GOVERNOR SIGNS TOUGH BORDER-SECURITY BILL
By G. Romero Wendorf
Would southbound border checkpoints – from Texas into Mexico -- help not only stem the rising tide of violence in Mexico but its boomerang effect into south Texas as well?
A lot of people seem to think so, including McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez and State Representative Sergio Muñoz.
Speaking at an immigration reform debate last fall, not afraid to mince words, Chief Rodriguez said, “Let’s control our borders outbound. Let’s deter and stop the unlawful exportation of guns and ammunition. Let’s stop the daily southbound unimpeded flow of our citizens’ stolen vehicles and stolen property. Let’s stop the daily southbound unimpeded flow of murderers, rapists, sex offenders and violent offenders. It is time for Texas to step up to this problem.”
In hearty agreement with him is another guy not known for mincing words: Othal E. Brand Jr., son of McAllen’s long-term Mayor Othal Brand and the current board president and general manager of the five-member board Hidalgo County Water Improvement District 3. He grew up swimming in the river, barbecuing and camping out along its banks. What a difference this decade has made. In fact, two years ago, two of District 3’s workmen were shot at from the Mexican side as they worked on a riverside pump station. Thankfully, neither was hit. Four years before that, several men from the Mexican side attacked a Donna Irrigation District employee working at the district’s pump house.
Today, DPS gun boats patrol the river, while federal and state choppers patrol overhead. Helping put a damper on tourism, headlines from around the country scream: Border Wars, blurring the division between the Rio Grande Valley and the cartel shootouts that take place almost daily a stone’s throw across the river.
In fact, headlines from last week tell the story with a dateline from last Saturday: The Military Kill Six Alleged Criminals in Tamaulipas.
Ramp up state and federal law-enforcement officers and agencies in the Rio Grande Valley, say some, and at least the spillover violence from Mexico will be thwarted at least to some extent. On the other end of the spectrum, however, there are Valley leaders, mayors, economic development gurus, who say just the opposite. Increased security in the Valley won’t necessarily stop the cartels moving drugs and people through the Valley, and it won’t stop one cartel faction from killing the other, but it will have a negative impact on the business sector – more bad PR – and if southbound checkpoints are implemented at border crossings into Mexico, it will bottleneck trade headed south.
For his part, Brand discounts those arguments. And in fact, he testified in March before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. He makes weekly, sometimes daily, trips to Hidalgo County Water Improvement District 3’s pumping station along the river. Today, as opposed to its nostalgic pastoral past, the area around it now looks almost like an armed camp. To underscore the severity of the problem, Brand said that was years ago, Border Patrol agents pulled eight bodies from the river area close to #3’s pumping station. Four of them were headless. As quoted in a Texas Monthly profile piece published last July, Brand said, “I was told none of them drowned.”
Earlier this month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a sweeping multi-million-dollar border security bill, HB 11, which will bolster DPS presence along the border, increase technology to help thwart cartel river crossings of both drugs and humans, and establish intel ops up and down the Rio Grande. HB 11 will cost taxpayers $310 million and is part of an overall $800 million border security effort. Opponents of increased border security, saying it hurts the RGV business sector by instilling fear in both Winter Texans and Mexican national shoppers, say that it looks as if Texas is forming its own Border Patrol. When they’ve asked Texas DPS to show statistics that prove that the border-security surge is actually producing results, the state law enforcement agency would only release data on drug seizures performed by all the law-enforcement agencies, state and federal, saying it’s hard to disassociate one from the other.
SHERIFF TREVIÑO SPEAKS
In a somewhat ironic twist, the Texas Tribune published a story June 9, headlined “Abbott Signs Sweeping Border Security Bill,” in which the question was asked by a reporter: “What problem was HB 11 intended to fix considering crime in the RGV is at an all-time low.”
The “all-time low” part, and here’s where the irony plays out, was (hyper) linked to a news story dated Jan. 19, 2014, published by The Monitor, in which former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño (now serving fiveyears in federal years in federal prison for money laundering courtesy of a convicted drug felon) had this to say about alleged Valley crime:
“If you look at these (crime-statistic) numbers, you will realize that this is not the crime-ridden community that some people through political rhetoric will have you believe. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, numbers don’t lie, people lie … . Our (low-crime) numbers are very true.”
To findout why Othal Brand Jr. is a proponent of southbound border checkpoints, and why Treviño was wrong, the District #3 GM agreed to an interview by phone earlier this week about the state of border security.
THE INTERVIEW
So give us your take on southbound border checkpoints. Originally, if I’m not mistaken, the checkpoints-headed-south portion was in HB 11, but was taken out of the final version. Now the state is doing one of those “feasibility studies” that always seem to cost money but never get anywhere.
Brand: “Well, it was in a bill. They had it in a bill for southbound checkpoints, (but then) your Border Alliance people and (several big-name local officials)said, ‘No, no, no, no. We don't want that.’
“Again, it goes back to where is your major concern. Mine has always been you have a solid community. You have a safe community and economies will always flourish.You take care of my home and my family and my community. You make us secure. That's how people flourish because they can do it freely in an environment that's safe for them to live their lives in and economies as well. Economies as well.
“Now I want to verify (this number). Because I think that (approximately) 80 percent of the guns that they're finding(in Mexico) that the drug cartels are using, they're coming from Texas; they've got to be going across at the bridge.
“Every week I'm with those (Border Patrol) guys. Because of what's going on and the proximity to our pump station. I really do keep a good pulse on that. Seldom have I ever heard them say that they intercepted people going south with guns. Never once. That's because their focus is on the smugglers headed north.”
