Posted by John Crewdson at 4:04 pm CDT
News that the Senate has added a $1.8 billion amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill, intended to pay for fencing off 370 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, recalled something I wrote in my book, The Tarnished Door, published back in 1983:
Turning east along the Rio Grande, which separates downtown El Paso from its sister city of Juarez, Williams sees a middle-aged Mexican man standing on the American side of the river. "He's just fishing, so I'm not going to bother him." As he passes the Bridge of the Americas, one of three that link the twin cities, he points to a jagged hole that someone cut long ago in the chain-link fence atop the bridge. The concrete abutment below has been worn smooth by the friction of countless bodies sliding to the ground, but the hole has never been repaired. "As long as it's there," Williams says, "we know where they come in. We're operating on our terms, not theirs."
In late 1978 the fence between El Paso and Juarez, like those dividing San Ysidro from Tijuana and Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Mexico, was replaced with what the Justice Department described as new, "impregnable" twelve-foot-high metal barriers topped with barbed concertina wire. The new fences quickly became known as the Tortilla Curtain--the Mexicans, people said, would eat them for lunch--and many in the Border Patrol, including Mike Williams, were frankly skeptical of their value. "You figure that somebody comes all the way to the border from the interior of Mexico, say Michoacan or Guanajuato," Williams says, "he's not going to turn around and go home when he sees a little twelve-foot fence."
The new fences nevertheless touched off protests from Hispanic groups after their manufacturer was quoted as saying that the wire strands of which they were made would be so sharp that anyone who tried to scale them might lose his fingers and toes. The controversy intensified when Bill Selzer, the deputy Border Patrol chief in Chula Vista, predicted that the six-mile-long fence at San Ysidro would divert illegal border crossers into the California desert to face "death from exposure or thirst." Among those offended by the fences was the Mexican government--Gaston de Bayona, a government official in Juarez, called them "very much like the fence that exists between East and West Berlin"--but no one need have worried. Within a week after the fences were finished, they were full of holes, some large enough to drive a truck through.
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Comments
If we build a 50 ft. fence,they will get a 51 ft. ladder.We need to crack down hard on big business's that hire illegals.That won't happen with Dubya,and the neo-cons in charge of congress.I suggest large posters of a nude Rush Limbaugh,holding up a large bottle of illegally obtained viagra be posted all along the border.This will surely scare them back to the homeland.
Posted by: John E. | August 3, 2006 5:11 PM
John E,you're making me laugh!!!
The very thought of your scenario is making me want to toss my dinner!
Boy,I can see a lot of burritos being hurled.
Posted by: john scanlon | August 3, 2006 8:22 PM