FROM THREAT to PROMISE : MAPPING DISAPPEARANCE and the PRODUCTION of DETERRENCE in the SONORA- ARIZONA BORDERLANDS Tara Plath
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antiAtlas Journal #4 - 2020 FROM THREAT TO PROMISE : MAPPING DISAPPEARANCE AND THE PRODUCTION OF DETERRENCE IN THE SONORA- ARIZONA BORDERLANDS Tara Plath This article investigates how the concept of deterrence is maintained in the United States border enforcement policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence,” by interrogating how death and its representations are produced by local NGOs in Arizona. It proposes that mass death and disappearance in Arizona’s deserts are not the consequences of poor policy, but rather its driving force. Tara Plath is a researcher currently based in Lowell, Massachusetts. She holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the appropriation of humanitarian frameworks in U.S. Border Patrol practices. Keywords: Prevention through Deterrence, Necropolitics, Mortality Mapping The horizon of the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, taken on the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. July 2019. To quote this article: Plath, Tara, "From Threat to Promise : Mapping Disappearance and the Production of Deterrence in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands", published on July 10th, 2020, antiAtlas Journal #4 | 2020, online, URL: https://www.antiatlas-journal.net/04-mapping-disapearance, last consultation on juillet 17, 2020 I. Representations of death always falter Visualizations of absence, markers of disappearance in ways that are inseparable to finitude,1 mourning and memorial must always the character of their terrain and supplant what is not there with the tangible; environment. The work of disappearing those what cannot be known with the sensible. who resist the effort of various government Globally, untold thousands have disappeared in agencies to contain and control within migrations across seas, mountains, and geographic boundaries, within lines on a map, deserts, whose journeys resist sovereign has very much to do with the qualities of cartographies in life as well as death. border zones that stretch across these strategic lines. This form of disappearance is not bound to a corporeal absence, but expands Untold thousands have disappeared to social death, to epistemological failings, in migrations across seas, to the “discursive limits of legibility,” as mountains, and deserts. Yves Winter describes it, that has allowed such treacherous border zones to be 1 Just as geographies so often dictate sovereign constituted as such . borders, the defense of territory, and forms of circulation between states, they facilitate A poster on a shelter wall in Mexico, just border with the intention of deterring another south2 of the US-Mexico Border reads : attempt to cross, of preventing any more deaths. Like all maps, aggregated and ¡No Vaya Ud! stylized, this map reveals as much as it ¡No Hay Suficiente Agua! obscures. The flattening of sovereign power, ¡No Vale La Pena! ideology, and disappearance into an image of points and lines with a set of imperatives deserves to be interpreted not just as a Hundreds of small red circles, representation of crisis, but as a mechanism each representative of the in the thickly layered apparatus of what 2 location where a set of human William Walters calls the humanitarian border . This assemblage of state and nonstate actors remains have been recovered. towards humanitarian ends is readily apparent in the poster’s map, which is the result of a Over a monochromatic terrain map are hundreds partnership between Humane Borders and the of small red circles, each representative of Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner the location where a set of human remains have (PCOME): the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for been recovered and subsequently attributed to Deceased Migrants3. an undocumented migrant. The poster is produced by Tucson, Arizona-based NGO Humane Borders, Inc. who circulates flyers along the Right and below : a poster warns of the dangers of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border through Arizona’s west desert. The posters are produced and distributed in shelters along the border by the nongovernmental organisation Humane Borders, Inc. 5 According to a query of the Initiative’s the desert’s extreme conditions . database,3 as of September 2019, 3.130 sets of migrants’ remains have been recovered from the 3.130 sets of migrants’ remains mountainous desert regions of southern have been recovered from the Arizona, whose entire southern boundary constitutes 373 of the 1.933 miles mountainous desert regions of international border between Mexico and the southern Arizona. United States4. This number is widely understood to be a significant undercount of Arguably less visible but no less direct is the total number of deaths, as it does not the fact that each fatality in this record is account for those whose remains have not yet the consequence of shifts in United States’ been or may never be recovered, nor the border enforcement policies and specifically thousands of open missing person reports the strategy coined