A VIEW FROM EL PASO

I recently went to the border town of El Paso, Texas that is just on the other side of the river from Cuidad Juarez.

I am not familiar with many of the issues that affect those who live on the U.S. side nor the Mexican side. I know what people told me. I do know that there is a great deal of traffic between both cities, in work places and domiciles. I do know that since about April of 2008 there has been a major increase in cartel and gang-related violence; American citizens have also been targets. Murders have taken place in broad daylight, and sometimes bodies are found decapitated.

The “narco wars” have taken more than 11,000 lives since it started to heat up in intensity and frequency. Juarez has now become known as “Mexico’s deadliest city” with 800 drug-related deaths so far this year. This isn’t only happening at this crossroads, but is occurring at many areas along the U.S./Mexico border.

I went to El Paso to be a participant in a training conference. One mental health professional from Juarez told the participants that the residents have few options to deal with this trauma along the border. She said what is needed is activism and hope. She related to the audience that ‘this is all we have—hope.’

What does any community do when their main resource is hope, and when deadly stressors and community-disruption now are the way of life? Any organism will respond by seeking more creatively how to survive. But if the societal breakdown is maintained over a long period of time, research indicates that the kind of behavior we call “normal” doesn’t return. It’s replaced by a new, more violent sort of behavior.

According to the stories—from those who are aware of this regression—this significant trauma is affecting the social, physical, emotional, mental, and religious domains of life in many ways. For one thing, the violence is just one more reason for people to want to migrate to the U.S. for something better for their families. Last week, however, the Barrera family was returning to their home deeper into Mexico, after living for a while in Juarez, and was attacked with gunfire. Three of the family members were murdered, while the two youngest children watched in psychic shock. The violence is more and more affecting innocents who have no connection with drugs, crime, or anything illegal.

Which brings me to an important point: many of you have heard that we’re attempting to build a wall all along our border with Mexico. Now, apparently, we’re trying to keep out illegal aliens (there are no illegal people by the way) and drug-runners who are competing for the market in the U.S. In my mind, this is an archaic way of dealing with these two problems. The U.S. and Mexico will never even come close to solving this problem, by the use of power, force, the military, or money. Fear is an incredible motivating factor; no one wants to live in the middle of this kind of chaos, so believe me, they’ll keep coming.

And why shouldn’t they? The United States of Europe has already been using a model of porous borders, and people cross from one country within the EU as freely as we go from one state to the next. Europe has not experienced the same kinds of consequences that we have by using an “old brain” approach to a “new brain” dilemma.

Of course migration is built into our human natures. People have been migrating from one place to another ever since humans have been on the planet. People can migrate to get away from something such as political unrest, or migrate to get somewhere such as employment.

A famous eco-researcher, Jack Calhoun, predicted years ago, that the nations of the world would be facing these kinds of staggering problems; he said that immigration is the problem, but it isn’t the problem. His research demonstrated that there were predictable human behaviors that occur when stress reaches a certain maintained level. Any social order will do what it can to retain its own culture and way of life within the parameters of social networks and social connections. This is survival for the need of community, closeness, and support. One of the worst spin-offs of the immigration quagmire is the separation of family members, and this adds more tension to an already tenuous situation.

The experience of history indicates that we need a new adaptive focus to problems like what we find on the border between El Paso and Juarez. These problems call us to look at all the factors involved in a systemic fashion. Sometimes the smallest of changes within any system can have huge consequences; these changes may be for better or ill.

Fear causes people to seek out single causes expecting single effects; behavior becomes reactive and many tend to lean towards biases against the groups involved in the conflicted paradigm. In other words, they use a means of stereotypical thinking, and by this I mean they view the groups who they feel are parts of the problem by using stereotypes as a form of fact. “If we don’t put that wall up, they’ll keep coming over and take all of our jobs! That’s a fact.” Usually, immigrants do the kind of work others don’t want to do, they pay taxes, and add monetary influx into the economy.

We’ve been trying these methods for some time, and we must acknowledge that they simply don’t work; “the war on drugs” has been a dismal failure. Many law enforcement officials now come down “anti-drug war” because we spend far too much money, and the models being used leave out much that is needed to correct the problem.

El Paso seemed like a quiet little town; for me it was peaceful, and a restful escape from the heat and humidity in East Texas. Cooler winds are the natural, airy fans to maintain comfortabililty. It’s nestled in the mountains and seems like a laid back place. Unless you seek it out, you may not hear much about what’s really going on in Juarez—it’s such a different environment. That’s why you need to make it your business to obtain news from good, perhaps alternative media sources, so that you can view the border situation in a systemic and facts-based way.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August 2009