IN THIS MESSAGE: Globalization's Doubters; Border Crossings Grow More
Treacherous & Deadly
Tuesday, February 16, 1999
California Prospect
Meet Globalization's Doubters Partway
Criticism that sounds like warmed-over Marxism in the
wealthy
West resonates as truth in the Third World.
By TOM PLATE
There's no shortage of fear, loathing and even hysteria
about economic globalization these days. That's
especially true in academe; many who toil there
believe its hurricane force will in the end leave the world's
poor twisting in the wind.
Some academicians flatly view globalization as an
ethical and moral menace. University of Exeter Prof.
Timothy Gorringe, in his new book "Fair Shares: Ethics and
the Global Economy," says globalization has "the potential
for destroying society." His metaphors are of sickness:
"clearly feverish," "a symptom of an illness," "a disorder of
the soul."
Others view globalization as a masked process for
putting false gods in clandestine charge of our lives.
Harvard Prof. Dani Rodrik writes in the new book "Making
Openness Work" that it "requires too much blind faith in
markets to believe that the global allocation of resources is
enhanced by the twenty-something-year-olds in London
who move hundreds of millions of dollars around the globe
in a matter of an instant."
Still others fear globalization as the hit man against
hope. Former Economist magazine researcher Harry Shutt,
in his recent book "The Trouble With Capitalism,"
compares it to "organized crime--a parasite so vicious that
it is killing the body it feeds off."
That's all a bit much, of course, for a comparatively new
force on the planet whose effects are only slowly becoming
apparent, much less fully understood. Still, a measure of
hysteria may not be such a bad thing, given globalization's
seeming inevitability. At bottom all that scholarly advice can
be boiled down to an old bromide: Prepare for the worst,
hope for the best. Does a more integrated world economy
add to the wealth of nations so that the resultant rising tide
lifts all boats? Or do the rich merely become even richer,
buying new yachts and leaving the world's poor in their
wake?
Economists tend to say that their craft is only about
money, not ethics or justice. But sages as far back as
Aristotle and up to today's egalitarian ethicists, especially
the great Harvard philosopher John Rawls, have always
insisted that at the heart of injustice one inevitably finds
greed, preying like a cancer on justice.
To many of us in the West, this line of thought can seem
like little more than microwaved Marxism. But not in the
Third World. Referring to the stomach-wrenching
downdrafts in less wealthy economies, Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak said recently: "In the emerging world, there
is a bitter sentiment of injustice. There's a sense that there
must be something wrong with a system that wipes out
years of hard-won development because of changes in
market sentiment. Years of progress are gone, because of
developments elsewhere."
The answer to the Mubaraks of the world is not to make
the obvious point that in their exaggeration they wind up
playing mainly to the soccer stands, but to figure out which
parts of their anti-globalization message are valid. To fail to
do that is to put at risk the valuable internationalizing power
of globalization.
In a recent speech, the eloquent U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan said: National markets are held together by
shared values and confidence in certain minimum
standards. But in the new global market, people do not yet
have that confidence." Annan concluded that until
widespread confidence in globalization is instilled, the
world economy will be vulnerable to the broadside
backlashes of protectionism, excessive nationalism and
ethnic chauvinism.
Annan is right: The West should be more open--and
therefore a lot less dismissive of Third World laments.
Rather than indicting the Mubaraks for provincialism, why
not make a point of meeting these outspoken leaders more
than halfway? Profit and economic growth surely are not the
only social values advanced by the developed world. Why
not offer a large spirit, an open mind, new ideas for
managing change, especially with regard to the world's
swirling capital markets? For, if something more than
dismissiveness is not forthcoming, fears about the potential
ravages of globalization will divide the world into those who
believe and those who hatefully do not. That could herald a
new ideological war that could bring out the worst in us all.
