LIGHTS, CAMERAS, MAYHEM!

The National Media Invades El Paso-And Gets The Story Wrong.

On March 25, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 rolled into El Paso to report
on Mexican drug-cartel violence. Cooper was one more in a recent wave
of national news heavy hitters to parachute in, scare the pants off
millions of viewers, then jet off to the next headline destination.

Dressed in military green, Cooper furrowed his brow and squinted
solemnly into the camera as the lights of the international border
checkpoint glimmered behind him. Guest Fred Burton, identified as a
terrorism and security expert with Stratfor Global Intelligence, was
beamed in from a studio in Austin to paint a menacing picture of
Mexican cartels invading U.S. city streets. "It's just a matter of
time before it really spills over into the United States unless we
shore up the border as best we can," Burton warned.

By God, they're coming to your neighborhood! Looking at another live
feed from El Paso, listening to the breathless reports of violence
and "expert" analysis about "spillover," viewers could only assume
that the city in which Cooper stood was under imminent assault.

That's the reality these days for El Pasoans. Or rather, it's the
twisted perception created by border-warrior politicians and national
news media, and foisted on Juarez's relatively peaceful sister city.
For El Pasoans and residents of nearby border towns, it might all be
a mere oddity-maybe even worth a chuckle-if it didn't mean the
construction of 18-foot border walls, blustery talk about National
Guard troop surges, and new resources for the disastrous war on
drugs. While "troop surge," "border wall," and "drug war" might sound
irresistibly sexy to politicians and pundits, it's border residents
who have to live with the fences and tanks and consequences.

The truth differs wildly from the perception. Certainly, El Paso's
symbiotic relationship with Juarez has been disrupted by the
explosion of drug violence south of the border, which began to tick
up in January 2008. But it's not the kind of disruption brought to
you by CNN, Fox, and the rest of the media pack.

The real impact of the ongoing tragedy in Juarez is felt by El
Pasoans in more indirect and personal ways. While the brutality
across the river has not caused a wave of kidnappings and murders in
El Paso, folks do feel its effects every day. Families are divided.
El Pasoans can no longer visit their friends, relatives, doctors or
dentists in Juarez. Businesses on both sides suffer. The stories are
legion: The high-school student who can't visit her beloved,
105-year-old grandmother because her parents don't want to risk her
safety. The young Juarez woman who worries that her El Paso friends
and relatives won't be able to attend her wedding. And the many
families mourning loved ones lost on the other side of the Rio Grande.

All too often the nightly news portrays Juarez and El Paso as one and
the same, with the U.S. city symbolizing the perils of that new
buzzword: spillover. Night after night, TV spin-meisters, retired
generals, terror analysts and politicians rage on about spillover
violence. They call Mexico a "failed state" and argue for
militarizing the border. No wonder Americans are scared. No wonder El
Pasoans feel doubly besieged.

Consider this gem from former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke,
now a consultant for ABC News, commenting on Juarez: "There is in
fact an insurgency on both sides of the American-Mexican border, and
it's stepped up a lot in the last several years because the Bush
administration ignored it and put its focus on Iraq."

After weeks of hearing the war drums beat louder and louder, Sito
Negron, editor of El Paso's online daily news journal, Newspaper
Tree, recently decided he'd had enough. An insurgency on both sides?
he thought, listening to Clarke's prime-time pronouncement. Are you kidding me?

According to the FBI, more than 1,600 people were killed by cartel
violence in Juarez in 2008. El Paso, a city of 755,000, recorded just
18 murders last year. Laredo had 11; Brownsville and McAllen had
three and nine, respectively. By comparison, Washington, D.C., with a
population smaller than El Paso's, had 186 homicides in 2008.

A native El Pasoan, Negron was fed up with national media feeding the
frenzy to militarize his hometown. He published an opinion piece on
Newspaper Tree titled, "Who are you idiots, and why are you on
national television talking about the border? An open letter to U.S. media":

Get this straight. The violence is not "spilling over the border"
into the U.S. No, every time you say that, whether you mean to or
not, you're conjuring up images of crazed Mexicans crossing the
border to burn Columbus, and you have it backwards. It spilled over
from the U.S. into Mexico and Latin America long ago. ... [F]or the
past 20 years, we've been slowly turning the border into a
militarized zone, so let's not say there isn't violence associated
with both sides of the drug trade and the Drug War. We could say that
we're now sharing the violence to a higher degree, an important
distinction from the simple-minded terminology of "spilling over."

"I'm happy that the border is an important place," Negron said a few
days after writing the piece. "But I'm not happy about the context in
which they place it. I'm generally a little more mainstream, but I
got a bit loose with the editorial because I was ticked off."