I saw a recent comment by, I think it was one of the state legislators, who said that increased law enforcement presence on the border will actually scare away Mexicans and Winter Texans who come south for the winters, and who are an important ingredient to our local economy. But I don’t agree that increased law enforcement along the river scares them away.
Brand: “It is just the opposite. (Because it’s absolutely true that Mexicans coming from Mexico are happy to see law enforcement here because they’re scared of where they’re living.)”
Some Valley spokespersons have said that increased law-enforcement in the Valley and along the river are detrimental to local business.
Brand: “Those of us that live around where we have illegals walking right by us out of the river, and we have guys coming along and we see them with bundles (of illegal contraband), then they tell our guys or employees to get out of here or they’ll be killed. For someone to say that added law enforcement here is a bad idea, well, that’s just a total disconnect. I’m no longer doing any farm work (along the river), but I visit with them regularly. And I hear their stories (of being threatened by illegal border crossers)”
Okay, so these farmworkers out in the field along the river are telling you that they are seeing these cartel-connected drug traffickers just walking by them, basically telling them -- turn a blind to what we’re doing, what you’re seeing, or else you’re going to die?
Brand: “Absolutely. You can talk to any farmer or his employees that work on the river and that is the only way they survive and live in peace.”
Because they just shut up, right?
Brand: “They don't say a word. I promise you, I told some legislators last year, I said, ‘I want to tell you absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt, a man who is a moral and upright guy working on the river and he sees a whole semi-load of cocaine being loaded up from the river going through his property, he will not say a word. He won't say a word.’ ”
Because he knows he’s going to be dead?
Brand: “In fact I can tell you several times when they came out on the farm and they drive up and they get out of the car and there's bundles of marijuana laying in the irrigation ditch right next to the field,when they see it they just get back in their car because they know they interrupted the load. He knows they're (the drug runners) there, hiding somewhere, watching him, so he gets back in his car (goes to eat breakfast for 30 minutes), and then they go back to the same spot, and the bundles of marijuana are gone, and then they go about their day.
“They know that if they turn them in, and they suspect him, then he does feel the threat of retaliation on him or his people that work on the farm.
“That is a given. It is a given. Some of them brag and say, ‘I don't carry guns around with me.’ You know why they can say that? Because they know they're no threat to them because they don't say anything.’’
Unfortunately, while most of us who live on this side of the border still feel relatively safe, that’s not the general perception from people who live out of the area. When they know they have a planned trip here on business, for example, I talk to people all the time who say their number-one concern is personal safety. It’s as if they can’t differentiate the Valley from Mexico. And what’s going on in Mexico is, thankfully, not what is going on here. At least not on the same scale. Not even close. In Mexico, most journalists, for example, have been silenced. And yet, on this side of the border, we’re still free to write about the cartels.
Brand: “Well, we are (different from Mexico). But you've got to admit that in National Geographic, when they say Border Wars, which is the title of (a recent magazine) series, and the first town that comes up is McAllen, people (from out of this area) make that association. All of a sudden, boom. Then they show the dead bodies floating in the river and yeah. I said you can't control (the negative publicity). Nobody can control that.”
In this recent piece of legislation, House Bill 11, the southbound border checkpoints was stripped from the final bill. Your thoughts?
Brand: “Here's where you have the heart of the problem. You have got people concerned about the economy. That's all they're concerned about. They're concerned about nothing but the economy. (Some local officials say) that everybody is safe in the cities. I'm not going to debate that.
“When I spoke in Washington, I started out by saying that I wanted to talk about people that work and live on the river and live outside of the cities. Because they're the ones (who are in danger). They're the ones living with this problem, not the people in the city. For example, McAllen has got 137 patrol officers for the city. That's 47 square miles. Hidalgo County has 1,582 square miles, and the sheriff has the same number of (deputies to patrol that, in comparison).
“There are 22 cities in the county, towns and cities. Those 22 towns and cities represent 200 square miles of this county; 220 square miles out of 1,582 square miles. That leaves 1,362 square miles covered by 137 deputy sheriffs who probably do two shifts. So you're really only talking about (approximately) 60 guys on patrol covering (at any one time) about, what is that? Twenty square miles for each one?
“If I took that same ratio to the city of McAllen, you know how many patrol officers you have for the whole city? Two.”
Some would argue that the more increased law-enforcement presence in the RGV would actually be good for the economy, whereas it seems that some people are arguing just the opposite.
Brand: “Those people arguing against that are wrong. The police chiefs of both McAllen and Mission told me that when we had the National Guard down here, those thousand men here along with the BPS, crime in Mission went down 18 percent. Crime in McAllen went down 9 percent.”
When you recently spoke in D.C. to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, what was your basic message?
Brand: “I'll tell you what I really wanted to do. I wanted to tell them do not be confused between those who tell you it's safe and those who tell you it's unsafe. There is a difference. Just like what I went through with you just now.
“Where there is no law, there is lawlessness. If you tell me you've only got one patrol officerin 20 square miles versus a city who's got one for every square mile and more on average, there's going to be a sense of law there.
“That's a given statistic. So whenever they put those thousand National Guards out there, it did stop (crime). I'll tell you why. Because Border Patrol says they don't ever have enough people. They're probably right. The state of Texas has an average of seven Border Patrol agents for every mile on the river, and we're got over half of the Mexican border.
The other three (border) states (New Mexico, Arizona and California) have 14 to 17 (Border Patrol agents) on average, per mile, along the river.”