Nogales International
April 22, 2014
by Curt Pendergast
Traffic along a major thoroughfare in Nogales, Sonora slowed to a crawl on Saturday morning as nearly 30 painters spilled out into the street.
Passersby craned their necks to see the volunteer painters touch up a mural that recently found a new home on the Buenos Aires avenue after being rescued from the U.S.-Mexico landing mat border fence when it was dismantled in 2011.
The 60-foot-long mural, titled “Vida y Suenos de la Canada Perla,” or “Life and Dreams of the Perla Ravine,” and commonly referred to as “El Mural de Taniperla” is made out of 34 panels depicting the lives and dreams of Tzetzal Indians living in the town of Ricardo Flores Magon, a Zapatista revolutionary community in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas that struggled for more autonomy from the Mexican government during the 1990s.
“It’s rescuing history,” said Luis Diego Taddei, a member of Taller Yonke, or Junk Studio, who helped lead Saturday’s effort. “The images, together with the material, have an important story for the city and for the country.”
The mural was painted on the border fence in downtown Nogales in 2005 as a sign of solidarity with the residents of Ricardo Flores Magon, who painted the mural on the side of a community center in 1998.
The Mexican Army destroyed the mural the day after it was painted. The mural on the border fence lasted much longer, staying on the fence for about six years until a new barrier was built.
After the original mural in Chiapas was destroyed, the mural took on a life of its own and other replicas were created in San Francisco, Ciudad Juarez, and Barcelona, as well as in Argentina and Brazil.
In 2011, when news of the fence dismantling in Nogales spread, members of Taller Yonke worked with the Sierra Club, Border Patrol, and Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-Tucson) to preserve the 34 panels containing the mural.
After three years in storage, the mural was bolted to the wall by the Buenos Aires thoroughfare about a mile south of the border.
Organizers chose the location so the mural would be seen by a large number of people, including people passing through Nogales on their to and from the United States. “We wanted it to be visible to all the people who pass through here,” Taddei said.
Ongoing process
The artists made a call for help from the public in February and Saturday’s effort was the first step in a weeks-long process of reviving the mural.
Among those to answer the call was Marta Dicochea-Morackis, sister of Alberto Morackis, one of the artists who painted the mural in 2005.
Morackis, who died in December 2008 from pneumonia, two days shy of his 50th birthday, founded Taller Yonke with his creative partner Guadalupe Serrano. In addition to conducting workshops and teaching art, Morackis participated in several urban art projects in Nogales, Sonora, including murals and sculptures mounted on or next to the old landing-mat border fence.
“It’s lovely,” Dicochea-Morackis said of the mural. “We need more murals in this city. Especially the children, they should paint, do more art.”
Among the painters was her granddaughter Itzel Vizcarra, 10, a Nogales, Sonora resident who likes to paint butterflies.
Although she didn’t get the chance to paint butterflies on Saturday, she did get to work with green, her favorite color, as she touched up the grass in the mural that surrounded images of community gatherings and armed resistance.
While Taller Yonke led the effort on Saturday, the impetus for reviving the mural came from a group of young people in Nogales, Sonora called the Flores Magon Collective, according to Taddei.
For more information on the mural and Taller Yonke, visit the group’s Facebook page. To learn more about the original mural, visit elmuromagico.org.
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/border-fence-mural-finds-new-home-caring-touch/article_c838b664-ca34-11e3-82c0-001a4bcf887a.html
Showing posts with label Dan Millis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan Millis. Show all posts
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Sierra Club: More border walls is not the answer
Rio Grande Guardian
June 22, 2013
by Steve Taylor
HIDALGO, June 22 - The Sierra Club has denounced plans to build hundreds of miles of additional border walls, saying the only place left to add more barriers is through wildlife refuges and private property along the Rio Grande in Texas.
In a statement, the group said America and its environment can’t afford another “Border Splurge.” So far, six hundred miles of walls have been built along the U.S.-Mexico border. “What we’ve learned,” the Sierra Club states, “is that that these barriers do not stop immigration – they only devastate wildlife and habitat while bisecting communities and costing taxpayers millions of dollars per mile.”
Plans to build more border walls came via an amendment to the Senate immigration reform legislation authored by Republican U.S. Sens. John Hoeven of North Dakota and Bob Corker of Tennessee. The amendment, which has the backing of the so-called Gang of Eight U.S. senators, would require the construction of hundreds of miles of border walls, to be added to the existing 651 miles of fencing already built, in addition to a near doubling of the U.S Border Patrol by adding 20,000 agents.
There would also be a lot more towers, cameras, sensors and drones. The additional border security could cost $48 billion over ten years.
Dan Millis, of the Sierra Club Borderlands team, said the Sierra Club “strongly opposes this reckless and unrealistic proposal that would not only destroy habitat, cut off wildlife migration corridors and cause flooding, but also waste tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on technology we know has little impact on fixing our immigration system.”
Millis pointed out that last year the U.S. government spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement - more than all other federal law enforcement combined.
“Our borderlands are already overrun with excessive numbers of Border Patrol vehicles, agents, towers and buildings. We have more than 650 miles of border fence that only serve to bisect communities and devastate the borderlands environment. We already have a border splurge – we don’t need another one,” Millis said.
Millis said the proposed doubling of the Border Patrol is precisely that, another border splurge.
“While cutting basic services and environmental protections, they want to waste billions more building more fences. The truth is the only place left to build more fences is through wildlife refuges and private property along the Rio Grande in Texas, where Homeland Security estimates future wall construction projects to cost $9.4 million per mile. That means spending billions of dollars on hundreds of miles of fence that won’t do what they want it to do,” Millis said.
“Our communities, our wildlife, and our borderlands can’t afford another border splurge, and neither can American taxpayers.”
Another group that has come out strongly against the Corker-Hoeven amendment is CAMBIO, which stands for Campaign for an Accountable, Moral and Balanced Immigration Overhaul. Its members include the Border Network for Human Rights, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, the ACLU of New Mexico Regional Center for Border Rights, and the Northern Borders Coalition.
The group released the following joint statement in united opposition to the negotiated Senate deal:
“This is a bad deal for U.S. taxpayers, but especially for those that live and work in the border region. While the flow of migration is at a historic low, excessive enforcement remains unchecked and unaccountable to communities in which Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection operates. This proposal to increase enforcement without checks and balances is an example of excessive and wasteful government spending and represents an unnecessary expansion of the federal government's authority.
“We know the effects that these provisions will have on the daily lives of all border residents. Our communities have endured the painful reality of unchecked and unaccountable enforcement operations, which have led to decreased civil liberties and civil rights protections, interruption of commerce and trade, constant surveillance in our neighborhoods, excessive and deadly use of force by Border Patrol agents, and the outright militarization of border communities. The senators need to be reminded that border communities are still part of this nation and that there should be no further militarization of our neighborhoods. In fact, there has been an immediate and overwhelming response from mayors, local elected officials, law enforcement leaders and faith leaders along the border in opposition to the proposal.
“As border communities, we stand united in our resounding rejection of the Hoeven-Corker deal and urge the Senate to include accountability and oversight mechanisms to the already massive presence of border agents in our communities. This includes mandating lapel cameras for border agents, providing subpoena power to the DHS Border Oversight Task Force, applying geographic limits on warrantless Border Patrol stops in the southern border, and directing any increase in personnel to ports of entry where they are needed to facilitate trade that is fueling our economies.
“The Hoeven-Corker proposal to increase the number of Border Patrol, add additional fencing, and spend trillions in technology is expensive, extreme and wasteful, particularly at a time when we need to improve our schools, fix our roads, and grow our economy. It is an assault on our system of checks and balances and seriously threatens the quality of life of border residents. Overhauling the nation's immigration process is urgently necessary, but this should not be done without proper consultation with those communities who must live with the effects of poorly thought-out policy. We cannot not remain silent as politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to treat border communities as an endlessly expendable trade-off for immigration reform.”
Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas was one of the elected officials to welcome members of the Border Network for Human Rights when they participated in a caravan for immigration reform in Laredo on Tuesday.
