NEAR MIDNIGHT ON February 25, 1992, Enrique Arguelles Palos must have felt like a lucky man, because he decided to risk wading across the Rio Grande at El Paso with a duffel bag stuffed with dope. Conditions had seemed auspicious for smuggling. A quarter moon had yet to rise. And the spindly, waist-high brush on the American bank provided good cover and appeared quiet. Only it wasn’t. When a U.S. Border Patrol van cruising the river without lights happened onto the scene, both agents jumped out, and one shattered the night’s stillness with a single shotgun blast. Arguelles’ comrades — he’d crossed the border with at least three other “mulas” — splashed in panic back into Juarez, Mexico. A patrolman took an errant pellet in his leg in the confusion. And 26-year-old Arguelles, described in his autopsy as “a well developed, well nourished, rather muscular Latin male” absorbed, at point-blank range, about a dozen pellets of buckshot into his chest. He died instantly, face-down in America.
The story of Arguelles’ death wasn’t exceptional on a border growing more brutal with each passing year. But the tale of its aftermath says a great deal about federal law enforcement secrecy — and accountability — on the border. Suspecting possible bungling by the agents, the media and civil rights groups on both sides of the Rio Grande demanded more details about the shooting after Mexican newspapers ran grisly photos of the body lying handcuffed on the U.S. bank. The Border Patrol in El Paso, following a long-standing policy, wouldn’t release the agents’ names. A routine internal investigation was promised, but its findings too were never announced. And finally, following a time-tested pattern, the public spotlight shifted elsewhere and Arguelles quietly became the latest episode in a story of eight similar shootings (five of them fatal) involving El Paso immigration officers over the previous five years. The agency also was implicated in a drowning, sporadic beatings, illegal deportations and even a case of arson.
I waited behind police and Border Patrol blockades the chilly night Arguelles mis-calculated his odds. The “no comments” were ritual. Nevertheless, over the next six months, trying to crack the Border Patrol’s wall of secrecy for the El Paso Times, I began to badger the agents who manned those bar-ricades. And for the first time ever, after weeks of false starts, they began to talk back.
Meeting at bowling alleys, bars and in their homes, they revealed that the Border Patrol’s aloof silence hid a poor track record on investigating and prosecuting allegedly abusive officers. Other agents admitted bluntly that catching Mexicans had devolved into a dehumanizing quota game. And, following up on accusations that the border , agencies were unresponsive to abuse victims? complaints, a tape recording experiment later showed that both the Border patrol and its parent agency, the Immigration and 1924 when it was created. They haven’t learned you can’t be a cowboy anymore.”
Complaints about federal law enforcement violence on the border are, of course, not new. But they are growing louder.
Beginning with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s 1980 report, The Tarnished Golden Door, U.S. agents have been charged with using bruising force when patrolling against illegal immigration and drug traf-ficking along the U.S.-Mexican line. Since then, the spectrum of alleged victims has broadened to include a large number of legal U.S. residents; a third of the complainants fil-ing abuse cases with the FBI in El Paso have non-Hispanic surnames. And by last year, the brutality controversy became a national issue when three human rights organizations issued reports blistering the INS, the Customs Service and especially the Border Patrol for allegedly committing scores of beatings, illegal inter-rogations, deportation and a handful of shoot-ings along the increasingly tense 2,000-mile boundary: One group, the Houston-based Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project, supported its allegations with nearly 400 field interviews.
Incidents like these would spawn terrific media scrutiny if city police forces were involved. The accused officers would usually be identified within hours. And in places
such as Dallas, “rap sheets” on the lawmen’s abuse records would be open to public perusal. So the INS’s tight-lipped policies have only compounded its rogue reputation in places like El Paso, a mostly-Hispanic desert city of half a million where nearly 1,000 U.S. immigration agents actually outnumbered local law enforcement personnel. “The Border Patrol is as visible in El Paso as the police,” observed Jose Moreno, director of the local Catholic diocese’s migrant and refugee services center. “I think that presence impacts the psyche of this community — all the more reason to make them accountable.”
“Hogwash,” the feds say. “I hear this coverup allegation all the time and it makes me want to gag,” counters Dale Musegades, El Paso’s sunburnt, mustachioed Border Patrol chief, a man whose good-ol’-boy persona grows pained under questioning. “We live in a fishbowl. My job’s on the line and so is everybody else’s here. We’re accused of not taking disciplinary action against abuses but we do — we just don’t advertise it.”
As it turns out, with good reason.
Interviews with almost a dozen Border Patrol agents and information in records obtained from the Justice Department revealed that federal investigators failed to even find the agents implicated in three of the eight most widely-publicized Border Patrol shootings and beatings in El Paso since 1987. Meanwhile, an agent convicted of a felony assault against local citizens continued to be employed by the patrol for over a year. No records of investigations into a notorious 1989 beating and illegal deportation case were on file, even though such a probe was required by law. And the results of other internal disciplinary investigations — one of them two years old — had never been released.