Other El Pasoans share his pique. Negron's piece generated several
dozen comments, mostly along this line: "[C]ongratulations on hitting
the nail on the head. I am so tired of hearing so-called pundits
speak about the border without being here and experiencing it for themselves."

Negron cops to his own role in whipping up the frenzy. In January he
penned an article for Texas Monthly called "Baghdad, Mexico,"
comparing the carnage in Juarez to the insurgent violence in Iraq. He
wishes he hadn't made the comparison, he says, because it helped fan
the blaze of overheated news coverage.

"I regret using the word 'Baghdad' because people from elsewhere who
don't know much about the border or Mexico see that word and think,
'We better send the military down there,'" Negron says. "The border
becomes a backdrop for the nation's fears and anxieties instead of a
place where real people live."

In late March, constituents criticized El Paso Mayor John Cook for
missing a civic forum on the city's east side. Cook couldn't make it
because he was being interviewed by BBC anchor Katty Kay. The BBC,
Kay said, had information that drug violence had spilled into El Paso.

Cook was eager to set the record straight. He's had plenty of
practice lately, with national and international media frequently
asking him about the situation in Juarez and in his own city. "I'll
speak with them and tell them there hasn't been any spillover of
violence into El Paso," he says, "and then they will turn around and
report that there is. Mostly I feel like I've wasted my time."

He's not the only border mayor who feels that frustration. In March,
McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez got into an on-air tussle with CNN
anchor Don Lemon. With archival footage of masked soldiers and body
bags in Sinaloa, Mexico-960 miles from McAllen-rolling in the
background, Lemon informed Cortez what was happening in his city.

"I think it's pretty close to a crisis, wouldn't you agree?" Lemon asked.

"The crisis is in Mexico," Cortez replied. "It has not spilled over,
Don, to mine-to our city."

"Yes, I know you say that. I know you say that it hasn't," Lemon
said. "Since you're the mayor of the city, you have to put the best
foot forward. I know your city is affected, but you have to put a
good face on it."

"I'm not putting my head in the sand," Cortez insisted. "I'm just
reporting to you as accurately as I can what has happened."

It's not that border mayors like Cook and Cortez aren't deeply
concerned. Even before the violence began to spike in Juarez last
year, they had been asking Congress for more checkpoints to search
for guns and cash heading south, and for more customs officials at
U.S. ports of entry to stop drugs heading north. The U.S. Government
Accountability Office found that ports of entry need an additional
$4.8 billion in infrastructure and 4,000 more agents to handle the
flow of cars and trade. Border mayors and residents are all for that.
They just don't want their towns to be militarized. Skewed reports of
spillover, they fear, are making that inevitable.

When folks around El Paso and McAllen hear rhetoric about sending
troops to the border, they can't help remembering what happened in
Redford, four hours east of El Paso, in 1997. With drug trafficking
having been declared a "threat to national security," thousands of
soldiers were dispatched to the border. Residents' worst fears were
realized when 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez was shot and killed by a
Marine while tending his family's herd of goats 100 yards from his
home. Hernandez was the first American killed by U.S. military forces
on native soil since the Kent State massacre in 1970. The Marine who
shot him was not charged with murder, though the federal government
eventually paid the Hernandez family $1.9 million to settle a
wrongful death claim.

Shortly after Hernandez's death, military operations along the border
were suspended. Almost a decade later, from June 2006 to July 2008,
6,000 National Guardsmen were sent to the border as part of Operation
Jump Start. This time they were assisting Border Patrol officers with
technical, logistical, and administrative work to free up the patrol
to focus on detaining more illegal immigrants. Eagle Pass Mayor Chad
Foster says the National Guard troops in his area spent most of those
two years parked outside the city in Humvees, dressed in camo
fatigues. "I came back from a trip and thought, 'My God, what
happened while I was away?'" he recalls. This time, at least, there
were no murders-just a couple of bored soldiers who got into trouble
for shooting off rounds on the outskirts of town one night.

Tired of living under virtual house arrest, mayors, county judges and
business leaders formed the Texas Border Coalition in 2006, the first
year of Operation Jump Start. The coalition has tried ever since to
educate state and federal policymakers about what U.S. border towns
are really experiencing and what they really need. They've spent a
lot of time pleading their case in Washington. It's been uphill all the way.

The coalition fought the 18-foot steel wall through their
communities. Growing desperate as the wall went up, they hired the
well-known lobbying firm Via Novo, run by former Bush staffers
Matthew Dowd and Tucker Askew, to try to get Congress' ear. "I don't
know if we wasted our time and money," Cook says. "They built the
damn thing anyway."