This week, Salinas has been in Las Vegas for the Conference of Mayors’ summer meeting. Salinas offered a resolution in support of comprehensive immigration reform that was approved by both the Conference of Mayors' Immigration Reform Task Force and its Criminal and Social Justice Committee. This committee is chaired by Houston Mayor Annise D. Parker.
“I am grateful to Mayor Parker for carrying the resolution through her committee and I am prepared to carry the resolution on the floor of the Conference on Monday,” Salinas said. “Immigration reform is needed now more than ever, and I am pleased that the Congress and the GAO have now documented the Immigration Reform is not only the right thing to do, it will provide this nation a needed economic stimulus.”
Vice President Joe Biden spoke about immigration reform at the Conference of Mayors event. “The math is pretty simple, if you bring people out of the shadows and you give them a start they add to the tax base. They start investing in the communities where they live and they begin to lay down roots,” Biden said. Salinas was pleased with the remarks Biden made.
“Vice President Biden referenced research that documented that the majority of small business that are started today are started by immigrants. But, more than the research, I was pleased that the Conference of Mayors debuted a documentary on the DREAMERs. You don't need research to see the desire in those young people's eyes,” Salinas said.
http://www.riograndeguardian.com/green_story.asp?story_no=25#.UcZRCFtF_7s.facebook
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Southern Arizona in the Crosshairs
Tucson Weekly
March 21, 2013
by Todd Miller
Razor wire was coiled around a rudimentary wooden shelter. Under it, a hunched man concentrated, looking into his laptop. Cameras and radar were set up on a retractable mast behind him and could detect any activity at long range, day and night. Desert camouflage covered this large mobile surveillance machine, which was surrounded by sandbags and desert shrubs.
Dressed sharply in a suit and tie, the man was not in a militarized border zone. The DRS Technologies salesman was in the Phoenix Convention Center, trying, as the midsize military and electronics company's motto asserts, to draw "clarity from the clutter."
This "bring the battlefield to the border" scenario (as another sales representative put it), was in play throughout the spacious exhibition hall at the seventh annual Border Security Expo on March 12 and 13. Almost 200 companies big (Raytheon) and small (Tucson-based StrongWatch), were competing for the multibillion-dollar border policing pie.
The exhibition hall was a bustling mall for the surveillance state. Uniformed Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement personnel were among the civilians browsing the exhibitor booths. Products ranging from minisurveillance drones to self-heating meals (with a three-year shelf life) to semi-automatic weapons were on display. Overhead, a surveillance blimp kept an eye on everybody walking around. In the middle of the hall was a tower able to withstand a high-level blast. It looked like something from a military base in Afghanistan, but it's now envisioned for border control.
"It's as if the United States is pulling out of Afghanistan, and invading Arizona," said Dan Millis of the Sierra Club's Tucson-based Borderlands Campaign, which opposes any new border fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In 2012, the U.S. government spent $18 billion on border and immigration enforcement agencies, more than on all other federal law enforcement agencies—including the FBI, DEA, Secret Service and several others'—combined. Tucson and Southern Arizona are front and center in this border policing bonanza, and it's one of the reasons the Washington D.C.-based DRS Technologies has also set up shop at the University of Arizona's Science and Technology Park on Rita Road.
The UA tech park has identified 57 border technology companies working in and around Tucson in what Bruce Wright, associate vice president for university research parks, called an "emerging industry cluster." Wright said that when you consider the international market for border technology, it is a booming industry approaching $20 billion in sales in 2013 and projected to reach $54.4 billion by 2018.
"Here we are living on the border—turning lemons into lemonade. If we are to deal with the problem, what is the economic benefit from dealing with it?" Wright said during a February 2012 interview. "Well, we can build an industry around this problem that creates employment, wages, and wealth for this region ... and this technology can be sold all over the world. So it becomes an industry cluster that is very beneficial to us in Southern Arizona."
The tech park is offering testing and evaluation services for border technology on its 1,345 acres, which includes a mockup with 18,000 linear feet of border fencing surrounding its solar farm. The tech park's business incubator helps startup border tech companies commercialize their products and gets them connected with the right people. At a March 1 event, when the tech park was showcasing DRS Technologies' integrated fixed-tower system (which included a command and control center), Wright said that "Southern Arizona could become the leading center in the world for the development and deployment of this technology."
This shouldn't be a surprise. Although in 2011 DHS canceled its contract with the Boeing Corp. for the previous technology surveillance plan known as SBInet, all eyes are still on the possibility of a virtual "wall" across Southern Arizona as part of an ever-expanding enforcement web. Many companies at the expo, including DRS, hope to make their debut in the Sonoran desert, outdoing Boeing's surveillance towers, which had difficulty with Arizona's rugged terrain.
At the expo, Mark Borkowski of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition assured anxious industry reps that the Arizona Technology Deployment Plan would happen. So expect to see more remote, mobile and fixed surveillance technology in the desert south of Tucson. Even with declining arrests of immigrants, Tucson continues to be the Border Patrol's busiest sector. The agency reports that there have been increased border-crossings in south Texas, where it also plans to concentrate new technology.
About the only thing dampening the upbeat mood of the border-protection industry was the sequester, the across-the-board federal budget cuts that went into effect March 1. However, according to Borkowski, the sequester touched very little of the money designated for technology. Companies at the expo were also enthusiastic about the improved prospects for immigration reform and the step-up in border policing that could come with the reforms.
Sarah Launius of the Tucson-based humanitarian aid group No More Deaths posed a question probably not widely considered at the expo: "When government and industry talk about 'border security' we have to ask 'security for whom?'" Since Sept. 11, the United States has spent $791 billion on homeland security, which outdoes the cost of the entire New Deal by (an inflation-adjusted) $300 billion. To answer one part of Launius' question: It certainly means a great deal of financial security for some of the companies selling cameras, sensors, drones, tanks and barriers in the buzzing exhibition hall in Phoenix.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/southern-arizona-in-the-crosshairs/Content?oid=3668058
March 21, 2013
by Todd Miller
Razor wire was coiled around a rudimentary wooden shelter. Under it, a hunched man concentrated, looking into his laptop. Cameras and radar were set up on a retractable mast behind him and could detect any activity at long range, day and night. Desert camouflage covered this large mobile surveillance machine, which was surrounded by sandbags and desert shrubs.
Dressed sharply in a suit and tie, the man was not in a militarized border zone. The DRS Technologies salesman was in the Phoenix Convention Center, trying, as the midsize military and electronics company's motto asserts, to draw "clarity from the clutter."
This "bring the battlefield to the border" scenario (as another sales representative put it), was in play throughout the spacious exhibition hall at the seventh annual Border Security Expo on March 12 and 13. Almost 200 companies big (Raytheon) and small (Tucson-based StrongWatch), were competing for the multibillion-dollar border policing pie.
The exhibition hall was a bustling mall for the surveillance state. Uniformed Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement personnel were among the civilians browsing the exhibitor booths. Products ranging from minisurveillance drones to self-heating meals (with a three-year shelf life) to semi-automatic weapons were on display. Overhead, a surveillance blimp kept an eye on everybody walking around. In the middle of the hall was a tower able to withstand a high-level blast. It looked like something from a military base in Afghanistan, but it's now envisioned for border control.
"It's as if the United States is pulling out of Afghanistan, and invading Arizona," said Dan Millis of the Sierra Club's Tucson-based Borderlands Campaign, which opposes any new border fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In 2012, the U.S. government spent $18 billion on border and immigration enforcement agencies, more than on all other federal law enforcement agencies—including the FBI, DEA, Secret Service and several others'—combined. Tucson and Southern Arizona are front and center in this border policing bonanza, and it's one of the reasons the Washington D.C.-based DRS Technologies has also set up shop at the University of Arizona's Science and Technology Park on Rita Road.
The UA tech park has identified 57 border technology companies working in and around Tucson in what Bruce Wright, associate vice president for university research parks, called an "emerging industry cluster." Wright said that when you consider the international market for border technology, it is a booming industry approaching $20 billion in sales in 2013 and projected to reach $54.4 billion by 2018.