Inside evidence also connected some names to El Paso’s more notorious abuse controversies:
• Mario Bellamy, an agent accused in the June 1992 beating a Juarez woman while she was carrying a toddler, had previously been involved in two other violent incidents and was still kept on the force. First, Bellamy was dismissed and reinstated after drawing a pistol, in a bloody fistfight with a fellow agent in 1988. Later, in a 1990 affidavit filed with local Mexican Consulate, it was alleged that he had pummeled and threatened to shoot undocumented Juarez limeseller and evangelist pastor Jose Luis Melendez on the banks of the Rio Grande. Bellamy, whose identity had to be culled from municipal police reports, remained on active duty while the FBI investigated — and cleared — him in a June incident of alleged abuse involving a Juarez housewife.
• Two other Border Patrol agents arrested in an off-duty brawl at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1990 weren’t dismissed — even after one of them, Donald Toovey, was con-victed of two felonies for blasting away with his service revolver at a parked truck. Toovey continued working for a patrol maintenance crew for more than a year before finally being fired. “Maybe for them, that’s within their disciplinary boundaries,” observes El Paso Police spokesman Bill Pfiel. “But in the P.D., even a felony indictment has been cause for immediate dismissal.”
• Probably most troubling of all, two agents found negligent in the 1987 drowning of undocumented Mexican.Armando Valenzuela faced no discipline whatsoever. A federal court ordered the U.S. government to pay Valenzuela’s family $210,000 in damages, after agents Glynis 0. Major and Ramon Vargas Jr. tipped the raft Valenzuela was riding across the Rio Grande. Valenzuela couldn’t swim. Major was later promoted to an administrative post in New Orleans and Vargas still patrols in El Paso, sources inside the agency say.
“The problem is, there’s a huge difference in how discipline is doled out for the same offense,” explains a seven-year veteran of the Border Patrol who requested anonymity. “In about 70 percent of the offense categories, the punishments can range from verbal reprimand to dismissal. And there’s certainly cronyism in how it’s handled.”
There were other revelations. A review of hundreds of pages of federal court records also showed how the agency managed to keep a low profile even when civil rights lawyers slapped it with potentially scandalous lawsuits.
Of the three known suits filed against the Border Patrol in El Paso over the past six years, only one — the dead rafter’s — ever advanced far enough to arrive before a judge. The government’s preferred arrangement with its usually impoverished plaintiffs, it seemed, was to settle out of court, out of the media spotlight and out of pocket.
Pedro Garcia, a legal U.S. resident and high-school student who claims he was handcuffed, held in a detention cell and illegally deported from downtown El Paso in 1989, got $5,000 in exchange for a legal agreement absolving the government of any wrongdoing.
Juarez teenager Octavio Romo Chavez made out slightly better.
In U.S. court records, Romo testified that two Border Patrol agents caught him fishing illegally on the El Paso bank of the Rio Grande back in 1987 and sent him packing across the river — after first throwing his reels and lines into the muddy water. Incensed, 17- year-old Romo hurled curses from the Mexican side of the river. One agent unholstered his handgun and responded, splitting Rorno’s left femur with a bullet. Four years later, the government quietly wrote Romo a check for $15,000, in exchange for dropping his civil suit. “Nobody has ever told me if anything is still being investigated, or even if they had a suspect,” Romo said philosophically.
Interviewed recently at his tidy cinderblock home in a dusty Juarez colonia, Romo, now a baby-faced burrito vendor, rolled up a pantleg to display his fifteen-thousand-dollar scar. While a television blared Mexican variety shows into his cement-floored living room, his voice trailed off and with a shrug he seemed to say: that’s the way the chips always fall on the border. La Migra — as the federal agency is known along the border — has lived up to expectations set, say, by Juarez’s own casually brutal police.
***
IF SECRECY-OBSESSED immigration officials have been circling their green Chevy Suburbans against an embarrass-ing onslaught of public criticism, they appar-ently just take their cues from Washington.
This became clear soon after the Times faxed the U.S. Department of Justice — the parent agency of the INS and Border Patrol — a list of 22 well-documented abuse com-plaints lodged against El Paso agents since 1987. The status of Justice’s internal inves-tigations into the list of cases, which ranged from sexual harassment to shootings, were a mystery. As the employer, chief investi-gator and judge of the agents involved, the department would have the answers on file.
