like Brad Pitt stopping zombie uprisings using border walls such as was the case in World War Z. That’s where we start, but after that our discussion goes deep and in multiple—and sometimes inspiring and revealing—directions.

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Between the state funded shipping container walls, and the Biden administration “filling in the gaps” of Trump’s border wall, it’s hard to tell what’s going on, exactly. What we do know is that border wall building under the current administration has not stopped, even if the Biden administration calls it something else. Scott Nicol is an artist, educator and environmentalist in South Texas who has advocated against border wall construction for years and is an expert on the subject. In this Border Chronicle podcast, Nicol talks about the current construction of wall in his community, which is being labeled as “levee repairs.” And he touches on other wall construction happening in other states despite President Biden’s promise during his campaign “that not another foot of wall” would be constructed during his administration.

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For today’s podcast, The Border Chronicle welcomes back Oswaldo Zavala to discuss his new book, The War Within the Words: An Intellectual History of the “Narco” in Mexico (1975–2020). In this discussion, Zavala examines and disassembles drug war narratives in official discourse and mainstream storytelling, both in news media and fictional accounts.

Zavala, a Juarense professor of Latin American literature, directly challenges entrenched and preconceived ideas—as he did last year, when we had him on the podcast to discuss his first book, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Zavala’s provocative work ultimately offers a new understanding of the drug war and a way to challenge what he calls “a policy of extermination.”

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Dora Rodriguez was once an asylum seeker. She escaped the death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed civil war. On her journey to the United States, her group was abandoned in the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson, Arizona. Thirteen people traveling with her died, and Rodriguez barely survived.

Since then, she’s devoted her life to social work and to helping migrants in the Sonoran Desert where she nearly perished. In this podcast, Rodriguez talks about the migrant resource center called Casa de la Esperanza which she helped open last year in the Mexican border community of Sásabe, Sonora. She talks about her own history, her nonprofit Salvavision, and the current situation at the border with Title 42 and other policies endangering asylum seekers’ lives. And she talks about how humanitarian work, which can take a physical and emotional toll, sustains her year after year. “There are some days that are painful,” she said. “There are tears. What keeps me going is to see the people behind me doing this work, and I know I’m not alone.”

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This month The Border Chronicle is focusing on a series on the climate crisis, displacement, and borders, and today’s podcast is a continuation of that. I am happy to be joined by insightful researcher Nathan Akehurst and by Petra Molnar, an anthropologist, lawyer, and top expert on border technology. Petra is also the associate director of the Refugee Law Lab, and she helps run the Migration Tech Monitor.

Our discussion looks at the border, the border-industrial complex, and all the technologies in development (like robotic dogs) in the face of the intensifying climate crisis. Petra draws from the extensive research she has done for her forthcoming book, Artificial Borders: AI, Surveillance, and Border Tech Experiments, and Nathan brings analysis from the paper “Border Violence and Security in a Warming World,” for which he was the principal author (I was a coauthor, and we are publishing the paper below).

In today’s discussion, we identify climate displacement and increasing border enforcement as two growing trends. But Petra and Nathan also begin to imagine different ways out of the crisis. In many ways this continues a compelling discussion we had last week with several experts and readers on this very subject.

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Border Violence and Security in a Warming World

By Nathan Akehurst with Mark Akkerman, Nick Buxton, and Todd Miller

In the mid-2000s, a security corporation ran an advert claiming that their thermal imaging technology would “have your back in Baghdad or Baton Rouge”, illustrated with an Army gunship and police helicopter. Geographer Stephen Graham references the image in a comprehensive analysis of how the US’ overseas wars of the early 2000s fostered simultaneous domestic and international securitization. New military technologies were developed in war, sold as battle-tested to other states, used to project force through military and border expansion, and deployed at home against suspect populations in the context of state-driven domestic security paranoia. This nexus is fundamental to the contemporary development of borders in the US and beyond. It has also provided the US, and more broadly the Global North, with a set of pre-existing strategies to pursue against new threats; and disincentivized considering alternatives.