"Here we are living on the border—turning lemons into lemonade. If we are to deal with the problem, what is the economic benefit from dealing with it?" Wright said during a February 2012 interview. "Well, we can build an industry around this problem that creates employment, wages, and wealth for this region ... and this technology can be sold all over the world. So it becomes an industry cluster that is very beneficial to us in Southern Arizona."
The tech park is offering testing and evaluation services for border technology on its 1,345 acres, which includes a mockup with 18,000 linear feet of border fencing surrounding its solar farm. The tech park's business incubator helps startup border tech companies commercialize their products and gets them connected with the right people. At a March 1 event, when the tech park was showcasing DRS Technologies' integrated fixed-tower system (which included a command and control center), Wright said that "Southern Arizona could become the leading center in the world for the development and deployment of this technology."
This shouldn't be a surprise. Although in 2011 DHS canceled its contract with the Boeing Corp. for the previous technology surveillance plan known as SBInet, all eyes are still on the possibility of a virtual "wall" across Southern Arizona as part of an ever-expanding enforcement web. Many companies at the expo, including DRS, hope to make their debut in the Sonoran desert, outdoing Boeing's surveillance towers, which had difficulty with Arizona's rugged terrain.
At the expo, Mark Borkowski of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition assured anxious industry reps that the Arizona Technology Deployment Plan would happen. So expect to see more remote, mobile and fixed surveillance technology in the desert south of Tucson. Even with declining arrests of immigrants, Tucson continues to be the Border Patrol's busiest sector. The agency reports that there have been increased border-crossings in south Texas, where it also plans to concentrate new technology.
About the only thing dampening the upbeat mood of the border-protection industry was the sequester, the across-the-board federal budget cuts that went into effect March 1. However, according to Borkowski, the sequester touched very little of the money designated for technology. Companies at the expo were also enthusiastic about the improved prospects for immigration reform and the step-up in border policing that could come with the reforms.
Sarah Launius of the Tucson-based humanitarian aid group No More Deaths posed a question probably not widely considered at the expo: "When government and industry talk about 'border security' we have to ask 'security for whom?'" Since Sept. 11, the United States has spent $791 billion on homeland security, which outdoes the cost of the entire New Deal by (an inflation-adjusted) $300 billion. To answer one part of Launius' question: It certainly means a great deal of financial security for some of the companies selling cameras, sensors, drones, tanks and barriers in the buzzing exhibition hall in Phoenix.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/southern-arizona-in-the-crosshairs/Content?oid=3668058
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Some see border security bill as threat to ecology, preservation
May 1, 2012
Houston Chronicle
by Tony Freemantle
Imagine sitting on a rock at Big Bend National Park gazing out over the Rio Grande at the Santa Elena Canyon on a clear day, Mexico so close you could reach out and touch it. Immemorial silence cloaks the soaring cliffs, broken only by the caw of a raven above and the rustle of the reeds in the river.
Then imagine the buzzy whine of a Customs and Border Protection four-wheeler patrolling the sandy banks, or the growl of a grader carving a road into the Chihuahuan Desert to a forward operating base, or a government helicopter bristling with surveillance equipment hovering overhead.
Hard to imagine?
A bill making its way through Congress would, in the interests of national security, bequeath to the Department of Homeland Security complete control of all federal lands in a coast-to-coast zone 100 miles south of the Canadian border and 100 miles north of the Mexican border from California to the Gulf of Mexico.
The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah with strong Republican support, is being touted as a necessary step in securing the nation's borders. But it is also being roundly condemned as a thinly veiled attempt to "gut a century's worth" of environmental laws aimed at preserving public lands, historic sites and national monuments.
In essence, the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act gives DHS, or more specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection, authority to build fences, roads and operating bases, to use aircraft and to install surveillance equipment and sensors in some of the most pristine, environmentally sensitive lands in the nation - including Big Bend and Guadalupe national parks and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.
And to clear the way for its stewardship of public lands, the agency would be exempt from compliance with more than 30 environmental laws - among them the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The bill has cleared committees in the House and is on the calendar for a vote on the floor. There is not yet a companion bill in the Senate.
'Really unnecessary'
Bishop and the other sponsors, including Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, argue that CBP's mandate to secure the nation's borders is being "thwarted" by the need to consult with and obtain permission from federal land managers - chiefly the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture - before conducting operations.
"The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that less than half of the U.S.-Mexico border is under the operational control of the Border Patrol," Smith said in a statement. "At the same time, the Obama Administration prevents the Border Patrol from accessing federal lands in the name of environmental preservation. Because the Border Patrol is prohibited from securing federal lands, drug smugglers and human traffickers trample the earth and terrorize communities."
Opponents, including the Department of the Interior, CBP and national environmental organizations, charge that the proposed legislation is an "overreach," since a 2006 memorandum of understanding between border security agencies and federal land mangers already establishes the framework for cooperation between them.
"This is a solution looking for a problem," said Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club. "There is already a framework in place for Border Patrol to work with public land management. If Border Patrol doesn't even have to try to work with managers, we will see a huge proliferation of roads, forward operating bases and fences on public lands."
The Coalition of National Parks Retirees is more blunt. The legislation would "gut a century's worth of land protection" laws and open up "millions of pristine acres of national parks" to unregulated intrusion.
"It's a really, really unnecessary bill," said Joan Anzelmo, a former superintendent of the Colorado National Monuments and board member of the organization. "It's an incredible assault on our national parks."
Other parks
In addition to Big Bend and Guadalupe parks in Texas, some of the other federal lands that fall within the 100-mile security zone, and hence under control of DHS, include Saguaro National Park in Arizona, Joshua Tree National Park in California, Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota and Acadia National Park in Maine.
Bishop believes his bill will end a "turf war" between Border Patrol and federal land mangers who use environmental laws to block efforts to secure the nation's borders.
"What I want to do is get the Border Patrol what they need to secure the border," Bishop said, "and they tell me that what they need more than money and people is access. There are enormous swaths of public land that have effectively been ceded over to the drug cartels."
The DHS already has been granted waivers from a slew of environmental laws in order to build the controversial "fence" along certain sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, which environmentalists charge has already cause significant damage to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona and to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.
Giving control of all lands within 100 miles of the borders to a single agency is unnecessary, they argue, and poses a significant danger.
"This is worse than misguided policy, although it is certainly misguided," said Kevin Dahl, the Arizona project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "It's a real danger to the parks because it means that the people who have made a career of public land management are not in control."
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Some-see-border-security-bill-as-threat-to-3519901.php#page-1
Houston Chronicle
by Tony Freemantle
Imagine sitting on a rock at Big Bend National Park gazing out over the Rio Grande at the Santa Elena Canyon on a clear day, Mexico so close you could reach out and touch it. Immemorial silence cloaks the soaring cliffs, broken only by the caw of a raven above and the rustle of the reeds in the river.
Then imagine the buzzy whine of a Customs and Border Protection four-wheeler patrolling the sandy banks, or the growl of a grader carving a road into the Chihuahuan Desert to a forward operating base, or a government helicopter bristling with surveillance equipment hovering overhead.
Hard to imagine?
A bill making its way through Congress would, in the interests of national security, bequeath to the Department of Homeland Security complete control of all federal lands in a coast-to-coast zone 100 miles south of the Canadian border and 100 miles north of the Mexican border from California to the Gulf of Mexico.
The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah with strong Republican support, is being touted as a necessary step in securing the nation's borders. But it is also being roundly condemned as a thinly veiled attempt to "gut a century's worth" of environmental laws aimed at preserving public lands, historic sites and national monuments.
In essence, the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act gives DHS, or more specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection, authority to build fences, roads and operating bases, to use aircraft and to install surveillance equipment and sensors in some of the most pristine, environmentally sensitive lands in the nation - including Big Bend and Guadalupe national parks and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.
And to clear the way for its stewardship of public lands, the agency would be exempt from compliance with more than 30 environmental laws - among them the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The bill has cleared committees in the House and is on the calendar for a vote on the floor. There is not yet a companion bill in the Senate.