“This will take some time to track down,” warned Amy Casner; a media spokeswoman at Justice who grudgingly fielded the request in March of 1992. As it turns out, Casner wasn’t kidding. Nine weeks and seven unanswered phone calls later, she matter-of-factly reported back that no records of 14 of the cases existed. Where investigations into the remaining incidents did exist, the guilt or innocence of the agents involved, much less their names, couldn’t be divulged. Months of frustrating phone calls followed — long distance exercises in pointlessness. Did Justice have an outreach program to address public corn- , plaints? How were problem agents tracked through the disciplinary process? And could alleged victims appeal the department’s find-ings — assuming those findings were ever made public? Dozens of calls and 29 pages of letters later the Times even resorted to asking then-Senator Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, for help. The nation’s policeman, the agency that spawned the square-jawed G-men and that nobly battled racism at Selma, couldn’t be budged when it came to accounting for abuse by its own people. “I want you to know we’re not trying to stonewall or anything,” Casner insisted — in a rare returned call in July. Less than two weeks later, however, she announced that she couldn’t handle any more human rights queries; that responsibility wasn’t in her portfolio.
What civil rights experts on the border have alleged for years is that nobody ever really handles the border agencies’ human rights portfolio. Tales of federal indifference or even hostility to public complaints have long plagued the organizations accused of misconduct.
“There’s no doubt about it, the complaint process is still very, very bureaucratic and confusing,” complained John F. Dulles III of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Dulles noted how all serious abuse complaints were bumped by the INS to the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General — sort of a Grand Central Station of federal misconduct claims already overwhelmed by thousands of cases ranging from theft of office stationary to misuse of government vehi-cleS. Meanwhile, back on the border, the local Border Patrol office and its boss, the INS, disavowed responsibility for each oth-ers’ brutish behavior, engaging in a bit of fin-ger-pointing that further mocked their already questionable claims of openness.
“It was amazingly bureaucratic. It was like dealing with Guatemala, not the U.S.,” recalled Fernando Dubove, an El Paso Catholic Diocese attorney who shepherded an abuse complaint first through the Border Patrol, then the INS, then the Justice Department.
His case, a complaint by Juarez house-wife Olivia Quintanilla de Otero, offers a depressingly typical tale of government cal-lousness. Stopped by unidentified Border Patrolmen at the El Paso airport in 1991, Quintanilla and her family allege they were ridiculed and called “pigs” and “pieces of shit” by the arresting agents. An affidavit filed with the Mexican Consulate adds that her two teenagers wept when the lawmen taunted Quintanilla with sexually suggestive remarks. And when both the consulate and the diocese demanded an investigation, the INS responded — five months later. The anonymous agents didn’t act unprofessionally, read the three-paragraph reply. Quintanilla, meanwhile, was never contacted for her side of the story.
“We are. not inaccessible to complainants,” bristled Al Guigni, El Paso’s INS chief, when confronted with horror stories like these. “We act on every report that conies across my desk.” Speaking for his agency, Chief Musegades repeated a superannuated Border Patrol chestnut: a record of only one complaint in every 17,000 arrests makes his troops the envy of the law enforcement world. “If people have complaints,” Musegades declared, “we’re waiting for them.”
So the Times accepted that offer.
Between May and August of last year, Chicana university students, staff reporters and Juarez dentists trooped into the newspaper’s bathrooms to be wired for sound and sent off to test what had long been claimed unprovable: whether the U.S. government brushes off civil rights complaints.
Stuffing microcassette recorders down their pantyhose or taping them to their paunches, the Times’ volunteers set out to capture responses at Border Patrol headquarters, INS checkpoints and Customs bridge crossings. The complaints were always legitimate. The questions were polite and neutral. And the results were tragicomic.
In half of the dozen encounters, the federal organizations didn’t enforce their own complaint regulations.
• Irregularities marred fully half of the eight taped conversation with the INS. The agency’s behavior ranged from bafflement at proper complaint procedures to outright bullying (“0Kjefe,” one white-shirted agent sneered, “I think we got a problem here. He wants to make a BIG complaint. Against YOU! You that’s got a white shirt!”) and deft brush-offs (one INS bridge inspector icily instructed a volunteer to take his complaints to the Mexican Consulate).
• Three taped conversations with the Border Patrol recorded bureaucratic confusion and dissembling. On two occasions, Border Patrol supervisors simply took down information on blank sheets of paper and advised the vol-unteers they would be contacted. One vol-unteer — a legal resident who later sued the agency for allegedly manhandling him dur-ing an arrest — never heard from the agency again.
• Customs was taped only once. The inspec-tor was solicitous, but Customs’ much-touted bilingual flyers outlining the complaints process weren’t visible at any border checkpoint.