Now the coalition is trying to fend off calls for another National
Guard "surge" along the border. It's not easy, with fear-mongering
about drug violence, spillover, and terror threats again reaching
fever pitch. In a March 7 article in The Hill, a daily newspaper
about congressional politics, Republican Congressman Trent Franks of
Arizona served up a vintage sampling of runaway rhetoric about
Mexican drug cartels. "When you have ... gangs and they have loose
ties with al- Qaida, and then you have Iran not too far away from
building a nuclear capability, nuclear terrorism may not be far off."

In February, Gov. Rick Perry flew to Washington to request that 1,000
National Guardsmen (along with six helicopters with infrared radar)
be sent to the Texas-Mexico border. In a subsequent congressional
hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she looked
forward to speaking with Perry. It wasn't all bad news for the Border
Coalition, as Napolitano added, "We do not want to militarize the border."

One problem, Cook says, is that Washington politicians and national
media "don't know how Mexico positively impacts our region"-including
the billions in legal trade across the border. "Typically what
happens in Washington is that they listen to you, and it sounds like
you are getting through to them. Then you leave, and they do whatever
it is they planned to do anyway."

Distorted perceptions of border communities can also stifle local
debate. In January, El Paso City Council member Beto O'Rourke found
himself in a media storm after he added an amendment to a resolution
expressing solidarity with the besieged citizens of Juarez. The
resolution had some "good, common sense policy recommendations about
interdicting more guns heading south," O'Rourke says. But he felt it
needed to say more about the underlying causes of the violence. So he
added language, approved unanimously by the council, calling for an
"honest, open debate on ending the prohibition of narcotics."

"I couldn't in good conscience vote for something that wouldn't be
meaningful," O'Rourke says. "We needed to also focus on the demand
side of the problem."

The day after the resolution passed, national headlines screeched:
"City Council Wants to Legalize Drugs." For the next two weeks,
O'Rourke fielded media calls from all over. He found himself
patiently explaining to reporter after reporter, "No, I am not a drug
pusher," and "Yes, I think the war on drugs is a failure."

At the height of the brouhaha, O'Rourke got a call from Congressman
Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat who has represented El Paso for 12 years.
Mayor Cook, a believer in current U.S. drug policy, had already
vetoed the council resolution. O'Rourke says he had the six votes
needed to override the veto, and he was planning to bring up the
amendment again at the next council meeting.

"The congressman told me in no uncertain terms, 'Stop what you are
doing,' " O'Rourke says. "If you continue with this, you are going to
jeopardize funding that I could otherwise secure for this region.'"

Reyes and five state representatives also sent stern letters to the
council members demanding that they drop the debate. Their message
had its desired effect. After a spirited defense of his amendment,
O'Rourke lost by two votes.

Reyes did not respond to requests for comment from the Observer. Back
in January, however, he told the Huffington Post what had riled him
up. Members of Congress had approached Reyes, chair of the House
Intelligence Committee, after seeing the reports about El Paso
wanting to legalize drugs. "The publicity that was generated last
week," Reyes told the HuffPo, "made it seem that the resolution was
calling on Congress to legalize drugs." Reyes noted that he knew that
was not the council's intent. But, he said, "that was the perception
up here, and a number of members [of Congress] bought it to my
attention and asked me directly, 'What gives with your city council?
Why are you wanting to legalize drugs?'"

A few weeks after the flap, O'Rourke sits at a table in his office,
which overlooks downtown El Paso and Juarez, recounting his
conversation with Reyes. The Mexican city of 1.5 million spreads
south as far as the eye can see. "He told me, 'My colleagues say that
you want to legalize drugs.' I said, 'Congressman, you should tell
them that's not what we are saying.' But he says, 'Well, that is the
perception.'"

O'Rourke sits back in his chair. "Well," he recalls telling Reyes,
"then you need to do a better job of presenting our perspective here
about what's really going on."

The same disconnect between reality and perception, O'Rourke says,
has derailed meaningful debate about immigration reform. "For the
past two years, we've been told that Mexicans are smuggling
terrorists, taking our jobs, and selling us drugs, and that we are
being invaded," O'Rourke says. "And it worked. It totally freaked
people out, and they reacted emotionally to an issue that I think
could be solved rationally."

If O'Rourke's amendment had passed, he says, El Paso City Council
members "could have gone to McAllen, Laredo, or San Diego and said,
'Let's join in common cause and petition the federal government to
really look at the demand side of our drug problem.'"

He won't stop trying. O'Rourke wants to organize a national
conference in El Paso on U.S. drug policy. "We are ground zero in the
drug war-this is it," O'Rourke says. "We are disproportionately
affected by any U.S. policy that deals with Mexico, whether it's
immigration or, in this case, drug policy. We should be the ones
framing this and informing the policymakers at the national level-not
Lou Dobbs or people in D.C. or other parts of the country. Because
the reality is that Mexico scares them, the border scares them, and
military interdiction seems to make perfect sense to them."