'Really unnecessary'
Bishop and the other sponsors, including Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, argue that CBP's mandate to secure the nation's borders is being "thwarted" by the need to consult with and obtain permission from federal land managers - chiefly the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture - before conducting operations.
"The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that less than half of the U.S.-Mexico border is under the operational control of the Border Patrol," Smith said in a statement. "At the same time, the Obama Administration prevents the Border Patrol from accessing federal lands in the name of environmental preservation. Because the Border Patrol is prohibited from securing federal lands, drug smugglers and human traffickers trample the earth and terrorize communities."
Opponents, including the Department of the Interior, CBP and national environmental organizations, charge that the proposed legislation is an "overreach," since a 2006 memorandum of understanding between border security agencies and federal land mangers already establishes the framework for cooperation between them.
"This is a solution looking for a problem," said Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club. "There is already a framework in place for Border Patrol to work with public land management. If Border Patrol doesn't even have to try to work with managers, we will see a huge proliferation of roads, forward operating bases and fences on public lands."
The Coalition of National Parks Retirees is more blunt. The legislation would "gut a century's worth of land protection" laws and open up "millions of pristine acres of national parks" to unregulated intrusion.
"It's a really, really unnecessary bill," said Joan Anzelmo, a former superintendent of the Colorado National Monuments and board member of the organization. "It's an incredible assault on our national parks."
Other parks
In addition to Big Bend and Guadalupe parks in Texas, some of the other federal lands that fall within the 100-mile security zone, and hence under control of DHS, include Saguaro National Park in Arizona, Joshua Tree National Park in California, Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota and Acadia National Park in Maine.
Bishop believes his bill will end a "turf war" between Border Patrol and federal land mangers who use environmental laws to block efforts to secure the nation's borders.
"What I want to do is get the Border Patrol what they need to secure the border," Bishop said, "and they tell me that what they need more than money and people is access. There are enormous swaths of public land that have effectively been ceded over to the drug cartels."
The DHS already has been granted waivers from a slew of environmental laws in order to build the controversial "fence" along certain sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, which environmentalists charge has already cause significant damage to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona and to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.
Giving control of all lands within 100 miles of the borders to a single agency is unnecessary, they argue, and poses a significant danger.
"This is worse than misguided policy, although it is certainly misguided," said Kevin Dahl, the Arizona project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "It's a real danger to the parks because it means that the people who have made a career of public land management are not in control."
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Some-see-border-security-bill-as-threat-to-3519901.php#page-1
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Fundraising website for border fence starts quest
Arizona Daily Star
July 20, 2011
by Brady McCombs
The website where people can donate to build a state-supported border fence is up - but it'll likely take millions of dollars for the ballyhooed plan to lead to actual construction.
Modern, sturdy border fences are expensive - it cost between $2.6 million to $7.4 million per mile to build hundreds of miles of new fencing in Arizona over the last five years. The most recent project, replacing 2.8 miles of old fence in Nogales, cost $4.14 million per mile.
The Arizona lawmaker who sponsored the fence bill is aware of the high costs, but Sen. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, says that standing by and accepting the federal government's refusal to build more fences is not an option.
"Somebody has to put the first foot on the ladder and start climbing," said Smith. "Border security is the name of the game. That's why we are doing this."
Under the legislation passed in April, the governor is allowed to enter an "interstate compact" to build and maintain an international border fence using private or public donations.
Critics call Smith's plan a misguided stunt that will only inflict more damage on the border environment that has already been harmed by the unprecedented buildup of barriers, roads and agents in the last decade.
"Their intent is to score some cheap political points by acting tough on immigration," said Dan Millis, program coordinator for the Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign. "These lawmakers are misled if they think this a project they are going to be able to complete."
More than four-fifths of Arizona's 378 miles of Mexican border have some type of border barrier already. There are 123 miles of pedestrian fences, 12- to 25-foot-high barriers designed to stop, or at least slow down, people. There are another 183 miles of vehicle barriers, waist- to chest-high barricades designed to stop cars.
The rest of the Arizona-Mexico border doesn't have barriers due to natural barriers such as mountains and other difficult terrain, said Customs and Border Protection spokesman Victor Brabble.
The agency declined to comment on the state project because it is a state legislative issue, Brabble said.
The federal government spent $2.4 billion to build 264 miles of pedestrian fencing and 226 miles of vehicle barriers from 2004-2009, the Government Accountability Office reported in 2009. Today, there are a total of 350 miles of pedestrian fences and 299 miles of vehicle barriers along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
Customs and Border Protection officials acknowledge that fences are not a panacea, but say they help deter, slow and funnel traffic. The impact of barriers on illegal immigration and drug smuggling is unknown because it has not been measured, according to a September 2009 GAO report.
Saying the fence is "basically complete," as President Obama did during a May 10 speech in El Paso, is disingenuous because the vehicle barriers are not fences, Smith said.
"It might stop a car, but it certainly isn't going to stop anyone on foot," Smith said. "If we really had a secure border and fencing that is adequate, explain to me how we have 12 million illegal aliens in this country?"
The type of fence built will be contingent on how much money is raised and upon the decision of the committee that will be formed, Smith said. But his wish would be to build an 18-foot high steel beam fence such as a the one up along 6.24 miles of border west of the San Pedro River in Cochise County.
"That's exactly what I think the state needs," Smith said.
That fence was built by Kiewit Western Company under a $16.6 million contract in 2008 - an average of $2.6 million per mile, information from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows.
But this fence should cost less because under the legislation approved in April, the state would use inmate labor at 50 cents an hour, Smith said. He also expects very competitive bids from construction companies.
Ideally, they'll be able to build fence on the federal government's 60-foot "Roosevelt easement" right next to the border, Smith said. But he's not expecting to get permission and said he's already identified several tracts of state or privately owned land that are highly trafficked areas where a fence would be helpful.
If they are able to raise enough money to build fences, it will be bad news for border wildlife and habitat, Millis said.
While it could take years to fully gauge the environmental toll of border fences, there are already examples of flooding caused by the barriers and wildlife being blocked by the barriers.
A recent study in the Diversity and Distributions journal of amphibian, reptile and some mammal species that live along the border found that additional barriers would further increase the number of threatened species whose survival would be at risk, Millis said.
"That's why we are fighting so hard against additional barriers," Millis said. "We're already seeing problems."
Smith said they won't build fences through riverbeds, for instance, and that there will always be open sections for animals to migrate.
The website - www.buildtheborderfence.com - will be simple, offering opportunities to donate online or by mail with a simple click of a button. It will also feature a letter from Smith about why the fence is needed.
"No matter if you live in Arizona or Maryland, you will be able to clearly understand the problem we are facing and why we need to do something about it," Smith said.
He hopes to get donations from all over the country from people who recognize illegal immigrants and drug smugglers who cross through Arizona end up throughout the nation. Donors will be able to print out a certificate that shows they donated to the border fence, he said.
If they can't raise the millions needed to build a fence, Smith said the project may at least pressure the federal government into continuing to build more fences.
This isn't the first time the state has set up a special fund for a border-related cause. In 2010, Gov. Jan Brewer set up a defense fund to accept private donations to pay the legal costs in fighting challenges to SB 1070. To date, more than 45,000 people had given almost $3.8 million to the fund, said spokesman Matthew Benson.
As soon as they have enough money in the fence fund, construction can begin, Smith said.
"I have teams that are ready now," he said. "It's all contingent on the amount of money raised."
http://azstarnet.com/article_5b7aea2d-8f67-5ff0-838f-9d0d0004ad36.html
July 20, 2011
by Brady McCombs
The website where people can donate to build a state-supported border fence is up - but it'll likely take millions of dollars for the ballyhooed plan to lead to actual construction.
Modern, sturdy border fences are expensive - it cost between $2.6 million to $7.4 million per mile to build hundreds of miles of new fencing in Arizona over the last five years. The most recent project, replacing 2.8 miles of old fence in Nogales, cost $4.14 million per mile.