Two voices stood out on the hours of tapes. One belonged to Rachel Martel, a 36-yearold El Paso hospital secretary who was attempting to report how a plainclothes Border Patrol agent at the airport allegedly singled her and her 14-year-old daughter out for harassment because they were dark-skinned. Echoing in a Border Patrol office, her singsong Tex-Mex cadences quaked with outrage as a patrol supervisor suggested the abusive agent was an impostor — a thug posing as a federal officer. “If an educated citizen can’t get any answers when’they’ re abused,” Martel said bitterly after the taping, “what about all those illegal aliens they deal with?” She, too, received a written denial from the INS — three months, six futile telephone calls and four unanswered letters’ after the incident.
The other voice was outdoors, backed up by idling cars and car horns. The script is slapstick.
“Where can I report a case of abuse?” Juarez dentist Adolfo Lopez asked an Anglo immigration inspector at the Paso Del Norte international bridge in June. (Lopez wanted to file charges against an INS agent he alleges detained and humiliated his family with racist slurs during a routine inspection).
“A case of what?” the inspector snapped.
“Of abuse. Harassment.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” marveled Lopez. “You see, I’ve recently been verbally abused, and I want to know how to report it.”
“I don’t know,” the inspector replied. “A case of what?”
“A case of abuse. Of verbal assault. I’ve been verbally abused.”
“Ah — I don’t know. Correct. An officer from there. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I can’t report it?” Lopez persisted.
“In Juarez?”
“No, here with you” — Lopez pointed at the inspector’s shirt — “with the shirts.”
“The officer,” the INS man finally huffed, impatiently gesturing with his arm, “— with the officer.” And he directed Lopez to a fruit inspector with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
***
THE PASSKEY TO THE INS’s skeleton closet turned out to be something of a surprise — a telling fragment of the larger puzzle of border abuse. Morale in the immigration service, especially among the Hispanic agents who make up half of the INS payroll, seemed blighted. Almost with a sense of catharsis, erstwhile lifers would agree to meet at a local Denny’s during an off hour, order an iced tea, and talk with the hangdog weariness of spurned men. Disgruntled agents simmered mostly over allegations of racism in the ranks and cronyism by an Anglo old-boy network called the “Texas Mafia.” Promotions of minorities were stymied, they said. Several Border Patrol officers already had filed discrimination suits. And in an internal Equal Employment Opportunity survey leaked by Border Patrol sources, job statistics seemed to back those charges up. In the INS’s Southern Region, which includes 13 states reaching from Florida to New Mexico, Hispanics were clustered disproportionately at the lowest-paid positions.
In El Paso, low-skilled Border Patrol jobs were occupied by almost twice as many Hispanics as Anglos, while Anglos outnumbered Hispanics more than two to one in top posts. That same imbalance was evident at the El Paso INS office, which mainly employs bridge inspectors. “That kind of trend leads to the perception within the service of a glass ceiling for minority promotions,” agreed Bob Martinez, the INS’s highest-ranking Hispanic administrator in Washington. “Unfortunately, that perception has a way of becoming reality.” In a remarkable venting of bitterness, agents of all races also complained about the Border Patrol’s intense top-to-bottom pressures to nab more “undocumenteds” — essentially vindicating years of allegations by rights activists that the game of cat-and-mouse on the border had essentially become a massive quota exercise. “Numbers make the world go ’round,” remarked Steven Franz, an ex-agent who served in El Paso from 1979 to 1985 and is now an investigator with the Texas Education Agency. “More arrests mean more press coverage. More press coverage means more money from Congress.”
Case in point: An internal protest obtained by the Times alleges that a supervisor named Ben Chaves lined up his troops last August and coolly informed them that if arrest num-bers didn’t start to increase their job perfor-mance evaluations would suffer. The agency would not allow Chaves to comment.
“We were told that appraisals were coming up and we needed to produce,” said Arcadio J. Neira, one of 13 agents who signed the protest and who is taking the agency to court in an unrelated race discrimination suit. “It’s as if we’re a company producing shoes or pants, not dealing with people.”
The irony, of course, is that the very bureaucracies so criticized for their arrogant and brutal treatment of so many on the border should subject their own people to abuse. Whether the internal disaffection will reach critical mass is doubtful, although the Border Patrol union president in San Diego has allowed that some loose talk of a Hispanic class action suit is making the rounds there.
In the meantime, the clumsy cudgel of the INS continues to assure that El Paso remains in the news as a dog-eared variety of Dodge City on the Rio Grande. The latest flap? A federal judge ruled last December that the U.S. Border Patrol couldn’t trespass any longer on Bowie High School, an overwhelmingly Hispanic campus where government vans had torn across parade fields and gun-toting agents had bullied teenaged students for IDs. That humiliation in court has actually resulted in some encouraging concessions: The El Paso Border Patrol office has become the first in the nation to create its own public affairs board to handle complaints and concerns. Perhaps this is part of a slow thaw, of a new era of glasnost.
Then again, after six months of asking, I still don’t know who pulled the trigger on Enrique Arguelles Palos.