Long after the latest news invasion pulls out of El Paso, folks along
the border will still be dealing with a broken immigration system and
the misguided policies spawned by political opportunism and media
myths. "Anderson Cooper is a nice guy," says Sito Negron of Newspaper
Tree, "but I realized in speaking with him that he doesn't know a
whole lot about the border. It's not a critique of him, but he
doesn't spend a lot of time here."

Who does spend a lot of time here, besides the local media? "Nobody
does," Negron says. There are a few exceptions, he says, counting
them off quickly: Sam Quinones does some border work for The Los
Angeles Times. The Dallas Morning News has Alfredo Corchado, a former
El Pasoan, reporting from Mexico City. John Burnett reports from the
border for National Public Radio. The rest of the media parachutes in
when a story like the violence in Juarez heats up.

Local reporters and officials occasionally have a chance to give a
national audience a window into what's actually happening. But the
story they have to tell is complicated and nuanced. It can't compete,
in the American imagination, with daily tirades from the likes of
CNN's Dobbs and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. Dobbs has been especially
avid and persistent in calling for armed troops on the border. In a
recent newscast, he had this advice for President Barack Obama:
"Bring home the troops from Okinawa, Afghanistan, Iraq ... and bring
them here to secure our border and stop the flow of illegal
immigrants, drugs and terrorists."

Martin Bartlett, an El Paso TV reporter, recently was invited to talk
on CNN about violence in Juarez. Bartlett has been reporting from
Juarez for more than a year. During his interview, CNN anchor Kyra
Phillips stood in front of a giant projection of the Mexican flag
with the words "Mexican Violence" and the image of an AK-47 splashed
across it. Phillips informed Bartlett that the military troop buildup
had been successful in Juarez. Didn't it make sense to have a troop
buildup on the U.S. side as well?

"Actually, folks here are unwilling to see U.S. troops along the
border," Bartlett told her. "They are disinterested in the full
militarization of the border."

Bartlett didn't have time during his three minutes to explain the
history of militarization on the border, or elaborate on why
residents don't want National Guard troops in their towns. He did say
that law-enforcement officials had seen some "spillover" on the U.S.
side, which he described as an increase in petty crime linked to drug
activity. He didn't explain what he meant by "petty crime." But it
was enough for CNN to run with the headline, "Mexican drug war spills over."

Javier Sambrano, the public information officer for the El Paso
Police Department, says there has been no increase in petty crime
over the last year. "We haven't seen anything out of the ordinary,
and there hasn't been any change in the crime stats," Sambrano says.
The biggest side effect from violence in Juarez, Sambrano says, has
been a handful of Mexican nationals transported to El Paso's Thomason
Hospital with gunshot wounds.

In a July El Paso Times story, Thomason Hospital CEO Jim Valenti said
22 victims of cartel violence in Juarez had been admitted to the
hospital so far in 2008. Some of them were Juarez police officers who
had been involved in gunfights with cartel members. The police
department provided security for hospital staff concerned that cartel
members might show up at the hospital to execute the officers.

"The issue of spillover is a very sensitive and emotional issue here
in El Paso," says David Cuthbertson, the FBI's special agent in
charge of the local office. Council Member O'Rourke says even
residents are confused about what constitutes spillover. "There is
also a war of facts and information," he says. O'Rourke, for one,
believes that there are more kidnappings in El Paso than are reported
to the FBI or local police. "The real number we don't know," he says,
"because the kidnappings are resolved with the agreement on the
victims' part that they won't say anything to the authorities."

While El Pasoans argue over semantics and statistics, residents in
Juarez fight for their lives as innocent bystanders in a battle over
who will sell cocaine and marijuana to the world's biggest drug
consumer. The Obama administration appears to be looking at the
problem from a fresh perspective, shifting U.S. policy to focus more
on the promotion of substance-abuse treatment and prevention, and
less on the drug war. During her March visit to Mexico, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton said that battling cartel violence should be a
shared responsibility and emphasized that America needs to curb its
demand for illegal drugs. That's a decidedly different political tack
from the Bush years, when all the talk was about bigger walls,
increased firepower, and Mexico's responsibility for the problem.
Other high-level administration officials have been dispatched to
Mexico with messages similar to Clinton's, including Homeland
Security Secretary Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder.

This new approach risks sounding "soft" to Americans fed a steady
media diet of border mayhem and spillover. "What we have is a failure
to communicate," Negron says. Americans "don't have a clue about
Mexico, and El Paso becomes the stage for the latest thing that
everyone should be afraid of."

Still, Negron tries to look at the bright side. "At least CNN sent
Anderson Cooper to El Paso," he says, "and not Lou Dobbs."