The Arizona lawmaker who sponsored the fence bill is aware of the high costs, but Sen. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, says that standing by and accepting the federal government's refusal to build more fences is not an option.
"Somebody has to put the first foot on the ladder and start climbing," said Smith. "Border security is the name of the game. That's why we are doing this."
Under the legislation passed in April, the governor is allowed to enter an "interstate compact" to build and maintain an international border fence using private or public donations.
Critics call Smith's plan a misguided stunt that will only inflict more damage on the border environment that has already been harmed by the unprecedented buildup of barriers, roads and agents in the last decade.
"Their intent is to score some cheap political points by acting tough on immigration," said Dan Millis, program coordinator for the Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign. "These lawmakers are misled if they think this a project they are going to be able to complete."
More than four-fifths of Arizona's 378 miles of Mexican border have some type of border barrier already. There are 123 miles of pedestrian fences, 12- to 25-foot-high barriers designed to stop, or at least slow down, people. There are another 183 miles of vehicle barriers, waist- to chest-high barricades designed to stop cars.
The rest of the Arizona-Mexico border doesn't have barriers due to natural barriers such as mountains and other difficult terrain, said Customs and Border Protection spokesman Victor Brabble.
The agency declined to comment on the state project because it is a state legislative issue, Brabble said.
The federal government spent $2.4 billion to build 264 miles of pedestrian fencing and 226 miles of vehicle barriers from 2004-2009, the Government Accountability Office reported in 2009. Today, there are a total of 350 miles of pedestrian fences and 299 miles of vehicle barriers along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
Customs and Border Protection officials acknowledge that fences are not a panacea, but say they help deter, slow and funnel traffic. The impact of barriers on illegal immigration and drug smuggling is unknown because it has not been measured, according to a September 2009 GAO report.
Saying the fence is "basically complete," as President Obama did during a May 10 speech in El Paso, is disingenuous because the vehicle barriers are not fences, Smith said.
"It might stop a car, but it certainly isn't going to stop anyone on foot," Smith said. "If we really had a secure border and fencing that is adequate, explain to me how we have 12 million illegal aliens in this country?"
The type of fence built will be contingent on how much money is raised and upon the decision of the committee that will be formed, Smith said. But his wish would be to build an 18-foot high steel beam fence such as a the one up along 6.24 miles of border west of the San Pedro River in Cochise County.
"That's exactly what I think the state needs," Smith said.
That fence was built by Kiewit Western Company under a $16.6 million contract in 2008 - an average of $2.6 million per mile, information from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows.
But this fence should cost less because under the legislation approved in April, the state would use inmate labor at 50 cents an hour, Smith said. He also expects very competitive bids from construction companies.
Ideally, they'll be able to build fence on the federal government's 60-foot "Roosevelt easement" right next to the border, Smith said. But he's not expecting to get permission and said he's already identified several tracts of state or privately owned land that are highly trafficked areas where a fence would be helpful.
If they are able to raise enough money to build fences, it will be bad news for border wildlife and habitat, Millis said.
While it could take years to fully gauge the environmental toll of border fences, there are already examples of flooding caused by the barriers and wildlife being blocked by the barriers.
A recent study in the Diversity and Distributions journal of amphibian, reptile and some mammal species that live along the border found that additional barriers would further increase the number of threatened species whose survival would be at risk, Millis said.
"That's why we are fighting so hard against additional barriers," Millis said. "We're already seeing problems."
Smith said they won't build fences through riverbeds, for instance, and that there will always be open sections for animals to migrate.
The website - www.buildtheborderfence.com - will be simple, offering opportunities to donate online or by mail with a simple click of a button. It will also feature a letter from Smith about why the fence is needed.
"No matter if you live in Arizona or Maryland, you will be able to clearly understand the problem we are facing and why we need to do something about it," Smith said.
He hopes to get donations from all over the country from people who recognize illegal immigrants and drug smugglers who cross through Arizona end up throughout the nation. Donors will be able to print out a certificate that shows they donated to the border fence, he said.
If they can't raise the millions needed to build a fence, Smith said the project may at least pressure the federal government into continuing to build more fences.
This isn't the first time the state has set up a special fund for a border-related cause. In 2010, Gov. Jan Brewer set up a defense fund to accept private donations to pay the legal costs in fighting challenges to SB 1070. To date, more than 45,000 people had given almost $3.8 million to the fund, said spokesman Matthew Benson.
As soon as they have enough money in the fence fund, construction can begin, Smith said.
"I have teams that are ready now," he said. "It's all contingent on the amount of money raised."
http://azstarnet.com/article_5b7aea2d-8f67-5ff0-838f-9d0d0004ad36.html
Monday, June 27, 2011
Barrier Rebuilt: As a new wall is built through Nogales, well-known art is being relocated or destroyed
Tucson Weekly
June 23, 2011
by Margaret Regan
A man named Enrique was packing up his hot dog cart on Calle Internacional in Nogales, Sonora, late one recent hot afternoon.
Asked his opinion of the new border wall across the street, he looked up appraisingly at the 18-foot steel posts looming above him.
"It's más beautiful," he said, speaking in the Spanglish of the borderlands. Prettier than the old wall.
Not everyone agreed. At the bus stop down the street, an older man shrugged. The two walls were "igual." he said. Equally ugly.
The old landing-mat wall, covered with graffiti and grassroots murals, has been coming down for months, removed piece by piece by Granite Construction, a firm contracted by the Border Patrol. The graffiti has vanished along with the wall, but some of the wall's best-known artworks have been rescued.
The acclaimed Paseo de Humanidad, a cavalcade of painted metal figures, was moved last year, much of it to a gallery in Tubac. A painted mural of Chiapas was rescued just last week, after a last-minute campaign by supporters, and returned to artist Guadalupe Serrano.
The corrugated panels are rapidly being replaced by the towering new poles, which rise as high as 30 feet in some places, says Steve Passement, a Border Patrol supervising agent. The massive poles, 6 inches square and filled with concrete, descend 6 feet down into the earth. The $11.6 million project should be finished sometime in July, and when it's done will slice through 2.77 miles of Ambos Nogales.
The beauty of the new wall, from the Border Patrol perspective, is that it's see-through. The heavy posts are separated by four inches of open air, too small for a body to slip through, but big enough for la migra to look south into Mexico.
"Our agents need to be aware of what's on the other side," Passement said. "There's always the chance of being rocked"—hit by rocks thrown from the other side. "The new (wall) definitely gives agents an awareness."
But the open spaces cue in potential wall-crossers as well. As Enrique closed up his cart and prepared to head home, three likely migrants ambled down the street, equipped with telltale border-crosser backpacks. They could see right through the new posts to a Border Patrol agent stationed on the other side. They laughed when they saw him pacing just yards from the barricade they intended to cross, then turned and walked off in another direction.
The old wall was flimsier—coyotes routinely used torches to blast holes in its thin metal skin—but it was opaque. Neither crossers nor agents could see their opponents on the other side.
A rough patchwork of used helicopter-landing pads, it was hastily cobbled together in the 1990s when immigration was beginning to surge into Arizona. The Army had discarded the flats after using them in the Persian Gulf and in the jungles of Vietnam, and was only too happy to turn them over to the Border Patrol free of charge.
Rising up 12 to 15 feet—miniature compared to the new wall—the landing-mat fence was colored the purples and rusts of a bruise. It was unapologetically ugly, and its battle history provided an uncomfortable metaphor for an international border between two nations at peace.
But it had at least one aesthetic virtue: It was flat, and it was big, a perfect canvas for grassroots art of all kinds.
Naturally, there was plenty of graffiti, mostly consisting of angry rants against the United States. As of last week, one bit still survived, on a section of the old wall still up east of the DeConcini Port of Entry. Painted in white against red, it read: Mundo sin fronteras ya basta, which loosely translates as: "A world without borders. Enough walls already."
On the west side of the port, where much of the old wall has already been replaced, white crosses memorialized the deaths of migrants. (Coalición de Derechos Humanos counts 2,192 known deaths in Southern Arizona in the last 11 years.) Once nailed to the landing flats, the crosses are gone now.
