Thursday, April 30, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
Virtual Warfare Escalates on U.S.-Mexico Border
- In the quiet desert community of Nomirage, located just 20 kilometres east of San Diego, the sounds of impending war creep over the silent landscape.
Walt Staton, a volunteer with No More Deaths, was convicted for "knowingly littering" a national refuge by leaving water bottles for border crossers. Credit: Nick Oza/IPS
Armed with a 100-million-dollar budget and over 1,000 acres of desert space, Brandon Webb, ex-Navy Seal and chief executive officer of the San Diego-based firm Wind Zero Inc., is forging ahead with plans for a law-enforcement and military-training facility, which, once completed, will be capable of firing a whopping 57,000 bullets on an average day.
According to Bill Conroy, a correspondent at Narco News specialising in U.S.-Mexico border issues, the Imperial County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 in favour of the proposed garrison in late December, despite strong opposition from community groups.
Featuring mock-up urban environments, live-fire training houses, helicopter landing pads, an airstrip and a 9.8- kilometre racetrack, Wind Zero’s new endeavour boasts all the elements of full-scale U.S. military centres in warzones, such as the Kirkush Training base located 112 kilometres east of Baghdad.
The facility bears a striking resemblance to a project launched by the private paramilitary contractor Blackwater in 2006, which was abandoned under torrential opposition two years ago. In an interview with the San Diego reader last week, Webb stated “There is a big conspiracy that we are a shadow for Blackwater but that’s just ridiculous,” adding that any similarities were purely coincidental.
Laura Carlsen, Director of the Mexico City-based Americas Programme of the Center for International Policy (CIP), said in an interview last year, "Plan Mexico, [formally known as the Merida Initiative], the three-year regional security cooperation plan devised by the former Bush administration in 2007, grew out of the extension of NAFTA into security areas, known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership."
According to Carlsen, "Plan Mexico is presented as a petition of the Mexican President Felipe Calderon for U.S. help in the war on drugs but in reality it was designed in Washington as a way to 'push out the borders' of the U.S. security perimeter. In other words, Mexico would take on U.S. security priorities including policing its southern border and allowing U.S. companies and agents into Mexico's intelligence and security operations."
Gregory Berger, a film professor at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos in Mexico, told IPS, "There are two kinds of 'Drug Wars' happening simultaneously in Mexico and neither one would be happening at all if it weren't for the U.S."
"The first war involves the Mexican army killing or capturing members of drug trafficking organisations. The second refers to the turf wars between rival trafficking organisations; the United States is intimately involved in all aspects of these wars," Berger said.
"The Merida Initiative gave more than 1.4 billion dollars to Mexico, and more has been promised. Much of that money has been spent on high-tech surveillance equipment purchased from U.S. contractors, including Bell Helicopter and Motorola. Mexican police are also travelling to the U.S. for training in intelligence gathering and counter- insurgency, which of course has no effect on drug trafficking, since traffickers have more resources than ever before to buy off law enforcement."
"Social movements, on the other hand, are more easily threatened, controlled, and intimidated than they were just a few short years ago," Berger added. "There are analysts who speculate that one of the primary objectives of the so called 'drug wars' is to limit the potential of these social movements to succeed in their challenge to state power."
Dehumanising the Immigrant ‘Other’
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently operating about half a dozen Predator B (Reaper) drones primarily along the U.S. southern border with Mexico,” Conroy told IPS.
“These drones do have deadly capabilities, but supposedly are now being used only for surveillance. In addition to the DHS, the U.S military also operates drones, though their uses along U.S. borders and coastal areas is less clear,” he said.
Conroy added, “On top of all of this, the Mexican government is allegedly operating drones along the U.S./Mexican border. In addition, U.S. military bases all along the southern border are used as staging sites for drone operations.”
Any lingering doubts about the unbridled proliferation of virtual surveillance technology are quickly dispelled by the fact that Wind Zero’s new facility is fully equipped to provide instruction in operating Unmanned Aerial Systems.