- - -
Times Contributing Editor Tom Plate's Column Runs
Tuesdays. he Teaches at Ucla. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
=========================================
As Crossings Grow Treacherous, More
Aliens Are Dying to Get In
Urban Patrols Push U.S.-Bound Migrants Into Remote
Areas
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 16, 1999; Page A10
ON THE RIO GRANDEAs the Border Patrol boat rounded the
river bend, a group of Mexicans on the high southern bank waved
their arms and pointed to the murky water below. One youth
clutched his neck with both hands to indicate someone had
drowned.
About 20 feet beneath them, floating face down, the body of a
woman was tethered to an overhanging tree to keep it from
drifting away before rescue workers could bring it up the steep
embankment. The word on the Mexican side was that a man had
also drowned during a crossing to the United States the night
before, and the group on the riverbank wanted the Border Patrol
to join the search for his body.
The unidentified woman was one of the latest victims of an illegal
migration that has claimed the lives of untold thousands of people
over the decades. By most accounts, the trek has grown more
treacherous in recent years, with rising death tolls along certain
stretches of border.
The danger attracted national attention last summer. Scores of
undocumented immigrants died of heat stroke in deserts on the
U.S. side as temperatures soared above 100 degrees day after
day. But an equal number of people drowned in the waterways
that separate the United States from Mexico, the Immigration and
Naturalization Service says.
The deaths stem in part from a U.S. border strategy aimed at
pushing illegal crossers away from urban centers, where they can
blend in with the local populace, and toward more remote areas
where they risk prolonged exposure to the elements in much
rougher terrain.
However, U.S. officials and illegal immigrants also blame many
deaths on professional alien smugglers, who have assumed a
growing role in the cross-border traffic because of the increased
difficulty of evading the Border Patrol's beefed-up forces and
high-tech detection equipment.
Smugglers have been accused of guiding people into hazardous
areas and abandoning them, or overloading makeshift rafts for
the short but often risky trip across the Rio Grande.
According to the INS, 254 people died trying to cross the
2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border in fiscal 1998, the first year in
which the agency systematically compiled such statistics. Of the
total, a third drowned, while another third died from heat
exposure. The highest number of fatalities was recorded in
California's El Centro Border Patrol sector, where 83 illegal
immigrants perished in the desert or drowned in the deceptively
swift-flowing All American Canal, which runs along 82 miles of
border in Imperial Valley.
The five sectors that span the Texas border along the Rio Grande
from El Paso to McAllen accounted for 109 deaths, 43 percent of
the total. More than 40 percent of the victims were never
identified, U.S. officials said.
While deaths have risen in remote areas of the border, they have
dropped in more populated sections, where hundreds of illegal
crossers formerly were hit by cars while trying to cross busy
highways, said Renee Harris, the Border Patrol's
Washington-based border safety coordinator.
The Mexican Embassy in Washington says 368 migrants died
trying to cross the border last year, 78 of them on the Mexican
side.
In a recent study, "Death at the Border," the University of
Houston's Center for Immigration Research documented more
than 1,600 "possible migrant fatalities" along the southwestern
border from 1993 to 1997. Nearly 600 of them were "Rio Grande
drowning deaths" that were reported by Mexican sources but not
tallied in the United States, the report said.
The Border Patrol acknowledges that its count is not
comprehensive. It includes illegal immigrants whose deaths have
been confirmed on U.S. territory, but not those whose remains
were never found or whose bodies were recovered in Mexico.
Among those not counted is the unidentified woman found
floating in the Rio Grande late last month a few miles west of
McAllen, Tex. According to the Border Patrol, she was in a group
that tried to cross illegally after midnight on a small, rickety raft.
Agents caught nine members of the group on the U.S. side and
were told that two others had been lost when gusts of wind kicked
up foot-high swells, capsizing the raft.
The Border Patrol sent a dozen agents and a helicopter
equipped with an infrared scope to search for the two, but nothing
was found that night.