Paseo de Humanidad was west of the crosses. An international project completed in 2004, the aluminum artwork was a collaboration between Serrano; the late Alberto Morackis of Taller Yonke in Nogales, Sonora; and Alfred Quiroz, artist and art professor in Tucson.
The Mexican team constructed colored figures of migrants and migra in the Arizona desert, offering warnings to would-be border-crossers of the dangers ahead. Quiroz added milagros, heads and hearts that were like prayers in aluminum. (See "Artistic Warning," May 13, 2004.)
Paseo was taken to safety long before the arrival of the demo crew the week of June 6. Since last November, the Serrano-Morackis portions have been on view in the sculpture garden at K. Newby Gallery in Tubac. Serrano said last week he's hoping to take it down by Wednesday, June 22, and store it in Rio Rico pending its next exhibition.
"I got an invitation to exhibit it at the UA in November, but it's not definite yet," Serrano wrote in Spanish in an e-mail. Quiroz's milagros are back in Tucson with their maker, he added.
The Chiapas mural had a much narrower escape. Its fate was still in doubt as late as early last week, when the wrecking machines were scheduled to knock down the portions of the old wall clinging to a steep hill along Calle Internacional.
A community group, led by Serrano and Morackis, had painted the mural directly onto the border wall in 2005, Serrano said. Officially called "Vida y sueños de la cañada perla¨ ("Life and Dreams of the Pearl Stream") and nicknamed the "Mural de Taniperla," it depicted indigenous people living an idyllic traditional life in the mountains of Chiapas. It was a copy of a 1998 work painted by Sergio Valdez and numerous Tzeltal Indians in embattled Chiapas, where the Zapatistas were in a standoff with the Mexican army. The army invaded the town and destroyed the original, Serrano said, and Valdez was jailed for six months.
To show their support for the people of Chiapas, artists around the world painted identical murals on their own hometown walls. The Nogales version was a community project, painted by people on both sides of the border, Serrano said.
Last week, a last-minute campaign by Serrano; Dan Millis, of the Sierra Club's Borderlands Campaign; Congressman Raúl Grijalva; Susannah Castro, of the Tubac Center for the Arts; Bob Phillips, of the Santa Cruz Community Foundation; and his counterpart in Nogales, Sonora, Alma Cota de Yanez, of Fundación del Empresariado Sonorense (FESAC), won the mural a reprieve.
"The Border Patrol was cooperative," Phillips said.
The Border Patrol "reached out to Granite," Border Patrol spokesman Steve Adkison said, and gave the construction company instructions to take down the panels carefully and turn them over to the artists. Early on June 16, the mural's 30 panels were gently felled. The pieces were hauled to Serrano's studio, where they are being held in safekeeping until a new location can be found.
It's unclear whether the new wall can accommodate art. Now that the agency has a clear view through the barrier, Agent Passement said, "We won't permit anyone to block it or hang things on it."
Crosses and metal sculptures might be out, but it's not hard to imagine artists painting the 6-inch wide posts, trailing designs across the openings.
In any case, enterprising families have already found a way to take advantage of the see-through new wall. A few days before Father's Day, several families were having a cross-border visit in a quiet district east of the port of entry. The mothers and children were on the Mexican side of the wall, and the dads were on the American.
One little girl had dressed up in pink to see her father. She sat by her mother, her legs dangling into the ditch created by the new wall. Her parents leaned into the poles, and her father listened intently as her mother spoke.
A few feet away, a little boy of about 5 or 6 had brought along a school paper—a drawing, perhaps?—to give to his father. The child was too small to push the paper into the United States, so his father thrust his own hand between the bars, and reached toward his child in Mexico.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/barrier-rebuilt/Content?oid=3028495
June 23, 2011
by Margaret Regan
A man named Enrique was packing up his hot dog cart on Calle Internacional in Nogales, Sonora, late one recent hot afternoon.
Asked his opinion of the new border wall across the street, he looked up appraisingly at the 18-foot steel posts looming above him.
"It's más beautiful," he said, speaking in the Spanglish of the borderlands. Prettier than the old wall.
Not everyone agreed. At the bus stop down the street, an older man shrugged. The two walls were "igual." he said. Equally ugly.
The old landing-mat wall, covered with graffiti and grassroots murals, has been coming down for months, removed piece by piece by Granite Construction, a firm contracted by the Border Patrol. The graffiti has vanished along with the wall, but some of the wall's best-known artworks have been rescued.
The acclaimed Paseo de Humanidad, a cavalcade of painted metal figures, was moved last year, much of it to a gallery in Tubac. A painted mural of Chiapas was rescued just last week, after a last-minute campaign by supporters, and returned to artist Guadalupe Serrano.
The corrugated panels are rapidly being replaced by the towering new poles, which rise as high as 30 feet in some places, says Steve Passement, a Border Patrol supervising agent. The massive poles, 6 inches square and filled with concrete, descend 6 feet down into the earth. The $11.6 million project should be finished sometime in July, and when it's done will slice through 2.77 miles of Ambos Nogales.
The beauty of the new wall, from the Border Patrol perspective, is that it's see-through. The heavy posts are separated by four inches of open air, too small for a body to slip through, but big enough for la migra to look south into Mexico.
"Our agents need to be aware of what's on the other side," Passement said. "There's always the chance of being rocked"—hit by rocks thrown from the other side. "The new (wall) definitely gives agents an awareness."
But the open spaces cue in potential wall-crossers as well. As Enrique closed up his cart and prepared to head home, three likely migrants ambled down the street, equipped with telltale border-crosser backpacks. They could see right through the new posts to a Border Patrol agent stationed on the other side. They laughed when they saw him pacing just yards from the barricade they intended to cross, then turned and walked off in another direction.
The old wall was flimsier—coyotes routinely used torches to blast holes in its thin metal skin—but it was opaque. Neither crossers nor agents could see their opponents on the other side.
A rough patchwork of used helicopter-landing pads, it was hastily cobbled together in the 1990s when immigration was beginning to surge into Arizona. The Army had discarded the flats after using them in the Persian Gulf and in the jungles of Vietnam, and was only too happy to turn them over to the Border Patrol free of charge.
Rising up 12 to 15 feet—miniature compared to the new wall—the landing-mat fence was colored the purples and rusts of a bruise. It was unapologetically ugly, and its battle history provided an uncomfortable metaphor for an international border between two nations at peace.
But it had at least one aesthetic virtue: It was flat, and it was big, a perfect canvas for grassroots art of all kinds.
Naturally, there was plenty of graffiti, mostly consisting of angry rants against the United States. As of last week, one bit still survived, on a section of the old wall still up east of the DeConcini Port of Entry. Painted in white against red, it read: Mundo sin fronteras ya basta, which loosely translates as: "A world without borders. Enough walls already."
On the west side of the port, where much of the old wall has already been replaced, white crosses memorialized the deaths of migrants. (Coalición de Derechos Humanos counts 2,192 known deaths in Southern Arizona in the last 11 years.) Once nailed to the landing flats, the crosses are gone now.
Paseo de Humanidad was west of the crosses. An international project completed in 2004, the aluminum artwork was a collaboration between Serrano; the late Alberto Morackis of Taller Yonke in Nogales, Sonora; and Alfred Quiroz, artist and art professor in Tucson.
The Mexican team constructed colored figures of migrants and migra in the Arizona desert, offering warnings to would-be border-crossers of the dangers ahead. Quiroz added milagros, heads and hearts that were like prayers in aluminum. (See "Artistic Warning," May 13, 2004.)
Paseo was taken to safety long before the arrival of the demo crew the week of June 6. Since last November, the Serrano-Morackis portions have been on view in the sculpture garden at K. Newby Gallery in Tubac. Serrano said last week he's hoping to take it down by Wednesday, June 22, and store it in Rio Rico pending its next exhibition.
"I got an invitation to exhibit it at the UA in November, but it's not definite yet," Serrano wrote in Spanish in an e-mail. Quiroz's milagros are back in Tucson with their maker, he added.