Deepak Bhargava’s “Statue of Liberty” plan, which this paper responds to, is a bold vision to reset migration policy and reform borders. Attempts at structural border reform first necessitate clearly understanding what borders are, and which actors determine them. Borders are broadly understood as linear geographical divisions bounded by entry and exit checks and a system of diminished rights and entitlements for non-citizens in a territory. Yet today, the Global North’s borders arrange life deep inside and outside the countries they supposedly guard and comprise multiple complex systems driven by state and private actors which track or stop movement and make migrants expendable or exploitable. These can be roughly grouped into:

· Infrastructure to prevent and control movement by force; in which traditional technologies such as barbed wire and weaponry have been augmented by innovations like “smart walls”, autonomous detection and monitoring systems (including drones) and sound cannons.

· Expanded powers and funding for militarized police and border forces including programs to enforce border controls in everyday settings like communities and workplaces, vast networks of detention jails, and deportation infrastructure.

· Lawfare; including the denial of legal support and basic rights to asylum seekers and the criminalization of everyday citizens – from those who rescue migrants to demands that doctors check the migration status of their patients.

· Surveillance, data extraction, and biometric technologies deployed not only at borders but often against the general population with the apparent aim of migrant surveillance.

· International structures and alliances that outsource border management and infrastructure to third countries, helping to drive down human rights standards, such as the US-Mexico Merida Initiative (renamed the Bicentennial Framework in 2021.

The scale and scope of the new border is vast and evolving. As states begin reacting to climate impacts, the border has formed part of their arsenal with which to do so. A stark example of this is the widely documented horsewhipping of Haitians in Texas , many fleeing extreme weather. Climate impacts in the ‘dry’ zone of Central America are currently largely driving internal displacement, but has also led to more international migration. The current and potential impact of climate change on already fragile political conditions will rarely be easy to track or measure. Given the lack of available resources for supporting countries to adapt to climate change, militarized borders is often the default response to climate-linked displacement.

Border expansion as the basis of a hostile response to climate-linked movement is an extension of the border’s already expansive role in public life. It aims to deter migrants through brutality; a strategy that does not work, but does increase lethality and raise the question; how much death are policymakers comfortable with?

It structures politics around fear of outsiders; both feeding that fear and acting as proof of political action, whilst embedding a national security narrative at the heart of all policy. It blocks movement that governments do not desire while speeding up movement that they do, from “smart” VIP lanes to US border posts at trade ports across the world - which is already all but borderless for extractive industry. It provides a testbed for breaches of human rights against vulnerable people. It forms part of an increasingly complex game of bargaining between states, dominated by the Global North’s border drive. Moreover, the global border apparatus provides growing and lucrative markets, as well as a forum for exchanging ideas, between states and the arms, technology, logistics, consultancy and other industries. This is a nexus of institutions that receives information about the world and processes it in terms of foreign threats that require constantly upgraded “defenses,” that now includes walls, armed agents, and incessant surveillance. In a climate context, such thinking is particularly deadly.

The “military-industrial complex” term coined by Eisenhower in the 1960s has been recently bolstered by a plethora of related terms familiar in activist movements; the “prison-industrial complex”, “border-industrial complex”, and so on. They describe the shared nest of state, commercial, and political interests around...

Zachary Mueller, political director for America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy nonprofit, has been tracking anti-immigrant and xenophobic campaign messaging since 2018. Mueller traces the deadly path from the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacy rally to this year’s great replacement messaging embraced by GOP candidates in the midterm election season.

Mueller also offers advice on what listeners can do to push back against racist conspiracy lies, and he talks about campaign messaging that can be used to lift border communities up rather than tear them down by portraying the region as a war zone.

As you all know, dear readers, we are in a new era at The Border Chronicle. Our fellowship with the Substack local initiative ended on September 9, and now, financially speaking, we are sailing solo. To continue our on-the-ground reporting, analysis, podcasts, etc., we will need your support. So we are very happy to announce that starting today, we will be accepting group subscriptions.

