U.S. Mexico Border Program (Border Watch)
American Friends Service Committee
Roberto L. Martinez, Director
P.O. Box 126147 (1129 Sixth Street)
San Diego, Calif. 92112
(619) 233-4114
(619) 233-6247 fax

It is difficult for any fair-minded American citizen to talk with Roberto Martinez for more than a few moments without feeling a profound sense of anger over the stories he has to tell.

Martinez, a fifth-generation Chicano citizen of the United States, vividly recalls growing up in the border country and being threatened daily with jail and deportation from his native land by thuggish immigration officers who made no effort to hide their prejudice against anyone of Mexican ancestry, and who demonstrated little interest in distinguishing between legal and illegal immigrants and natural-born citizens of the U.S.

Human rights have little meaning along the border, Martinez says, with considerable credibility; this increasingly militarized zone, where a 10-foot steel fence has been erected almost all the way from the Pacific beaches to the Arizona border, is the scene of frequent abuses and physical beatings more reminiscent of the Deep South in the 1950s than most of us might assume is possible anyplace in America in the 1990s. Remember the televised beatings of a truckload of agricultural workers by Riverside County sheriff's deputies in the spring of 1996? The only thing unusual about that is that it was publicized, Martinez says; his Border Watch program records similar events, often more brutal events, on a weekly basis.

The issue here, he points out, goes far deeper than mere political debate, as in welfare reform, or even in the propriety of immigration policy set by fiat, such as the erection of the "steel wall," an executive-agency decision not directed by elected officials. It is, rather, a simple case of lawmen and law-enforcement run amok, beating and even killing undocumented immigrants and sometimes sexually abusing, even raping women and children -- and, by and large, getting away with it in a system where an undocumented alien has little status or credibility in any effort to complain.

That's where Border Watch comes in: Organized in 1977 to advocate for fair treatment of migrant agricultural workers and taking its present form when Martinez arrived in 1983, it ow literally monitors the border and keeps an eye on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, and local law-enforcement agencies, seeking to learn about, document and publicize abuses. Aided by volunteers and interns, Border Watch's staff of two responds to calls, tracks down and interviews victims of abuse, and tries to get the facts out, through a hard-hitting annual report and through the political process, negotiating with law-enforcement and politicians right up through and including Attorney General Janet Reno (who, to her credit, recently appointed a task force to investigate reports of abuse).

Over the years, Martinez has gained considerable respect. He has testified before Congress, met with the Attorney General, and won some highly visible cases, including a $250,000 judgment on behalf of a Mexican youth who was shot and severely injured by a Border Patrol officer who fired through a fence and shot him down while standing quietly within Mexican territory. His work has also earned him frequent death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, the White Aryan Resistance, and, increasingly, local militias, underscoring the obviously racist character behind the violent opposition to immigrants of all varieties in the border country.

"It's one step forward, two steps back sometimes," he said of the quest for justice here. "When you cross the border, your constitutional rights cease to exist." Furthermore, he noted, bipartisan immigration policy that links drugs and crime with all immigration from Mexico unfairly tars the hundreds of thousands of innocent, ambitious workers lured to this country by the mixed message of an economy that calls for hard workers who'll accept low pay but that also seems to despise them.

He acknowledges that things have improved somewhat since Reagan's time. But even under a Democratic national administration, the litany of abuses along the border goes on. Border Watch's 1995 "Abuse Report" for San Diego alone, the most recent document available, enumerates dozens of case studies that would seem unbelievable if they were presented as fiction; a litany of slurs and violence and rape and even murder by sworn law-enforcement officers. Yet much of America turns a blind eye, and Border Watch has had very little luck in getting serious media attention.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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