The Chiapas mural had a much narrower escape. Its fate was still in doubt as late as early last week, when the wrecking machines were scheduled to knock down the portions of the old wall clinging to a steep hill along Calle Internacional.
A community group, led by Serrano and Morackis, had painted the mural directly onto the border wall in 2005, Serrano said. Officially called "Vida y sueños de la cañada perla¨ ("Life and Dreams of the Pearl Stream") and nicknamed the "Mural de Taniperla," it depicted indigenous people living an idyllic traditional life in the mountains of Chiapas. It was a copy of a 1998 work painted by Sergio Valdez and numerous Tzeltal Indians in embattled Chiapas, where the Zapatistas were in a standoff with the Mexican army. The army invaded the town and destroyed the original, Serrano said, and Valdez was jailed for six months.
To show their support for the people of Chiapas, artists around the world painted identical murals on their own hometown walls. The Nogales version was a community project, painted by people on both sides of the border, Serrano said.
Last week, a last-minute campaign by Serrano; Dan Millis, of the Sierra Club's Borderlands Campaign; Congressman Raúl Grijalva; Susannah Castro, of the Tubac Center for the Arts; Bob Phillips, of the Santa Cruz Community Foundation; and his counterpart in Nogales, Sonora, Alma Cota de Yanez, of Fundación del Empresariado Sonorense (FESAC), won the mural a reprieve.
"The Border Patrol was cooperative," Phillips said.
The Border Patrol "reached out to Granite," Border Patrol spokesman Steve Adkison said, and gave the construction company instructions to take down the panels carefully and turn them over to the artists. Early on June 16, the mural's 30 panels were gently felled. The pieces were hauled to Serrano's studio, where they are being held in safekeeping until a new location can be found.
It's unclear whether the new wall can accommodate art. Now that the agency has a clear view through the barrier, Agent Passement said, "We won't permit anyone to block it or hang things on it."
Crosses and metal sculptures might be out, but it's not hard to imagine artists painting the 6-inch wide posts, trailing designs across the openings.
In any case, enterprising families have already found a way to take advantage of the see-through new wall. A few days before Father's Day, several families were having a cross-border visit in a quiet district east of the port of entry. The mothers and children were on the Mexican side of the wall, and the dads were on the American.
One little girl had dressed up in pink to see her father. She sat by her mother, her legs dangling into the ditch created by the new wall. Her parents leaned into the poles, and her father listened intently as her mother spoke.
A few feet away, a little boy of about 5 or 6 had brought along a school paper—a drawing, perhaps?—to give to his father. The child was too small to push the paper into the United States, so his father thrust his own hand between the bars, and reached toward his child in Mexico.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/barrier-rebuilt/Content?oid=3028495
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Binational effort helps rescue border fence mural
Nogales International
June 21, 2011
by Jonathan Clark
A community mural painted on the border wall separating the U.S. and Mexico was saved from the scrap heap last week through a binational effort, and an artist who was integral to its creation and salvation says he hopes the artwork, which represents popular resistance, will one day rise again at its original location.
The 60-foot-long mural, titled “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla,” or “Life and Dreams of the Perla Ravine,” was painted by people from both sides of the border in 2005 on the Sonoran face of the landing-mat fence running through Ambos Nogales, a few hundred yards west of the DeConcini port.
It’s a replica of a mural painted in 1998 by Tzetzal Indians on the façade of the community center of Taniperla, Chiapas to represent their lives and dreams after declaring themselves part of an autonomous Zapatista revolutionary municipality. However, on April 11, 1998, a day after the mural and the autonomous municipality were inaugurated, the Mexican Army retook control of the town, destroyed the mural and jailed the man who had directed its creation, university professor Sergio Valdez.
Nogales, Sonora-based artist Guadalupe Serrano, who along with his creative partner Alberto Morackis brought Valdez to the border city for the re-creation project in 2005, said that after U.S. crews replacing the 2.8-mile-long landing-mat fence with a taller, stronger barrier reached the downtown area last month, city officials warned him that the “Vida y Sueños” replica might also be destroyed.
At the same time, he said, he learned that wheels had also begun to turn in Arizona in an effort to save the mural.
“What happened was that in Tucson, there’s an organization called the Sierra Club, and a guy from that organization named Dan Millis got in touch with Congressman Raul Grijalva,” Serrano said.
In a letter dated June 8, Millis, along with Kim Roseman of the K. Newby Gallery in Tubac, Susannah Castro of the Tubac Center of the Arts and Bob Phillips of the Santa Cruz Community Foundation, urged Grijalva to investigate the status of “Vida y Sueños” and other nearby fence art and iconic graffiti, “and act to ensure that these cultural resources are protected for future generations.”
Grijalva responded by dispatching staffer Ruben Reyes to coordinate with the Border Patrol (a Grijalva spokesman said the agency was “very cooperative”), who then worked with contractor Granite Construction to arrange a safe takedown and handover of the mural panels to Serrano.
Early last Thursday, Serrano and members of his art collective Taller Yonke (Junk Studio) showed up at the border fence with a trailer and some tools to dismantle and haul off the mural panels after a Granite Construction crane lifted them off their footing in the United States and laid them on the ground in Mexico.
“We saved the whole mural,” Serrano said. “There were just two pieces at the end that were already gone.”
The other nearby iconography – a mural depicting a loteria card version of the floating eye pyramid, an array of white crosses representing migrant deaths and painted slogans including “Fronteras: Cicatrices en la tierra” (“Borders: Scars on the Earth”) – were not so lucky.
“Those things were in another area, and by the time we realized what was happening, ‘La Migra’ had taken them away,” Serrano said.
There was another important object, not attached to the fence but mounted directly in front of it, that Serrano was able to save: a bust of his collaborator and fellow Taller Yonke founder Morackis, who died in December 2008 from pneumonia, two days short of his 50th birthday.
Border art
Serrano and Morackis began using the Nogales landing-mat fence as a forum for socially and politically conscious art in 2003 when they unveiled “Border Dynamics,” a steel-and-resin piece depicting four, 14-foot human figures pushing against the wall. The artists initially hoped to place the figures on both sides of the fence, but the Border Patrol nixed the plan on the U.S. side, citing security concerns.
The University of Arizona later purchased “Border Dynamics” and displayed it on the campus mall in Tucson before moving it to an area next to the school’s Harvill building.
In March 2004, the artists mounted another provocative piece on the south side of the fence: a series of aluminum human figures and symbols called “Paseo de Humanidad,” or “Parade of Humanity.” Created in collaboration with Tucson-based artist Alfred J. Quiroz, the work represented the suffering of Mexican migrants as they traveled to and from the United States.
But as Serrano noted, “Border Dymanics” and “Paseo de Humanidad” were temporary exhibits at the Nogales fence. The “Vida y Sueños” mural was permanently affixed to it.
The idea for the mural project, he said, came when he met Valdez during a trip to Mexico City. Serrano knew the history of the original mural, and how communities from South America to Europe had re-created it in public spaces as a show of solidarity and resistance. So he asked Valdez to help with a re-creation on the border wall in Nogales, “for what the mural means and what the wall represents,” he said.
Aided by a patron in Hermosillo and an art collective called La Linea, Serrano and Morackis invited people from across Sonora and Southern Arizona to paint the mural in the spring of 2005.
“The only thing we did was coordinate the project,” Serrano said. “We didn’t participate in the painting – all we really did was get the paint ready and coordinate.”
The centerpiece of the colorful painting is a depiction of two doves holding banners reading “Chiapas,” “Peace” and “Mexico,” as a campesino man and woman walk toward them. Above, Emiliano Zapata, the land-reform hero of the Mexican Revolution, rides a horse and sports a bandana reading, “La tierra es de quien la trabaja,” or “The land belongs to the person who works it.”
Other images show an idyllic riverside village where people work the land and hold community meetings as ski mask-clad Zapatista guerrillas stand at the ready on nearby hillsides.
