Tragedy Unremarked: Empty Spots in Human Connection and Law
In Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border, John Carlos Frey shows the reader a story about life, death, and a void in the reach of law to human need. Frey tells of a government-orchestrated disaster, shocking but unseen, that has been under way at the Southern border for decades. As a journalist of Mexican origin and paternally derived U.S. citizenship, Frey delivers a vivid and partly personal account of the human tragedy purposefully and soundlessly inflicted on poor Hispanic arrivals—a tragedy that should sear a vivid image of horror into our collective memory. For many years, Americans have known of the grudging welcome extended to our Southern neighbors but little of the corresponding human consequences. The result has been a void in both cultural awareness and legal doctrine. Over time, a public theater of immigration control, balancing the needs of politicians, business interests, and law enforcement, has shunted aspiring immigrants into a dystopia, planned by bureaucrats but given effect and form by human desperation, avarice, and menace.
Pursuing the human drama in the void, Frey paid smugglers working in Mexico for the Sinaloa cartel to take him on a trip through the Mexican desert to the U.S. border. He depicts a brutal ride in a van packed with men, without seating. The cartel business model Frey experienced responds to a market opening created by a blank place in our American conception of legal order (P. 103.) The cartels run “sophisticated operation[s] capable of monitoring U.S. law enforcement activity to ensure that migrants crossed the border successfully.” (P. 108.) Frey’s guide, as they neared the border, used “binoculars, what appeared to be a satellite phone, and a cell phone…[for] communicating with someone who knew the whereabouts of Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side.” Frey endured a gun in his face by a cartel member charged with assuring he had not captured images of cartel members. “If they had [found images], I’m sure they would’ve killed me on the spot.” The cartel members are unemotional about their business, in contrast to those border patrol agents who have adopted emotional views of the quarry. The exception in the business model pitting emotional border agents against pure business logic is the expectable corruption—agents who take bribes to look away as guides move migrants into the U.S. (P. 104.) Everyone—almost everyone—gets a little something from the unwritten rules. Continue reading "Tragedy Unremarked: Empty Spots in Human Connection and Law"
