People have been heaping scorn on U.S.
President Donald Trump ever since he announced his intention to build a wall
along the Mexican-American border. It has been seen as a manifestation of racism
and xenophobia.
At his June 2015 announcement speech,
Trump’s remarks about undocumented Mexicans being criminals and rapists sparked
an intense furor.
His desire to renegotiate the North
American Free Trade Agreement is seen in the same vein. Trump holds NAFTA
responsible for “waves” of illegal migrants from Mexico since the agreement was
enacted in 1993.
Throughout American history, Mexico has
been considered “the other.” As Laila Lalam, a professor of creative writing at
the University of California at Riverside, has written, “In this kind of
rhetoric, the border separates not just nationals from foreigners, rich from
poor and north from south, but also order from chaos, civilization from
barbarians, decent people from criminals.”
In his 2005 article “Placing ‘Touch of Evil’, ‘The Border’, and ‘Traffic’ in the American Imagination,” published in
the Journal of Popular Film &
Television, Jack M. Beckham II analyzes three popular motion pictures,
released in, respectively, 1958, 1982, and 2000.
They demonstrate, he suggests, that American-made cinema focusing on
the border often functions as a cultural response to American policy changes
that affect it and immigration. They don’t paint a pretty picture.
But let no one mistake Mexico for, say, New
Zealand. It is indeed a violent country, and the border is particularly
dangerous. In fact, much of the land border is already fenced off.
If
anything, since the declaration of a drugs war by then President Felipe Calderon
in 2006, things in Mexico have become worse. More than 150,000 Mexicans have
died of related violence and this doesn’t even include the 26,000 disappeared,
many ending up in unmarked mass graves.
The country had more killings in the first
quarter of 2017 than in the start of any year in at least two decades. For
January through March, there were 5,775 killings around the country, up 29 per
cent from the same period in 2016.
Few
atrocities receive much international attention, one exception being the widely publicized
disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the
state of Guerrero in 2014. The mass murders still remain unsolved – as
do 98 percent of all killings.
Ciudad Juarez, a slum-ridden border city across the Rio Grande from El
Paso, Texas, is dominated by drug cartels who murder with impunity. Last year
set a record for homicides.
Further
down river, Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, is a place where illegal
immigration, drugs and weapons converge. Numerous stores have shut down ever
since a turf war between cartels struck the city.
The same
is true for Nuevo Laredo, south of Laredo. I’ve been to both of these Mexican border cities
and one could feel the tension.
Mexico
is a country where even journalism can be a deadly trade. In the 2016 book The Sorrows of Mexico, an
anthology of reporting by seven of Mexico’s leading journalists, editor Lydia Cacho’s “Fragments from a
Reporter’s Journal” recounts the twenty hours of torture she experienced in
2006 when exposing sex traffickers.
She is
lucky to be alive. According to an April 29 New York Times article by Azan Ahmed, its Mexican bureau chief, at least 104
journalists have been murdered in the country since 2000, while 25 others have
disappeared, and presumed dead.
The Mexican state of Veracruz is the most
dangerous place to be a reporter in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Last year, 11 Mexican journalists were
killed, the highest number this century. In March, a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez
shut down after nearly 30 years after three journalists from other news
organizations were killed. Even corrupt mayors and police officers have
threatened journalists.
Ahmed knows his colleagues in the Mexican
media often cannot reveal criminality. “It’s incumbent on us to do the kinds of
stories that they can’t do,” he stated.
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