Abstract, Commentary: The U.S.-Mexican Border, Immigration, and Resistance

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Commentary: The U.S.-Mexican Border, Immigration, and Resistance
by María L. Cruz-Torres



Border crossing and its implications for both indigenous communities in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States were at the heart of my late colleague Michael Kearney’s research, personal commitment, and activism. He sought to understand the movement of people in global and transnational spaces. Contributing to Michael’s legacy, Lynn Stephen’s article raises many important issues that provide us with a broad historical and contemporary perspective on the movement of people across borders. Her discussion begins with the immigration policies of the 1980s under the Reagan administration and ends with those of the Obama administration, both of which have permitted and prohibited the entry of people into the country by creating and implementing a set of legally ambiguous categories for labeling, separating, and stigmatizing people. The underlying laws, regulations, and policies have led to racial profiling or what Stephens calls the “differential perception” of an entire population based on physical appearance, gender, ethnicity, language, or degree of cultural and social assimilation.

Abstract, Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present

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Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present
by Lynn Stephen 


Analysis of U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies and their impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and Central America who have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees since the mid-1980s suggests that through immigration programs such as Prevention through Deterrence, the United States has crafted a set of policies that creates “preemptive suspects”—categories of people from Central America and Mexico that may be systematically excluded as dangerous, criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens.

Political Report # 1334 Tomgram: Todd Miller, An Unsustainable World Managed With an Iron Fist

By Todd Miller,  TomDispatch

At first, I thought I had inadvertently entered an active war zone. I was on a lonely two-lane road in southern New Mexico heading for El Paso, Texas. Off to the side of the road, hardly concealed behind some desert shrubs, I suddenly noticed what seemed to be a tank. For a second, I thought I might be seeing an apparition. When I stopped to take a picture, a soldier wearing a camouflage helmet emerged from the top of the Stryker, a 19-ton, eight-wheeled combat vehicle that was regularly used in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He looked my way and I offered a pathetic wave. To my relief, he waved back, then settled behind what seemed to be a large surveillance display mounted atop the vehicle. With high-tech binoculars, he began to monitor the mountainous desert that stretched toward Mexico, 20 miles away, as if the enemy might appear at any moment. That was in 2012 and, though I had already been reporting on the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border for years, I had never seen anything like it. Barack Obama was still president and it would be another six years before Donald Trump announced with much fanfare that he was essentially going to declare war at the border and send in the National Guard. (“We really haven’t done that before,” Trump told the media on April 3rd, “or certainly not very much before.”) Operation Nimbus II, as the 2012 mission was called, involved 500 soldiers from Fort Bliss and Fort Hood and was a typical Joint Task Force North (JTF-N) operation. Those troops were officially there to provide the U.S. Border Patrol with “intelligence and surveillance.” Since JTF-N was tasked with supporting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the border, its motto was “protecting the Homeland.” However, it was also deeply involved in training soldiers for overseas military operations in ongoing American wars in the Greater Middle East.

Political Report # 1078 Venezuela Takes Control of Its Border as Bogotá and Caracas Bring Their Cases to UNASUR By: Frederick B. Mills and William Camacaro, Senior Research Fellows at COHA

la marcha contra el contra el paramilitarismo By: Frederick B. Mills and William Camacaro, Senior Research Fellows at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

On July 13, 2015, President Nicolas Maduro launched an ambitious campaign to fight organized crime (the Operation to Liberate and Protect the People-OLP) in the most seriously impacted states of the country. Over the past week, as a critical phase of this campaign, Venezuela has moved to take control over its notoriously porous border with Colombia in Táchira State, seriously disrupting the routine but illicit trade in contraband goods coming from Venezuela that has fueled a parallel economy in Colombia. This illicit trade, however, as well as manipulative currency exchange practices in the frontier area, has been generating some of the commodity shortages and the depreciation of the bolívar fuerte suffered by consumers in Venezuela. This is not a new issue. The crime and contraband problem along the border had been brewing for more than a decade. Moreover, a growing public outcry calling for decisive action to address both public security concerns and persistent commodity shortages has become particularly intense over the past two years and now threatens to derail the Bolivarian project ahead of the December 2015 legislative elections. Maduro had to either take decisive action or preside over the demise of the revolution.

Political Report #1071, The Secret Agenda Behind the Venezuela-Guyana Conflict by Eva Golinger, Guest Scholar for COHA

It all began in 1835 when the British Empire sent a German-born naturalist and explorer to conduct geographical research in the South American territory it had colonized and named British Guiana. In the course of his explorations, a map was drawn that well-exceeded the original western boundary first occupied by the Dutch and later passed to British control. Sparking the interest of the Empire’s desire to expand its borders into the area west of the Essequibo River that was known to be rich in gold, the British government commissioned the explorer to survey their territorial boundaries. What became known as the “Schomburgk Line,” named after the explorer, Robert Hermann Schomburgk, acquired a large portion of Venezuelan land, and provoked the beginning of a territorial confrontation that has remained unresolved to this day.