Conroy writes, “The camp will feature a long airstrip and multiple heliports; a control tower and operations center; a 25,000-foot above-ground-level (AGL) air ceiling; and a location only 87 miles from a major border population center (San Diego/Tijuana) that is ground zero on the West Coast for the drug war.”
In his final report to the United Nations General Assembly in 2010, Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, stated clearly, "Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal. A targeted drone killing in a State's own territory, over which the State has control, would be very unlikely to meet human rights law limitations on the use of lethal force."
However, as Rivera points out, drone use has always fallen very conveniently into a "grey area", which the United States has manipulated to its great advantage.
"Drones aren't bomber planes with pilots in them, but they do have the destructive capacity of the air-force because most are loaded with hellfire missiles and capable of carrying out high-impact missions," Rivera told IPS.
"They are cyborgs, not quite people but very humanised, so there is a clear advantage to them being deployed in zones where the U.S. hasn't declared official hostilities - like Pakistan, where we haven't yet declared war or in the borderlands which have always existed in a kind of legal limbo," he added.
Regardless of the tragedy wrought by virtual warfare, there is a pot of gold to be made from it and the U.S. has never been one to give up a slice of the proverbial pie.
According to Conroy, the Pentagon has spent at least 20 billion dollars since 2001 on Southern California's drone industry alone, money that goes directly into the pockets of firms like Wind Zero Inc.
"As long as developing superior battlefield technology remains such a lucrative quest, the beast we choose to feed, typically at the expense of addressing poverty, disease and social injustice, will continue to cause human suffering in greater and greater numbers," Conroy told IPS.
Alex Rivera, a filmmaker whose work deals extensively with the crisis on the border, told IPS, “The image of these drones, which cost millions to deploy, flying over a desert where migrant women and children are carrying jugs through the blistering heat is reminiscent of films like ‘Terminator’. In reality this image belongs not in science fiction but in the history books because it’s been happening for years.”
“Surveillance drones are only one dot in a constellation of technology being deployed on the border that includes heat- seeking cameras, sensors embedded in the deserts and thousands of border patrol agents,” Rivera told IPS.
In fact, figures released by the DHS last year showed that the number of border personnel has increased from 10,000 in 2004 to over 21,000 in 2010.
“Border patrol has always used a kind of twin-logic that conflates the flow of drugs with the flow of people,” Rivera added.
American Science and Engineering (AES) Inc., responsible for the notorious ‘Z-backscatter’ technology that is being widely deployed in international airports, coined the term ‘organic contraband’ to refer to both narcotics and human beings crossing the border.
“AES’s old X-rays could only detect metal,” Rivera told IPS, “but they’ve now been stepped up to be able to detect a bundle of marijuana, a bag of cocaine, and even human flesh.”
“So if a person is being smuggled across the border in the trunk of a car – that would be considered ‘organic contraband’,” he added.
Organisations such as No More Deaths (No Mas Muertes) have waged an arduous battle against such dehumanising language that has given rise what they believe are inhuman laws.
“Increased surveillance technology over the last 10 years has been accompanied by a huge increase in the number of deaths at the border,” Geoffrey Boyce, the media spokesperson for No More Deaths in Tucson, Arizona, told IPS.
“People are being pushed into more remote and difficult terrain,” he said. “The length of a crossing has shot up from a day or two to an average six-day long crossing – and in the summertime we are talking temperatures from 100-120 degrees almost every single day.”
Boyce added, “Although the government’s law enforcement strategy is premised on the fact that increased difficulty at the border will reduce the number of people attempting to cross, we have seen the opposite scenario unfolding over the last decade.”
Far from reducing the flow of immigration, Boyce said, surveillance has simply made the already grueling trek through the desert ever more deadly. In southern Arizona alone, No More Deaths monitors over 200 deaths every year at the border.
“This situation has been absolutely tragic and there appears to be no end in sight,” Boyce told IPS.
Print
|