The next morning, agents Mark Jones and Richard Johnston
came upon the woman's floating body while patrolling the Rio
Grande in the McAllen sector. "This happens probably more often
than we know," said Jones, 38, as he piloted the 16-foot,
flat-bottomed boat, one of 10 new craft that make up the only
riverboat fleet in the Border Patrol.
At the request of the Mexicans, the agents ventured up the river to
look for the other reported victim. Carrizo cane growing on the
banks rustled in the breeze as blue herons, ducks and kingfishers
flew overhead or paddled in the greenish waters. A long-necked
white egret stood on one leg, seemingly oblivious to the boat's
passage. A turtle splashed into the water from a fallen tree limb at
the river's edge.
But while this river of contradictions harbors abundant wildlife and
showcases spots of pristine beauty, its polluted waters also flow
past man-made eyesores and detritus. Black inner tubes and
plastic garbage bags dot the banks where alien-smugglers and
drug-traffickers have brought their loads across. Among the junk
left on the U.S. side are plastic bottles that have been tied
together to make crude flotation devices, pieces of abandoned
clothing, and rags tied to tree limbs to mark crossing points.
And despite its often placid appearance, the river can be
treacherous. Shallow enough to walk across in some places, it is
more than 20 feet deep in others. To Mexicans, it is known as the
Rio Bravo, an adjective that can mean valiant, but also savage or
fierce.
"Many times the water looks very still, but there are some
undercurrents that are very strong," said Armando Mercado Jr.,
assistant Border Patrol agent-in-charge in McAllen. "It may be
that it's named the Rio Bravo because it's very vicious and can
easily end your life."
Wearing bulletproof vests as protection against potshots by drug
traffickers, Jones, who formerly served in the Coast Guard, and
Johnston, a recent recruit who emigrated from Canada 10 years
ago, peered into the vegetation on both banks of the river but
could not find a second body. The Border Patrol later heard that
the purported male victim, apparently the husband of the drowned
woman, had turned up alive on the Mexican side after trying to
rescue her.
"Since she wound up on the Mexican side . . . [the woman] is not
part of our statistics," Mercado said.
As often happens, the smuggler hired to bring the group across
was "irresponsible," he said. "It wouldn't take but an extra three
minutes to make two trips, but that increases the chance of being
caught. So they'll load these rafts beyond their capacity, and that's
where they wind up having accidents."
Smuggling guides known as "coyotes" have caused many deaths
by abandoning their fee-paying charges in dangerous areas or
turning them over to border bandits, illegal immigrants say. Other
migrants have simply disappeared, their fates unknown.
Fidencio Delgado Cardona, a 23-year-old Honduran interviewed
at a Brownsville homeless shelter, said he was robbed before
crossing the river last month with other young men from Central
America, where Hurricane Mitch caused extensive damage last
year. A coyote on the Mexican side "led us to bandits," who
pulled guns on the group and demanded money, he said. "The
coyote was in league with the robbers."
Delgado, who said his father and two brothers were killed in the
hurricane, knew that his trip to "El Norte" could be dangerous, but
felt he had no choice.
"I have an uncle who left for the United States 19 years ago," he
said. "We never heard from him again. He left behind children
who grew up never knowing their father. Is he dead? We don't
know."
Border Deaths
Drowning and heat exposure cause most of the deaths of illegal
immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The Border
Patrol says many deaths go uncounted because the bodies aren't
found.
Migrant deaths along border by Border Patrol sector
10/97 to 9/98 10/98 to 11/98
McAllen 28 6
Laredo 19 1
Del Rio 35 1
Marfa 3 0
El Paso 24 4
Tucson 11 3
Yuma 8 1
El Centro 83 10
San Diego 43 1
Cause of migrant border deaths
10/97 to 9/98
Drowning 84
Heat exposure 84
Unknown 30
Cold exposure 16
Vehicle accident 16
Train-related 8
Other 16
SOURCE: Immigration and Naturalization Service
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