Prevention Through recorded by local NGOs, national and Deterrence (PTD), which was established in the international databases. mid-90s and continues today. The leading factor for these deaths, when can be determined, is dehydration or exposure to 5 The widely-accepted discourse around the Medical Examiner, and its corresponding Prevention4 Through Deterrence places emphasis representation in the form of an open access on the intention of the strategy at the time GIS map do not represent a clear and it was implemented, and interprets migrant straightforward picture of the dangers of fatalities as tragic but “unintended” border-crossing, as they first appear to, but consequences of a strategic turn in 19946. But rather gesture toward a complex and layered excessive focus on the intentions and apparatus of securitization and disappearance. miscalculations of Border Patrol fails to The accumulation of migrant fatalities over address how deterrence continues to operate in the past two decades and the illustration of Arizona’s west desert, and is thusly unable to those deaths constitute a territorial boundary account for why there has been a lack of both visually, materially, and in the cultural comprehensive policy change or adequate imagination, rendering a wall or fence governmental response to the thousands of unnecessary. The map acts not as a secondary death on U.S. soil. By redirecting attention representation of previously established fact, towards the ways in which Prevention Through but as an active and ever-evolving producer of Deterrence operates through the lens of the sovereign territory within the Border Patrol’s mortality map depicted on Humane Borders’ strategic framework of “deterrence.” Through flyers, I would like to put forward a renewed an analysis of the open access GIS map of understanding of how migrant fatalities are migrant fatalities, and the modes through not a corollary effect but are in fact the which this map circulates, I aim to very fuel of deterrence as a functioning demonstrate how Border Patrol’s Prevention strategy. This process is what I call the Through Deterrence strategy sustains itself in deterrent imperative. relation to the ecological and spatio-temporal conditions specific to Sonora-Arizona borderlands; according to the deterrent Migrant fatalities are not a imperative, the space of deterrence must corollary effect but are in fact produce death in order to legitimize the the very fuel of deterrence as a incitement of the fear of death as a functioning strategy in establishing and functioning strategy. maintaining the border. The regional mortality data, which is publicly available from Arizona’s Pima County Office of II. The Space of Deterrence as Border Enforcement 5 The 1990s saw an unprecedented bolstering deterrence”, as outlined in the document of5 U.S. border enforcement, driven by bi- Border Patrol Strategy 1994 and Beyond, with partisan support in the face of public outcry the pretext that the intensification of border over a “border out of control”, with a focus enforcement in traditional corridors of on unauthorized entries in cities along the entries, increased apprehensions, and inflated border7. The U.S. Immigration and smuggling costs would drastically reduce the Naturalization Service expanded its border number of unauthorized entries, resulting with enforcement budget in the southwest from $400 only “the most desperate of those aliens 9 million USD in 1993 to $800 million in 1997, seeking entry” attempting to do so illegally in tandem with a significant increase of agents . It was anticipated that those who did still in specific southwest sectors8. A series of attempt to cross outside of state-sanctioned dramatic injections of budget, personnel, and channels would be forced to do so over “more infrastructure to urban enforcement came in hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and 10 the form of Operation Blockade (later renamed more suited for enforcement ”. Thus, a single Hold-the-Line) in El Paso, Operation line describing the policy followed by a Gatekeeper in San Diego, and Operation meagre framework of tactics resulted in untold Safeguard in Arizona, all implemented between deaths in the desert. 1993 and 1995. These operations were built around the strategy of “prevention through On a trip to Altar, Sonora, Mexico, Rev. Robin Hoover refers to a map marking the deaths of border crossers in the Arizona, USA. Norma Jean Gargasz / Alamy Stock Photo, 2011. In the same year, North American Free events on migration exceeded the agreement’s Trade6 Agreement was put into effect, prediction of job creation in Mexico’s validating Mexico as an established trading manufacturing sector, thwarting any partner with the United States and Canada. anticipated reduction of migration from south 14 Designed primarily with the interests of to north . bankers and corporations at heart, the architects of NAFTA resolutely placed the free The connections between movement of goods and capital as its priority territory, deterrence, and death while refusing to account for the movement of people. Labour-related movement between Mexico must be activated by a body and the U.S., however, has been a perennial deemed disposable.