This means that if you subscribe in a group, there will be a 40 percent discount per person. For example, if five people signed up in a group, the total would be $180, 10 would cost $360, 20 would cost $720, etc. We hope that will work perfectly in many scenarios, including classrooms. Paid subscribers will also get access to monthly discussion threads we have with experts about different border issues, such as the one we are planning for October 6 on climate change, displacement, and borders (as we begin to think about the United Nations summit in November. By the way, speaking of climate issues, today is global Loss and Damage day). And there will be other content available only to paid subscribers in the future.

Another thing The Border Chronicle would like to offer to group subscribers is one presentation or group discussion per subscription, including for university or high school classrooms (and in that case, we could make it per semester). We can Zoom in digitally, or meet in person if you happen to be close by, and talk about the border, border journalism, or any subject matter to your liking. Engaging with, and creating journalism from, the community remains a top priority for us.

Group subscriptions are something new to us, so this will be a bit of an experiment at first. If you can’t afford the above set of prices but still hope to have a group subscription, please contact us at [email protected] We are willing to negotiate to your budget. And if your institution can afford more than the prices listed above, we of course would welcome that too.

Each group will have its own in-group administrator. This administrator can remove and add names and emails from the group subscriber list.

So if you are in or know of a group that might be interested in this, please be in contact. We would love to hear from you.

Now let’s turn our attention to our first live podcast. This will kick off a series of pieces looking at the environment and climate change through the month of October.

Nature Has No Borders: A Live Podcast with Erick Meza of Sierra Club Borderlands

We discuss the history of The Border Chronicle, the environmental impacts of the wall, and how solutions to border woes might be in the flora and fauna before our eyes.

Today, we are offering you The Border Chronicle’s first live podcast. And we mean “live” in the sense that we recorded this in front of a lively, very engaged audience in Patagonia, Arizona, in August.

This podcast is in three parts.

In the first part, Melissa and I talk about The Border Chronicle, how we came into existence, why we came into existence, what we’ve been working on, and what we hope to be working on going forward. As Melissa explains, we want “to report on the border from a border community perspective for a national audience, as journalists who are here in the community and not somebody parachuting into the community and putting their spin on it.”

Melissa highlighted some stories she’s reported over the last year, including one about people’s valuables being trashed by Border Patrol and the concept of “border theater” (if you haven’t checked it out yet, read Tuesday’s piece on Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s foibles). I talked a little bit about our coverage of technology and climate change.

But the star of the show was Erick Meza of Sierra Club Borderlands (he starts around 30:00 if you want to skip ahead). The chapter of the U.S.’s largest environmental organization is a coalition of groups representing border communities, civil rights activists, faith groups, environmental groups, indigenous peoples, and LGBTQ people, all of whom have come together to protect the community, culture, and environment in the borderlands.

Erick breaks down the environmental impacts of the border wall and gets into the nitty-gritty of Sierra Club’s history, which in the past has included some strong anti-immigrant stances.

“For me, the most important part of the work is to engage with communities,” Erick told us during the interview, “and try to elevate the communities that get affected by all these injustices on the border, in the borderlands.”

While answering questions from the audience in the third part of the podcast (which begins around the one-hour mark), Erick—who is originally from Guaymas, Mexico—told us that “nature has no borders,” but it has edges, and it is on those edges where there is the greatest biodiversity. And in these edge areas, like the borderlands, it is up to people to create a habitable space for generations to come, human and nonhuman.

“One day, I want to say, ‘Hey, son, look at this mountain. This is where the jaguars live.’ Instead of saying, ‘Look, son, this is where the jaguars used to live, because we built a wall.’”

The Border Chronicle wishes to thank Voices from the Border and Sierra Club Borderlands for sponsoring the event, especially Maggie Urgo and India Aubry for their organizing efforts.

You can follow Sierra Club Borderlands here on Twitter or Facebook, as well as sign up for its newsletter here.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.