The mural’s political imagery perhaps didn’t have an immediate connection to Nogales and its border wall, Serrano said, but the history of its creation and the efforts to re-create it did.
“More than anything, it was that it was a form of resistance and a representation of what the community could accomplish,” he said. “The social issues don’t have a lot of direct relevance here, but as a representation of civil resistance, that makes it significant.”
Grijalva said the cross-border community effort that created it in Nogales, Sonora also made the local version of the mural significant, and worth saving.
“This mural tells the story of our border community just as strongly as any words,” the congressman said. “One day we’ll look back on this work of art and thank ourselves for preserving it when we had the chance.”
Future plans
As for the future, Serrano said, once the fence construction project finishes, he plans to return the bust of Morackis to its original spot in the border-side strip at the intersection of Internacional and Fenochio streets that’s informally known as the Espacio Cultural Binacional Alberto Morackis.
He’d like to mount “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla” there as well, against the newer, bigger border barrier that replaced its original canvas.
“We’re going to wait for them to conclude the work, and then we’re going to have to talk with the Border Patrol to see if we'll be able to install it there again,” Serrano said, though he noted there may be resistance to the idea, since one of the reasons for the new, interconnected-pole fence was to allow Border Patrol agents to see clearly into Sonora.
“We’re going to talk with them to see if there’s any way that we can install it. If not,” he said, “we'll look for some other space to display it here in the city.”
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2011/06/21/news/doc4e00b7fbc8aa4830128705.txt
June 21, 2011
by Jonathan Clark
A community mural painted on the border wall separating the U.S. and Mexico was saved from the scrap heap last week through a binational effort, and an artist who was integral to its creation and salvation says he hopes the artwork, which represents popular resistance, will one day rise again at its original location.
The 60-foot-long mural, titled “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla,” or “Life and Dreams of the Perla Ravine,” was painted by people from both sides of the border in 2005 on the Sonoran face of the landing-mat fence running through Ambos Nogales, a few hundred yards west of the DeConcini port.
It’s a replica of a mural painted in 1998 by Tzetzal Indians on the façade of the community center of Taniperla, Chiapas to represent their lives and dreams after declaring themselves part of an autonomous Zapatista revolutionary municipality. However, on April 11, 1998, a day after the mural and the autonomous municipality were inaugurated, the Mexican Army retook control of the town, destroyed the mural and jailed the man who had directed its creation, university professor Sergio Valdez.
Nogales, Sonora-based artist Guadalupe Serrano, who along with his creative partner Alberto Morackis brought Valdez to the border city for the re-creation project in 2005, said that after U.S. crews replacing the 2.8-mile-long landing-mat fence with a taller, stronger barrier reached the downtown area last month, city officials warned him that the “Vida y Sueños” replica might also be destroyed.
At the same time, he said, he learned that wheels had also begun to turn in Arizona in an effort to save the mural.
“What happened was that in Tucson, there’s an organization called the Sierra Club, and a guy from that organization named Dan Millis got in touch with Congressman Raul Grijalva,” Serrano said.
In a letter dated June 8, Millis, along with Kim Roseman of the K. Newby Gallery in Tubac, Susannah Castro of the Tubac Center of the Arts and Bob Phillips of the Santa Cruz Community Foundation, urged Grijalva to investigate the status of “Vida y Sueños” and other nearby fence art and iconic graffiti, “and act to ensure that these cultural resources are protected for future generations.”
Grijalva responded by dispatching staffer Ruben Reyes to coordinate with the Border Patrol (a Grijalva spokesman said the agency was “very cooperative”), who then worked with contractor Granite Construction to arrange a safe takedown and handover of the mural panels to Serrano.
Early last Thursday, Serrano and members of his art collective Taller Yonke (Junk Studio) showed up at the border fence with a trailer and some tools to dismantle and haul off the mural panels after a Granite Construction crane lifted them off their footing in the United States and laid them on the ground in Mexico.
“We saved the whole mural,” Serrano said. “There were just two pieces at the end that were already gone.”
The other nearby iconography – a mural depicting a loteria card version of the floating eye pyramid, an array of white crosses representing migrant deaths and painted slogans including “Fronteras: Cicatrices en la tierra” (“Borders: Scars on the Earth”) – were not so lucky.
“Those things were in another area, and by the time we realized what was happening, ‘La Migra’ had taken them away,” Serrano said.
There was another important object, not attached to the fence but mounted directly in front of it, that Serrano was able to save: a bust of his collaborator and fellow Taller Yonke founder Morackis, who died in December 2008 from pneumonia, two days short of his 50th birthday.
Border art
Serrano and Morackis began using the Nogales landing-mat fence as a forum for socially and politically conscious art in 2003 when they unveiled “Border Dynamics,” a steel-and-resin piece depicting four, 14-foot human figures pushing against the wall. The artists initially hoped to place the figures on both sides of the fence, but the Border Patrol nixed the plan on the U.S. side, citing security concerns.
The University of Arizona later purchased “Border Dynamics” and displayed it on the campus mall in Tucson before moving it to an area next to the school’s Harvill building.
In March 2004, the artists mounted another provocative piece on the south side of the fence: a series of aluminum human figures and symbols called “Paseo de Humanidad,” or “Parade of Humanity.” Created in collaboration with Tucson-based artist Alfred J. Quiroz, the work represented the suffering of Mexican migrants as they traveled to and from the United States.
But as Serrano noted, “Border Dymanics” and “Paseo de Humanidad” were temporary exhibits at the Nogales fence. The “Vida y Sueños” mural was permanently affixed to it.
The idea for the mural project, he said, came when he met Valdez during a trip to Mexico City. Serrano knew the history of the original mural, and how communities from South America to Europe had re-created it in public spaces as a show of solidarity and resistance. So he asked Valdez to help with a re-creation on the border wall in Nogales, “for what the mural means and what the wall represents,” he said.
Aided by a patron in Hermosillo and an art collective called La Linea, Serrano and Morackis invited people from across Sonora and Southern Arizona to paint the mural in the spring of 2005.
“The only thing we did was coordinate the project,” Serrano said. “We didn’t participate in the painting – all we really did was get the paint ready and coordinate.”
The centerpiece of the colorful painting is a depiction of two doves holding banners reading “Chiapas,” “Peace” and “Mexico,” as a campesino man and woman walk toward them. Above, Emiliano Zapata, the land-reform hero of the Mexican Revolution, rides a horse and sports a bandana reading, “La tierra es de quien la trabaja,” or “The land belongs to the person who works it.”
Other images show an idyllic riverside village where people work the land and hold community meetings as ski mask-clad Zapatista guerrillas stand at the ready on nearby hillsides.
The mural’s political imagery perhaps didn’t have an immediate connection to Nogales and its border wall, Serrano said, but the history of its creation and the efforts to re-create it did.
“More than anything, it was that it was a form of resistance and a representation of what the community could accomplish,” he said. “The social issues don’t have a lot of direct relevance here, but as a representation of civil resistance, that makes it significant.”
Grijalva said the cross-border community effort that created it in Nogales, Sonora also made the local version of the mural significant, and worth saving.
“This mural tells the story of our border community just as strongly as any words,” the congressman said. “One day we’ll look back on this work of art and thank ourselves for preserving it when we had the chance.”
Future plans
As for the future, Serrano said, once the fence construction project finishes, he plans to return the bust of Morackis to its original spot in the border-side strip at the intersection of Internacional and Fenochio streets that’s informally known as the Espacio Cultural Binacional Alberto Morackis.
He’d like to mount “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla” there as well, against the newer, bigger border barrier that replaced its original canvas.
“We’re going to wait for them to conclude the work, and then we’re going to have to talk with the Border Patrol to see if we'll be able to install it there again,” Serrano said, though he noted there may be resistance to the idea, since one of the reasons for the new, interconnected-pole fence was to allow Border Patrol agents to see clearly into Sonora.
“We’re going to talk with them to see if there’s any way that we can install it. If not,” he said, “we'll look for some other space to display it here in the city.”
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2011/06/21/news/doc4e00b7fbc8aa4830128705.txt
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