Border Toll

The annual death toll at the Mexican border reached 464 on September 30th. Every year, half a Hurricane Katrina's worth of victims die, where 25 years ago, very few did so. I remember when 13 Mexican illegals died in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in Arizona, in 1981, and just how shocking that was: vulnerable women in high heel shoes, stumbling through the wilderness' summer heat, eating Noxema in a desperate effort to remain hydrated. Well, that was nothing!

A handful of weeks ago, a group of Tijuana-based activists gathered nine brightly painted full-size coffins and bolted them right onto the grimy border wall along a stretch of the heavily trafficked route to the local airport. Each coffin is inscribed with a year, running from the mid-’90s to the present, and a death toll: the number of Mexicans who have died while attempting to cross the border.

In 1995, the toll was 61.

In 2000, the number of dead had risen to 499.

This year, the toll already stood at nearly 400 at the end of October.

“The U.S.-Mexican border has been 10 times deadlier to Mexican immigrants in the last 10 years than was the whole 28-year history of the Berlin Wall [to East Germans],” says Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.

Over the entire history of the Berlin Wall, 287 people perished trying to cross it. Since the Clinton administration implemented the current U.S. border strategy, more than 2,500 Mexicans have died. Or 2,600. Or 2,700 by some counts.

“It has been a strategy of prevention through deterrence,” says Cornelius. If the four traditional urban hot spots for illegal crossings could be barricaded, as they were, Cornelius says the U.S. government believed that “the mountains and deserts would do the rest.”

The calculation was either dead on or dead wrong, depending on how cynical you believe the architects of the strategy were. With the extremities of the border tied off, the immigration flow has been, in essence, funneled away from El Paso and Tijuana, and into the unforgiving mountains along the eastern edge of the California border and through the brutal deserts along the mostly uninhabited patches of southern Arizona.

Sunstroke, freezing temperatures, dehydration and asphyxiation in sealed containers are the primary causes of death, along with drowning and crashes of vehicles involved in high-speed Border Patrol pursuits. A full third of the Mexican dead go unidentified.

And what's it like on the other side of the border? Pretty surreal!

Las Chepas gained notoriety on Aug. 12 when Gov. Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency in four border counties and asked the governor of Chihuahua to bulldoze the town.

In mid-September, the Chihuahua government obliged, partly. Bulldozers escorted by police demolished 31 buildings.

But many other abandoned buildings remain.

The town is a surreal mix of farmers and transients heading north. Untended horses saunter through the streets, and here and there, next to abandoned graffiti-covered houses, are piles of tin cans and empty water bottles.

One of the town's founders, 69-year-old Benjamin Lerma Gonzales, says the housing demolition has not deterred border crossers.

''It's the same as before. Mexicans continue to walk through,'' he says.