Soldiers of Misfortune
For as long as the U.S. military has patrolled the border in search of drug smugglers, there has been the possibility that an innocent civilian would be killed. The government insists the chance is worth taking. Tell that to the family of EzequielHernandez, Jr.
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Created in 1989 by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, JTF-6 also owes its existence to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell, who envisioned a key role for the military in the Bush administration’s National Drug Control Strategy. When one considers the political inclinations of both Powell and Cheney, one can imagine the public-relations value they saw in this maneuver. Others in the military were less sanguine. As one Defense Department spokesperson told me, “We were ordered to get into the counterdrug policy, and believe me, we were dragged in kicking and screaming. There are a lot of hard, complicated issues to be faced when you’re talking about military personnel on U.S. soil. But there was strong pressure for the military to be more involved in the drug fight. For a lot of lawmakers, this is their big political shtick.”
Beneath the rhetorical bravado, however, one finds a war that is being carried out with a near-total absence of urgency. In the dull, workaday setting of vast Biggs Army Air Field, part of Fort Bliss near El Paso, some 169 soldiers and support personnel toil at JTF-6, including its commander, Brigadier General James Lovelace, who, like his predecessors, will serve eighteen months before moving on to the next post. This lack of continuity exasperates other senior colleagues in the federal drug war—including one senior official at another agency who says of JTF-6: “It’s basically a way station where a one-star general gets a second star, and then he moves on.”
The wheezing bureaucracy that directs the military’s drug warriors hardly provokes an image of a lean, mean fighting machine. It takes months for JTF-6 translators to provide a wiretap transcript and usually a year to deploy an operational military unit. Its so-called rapid support unit renders assistance in about a month, according to spokesperson Bossch. In memos distributed to local, state, and federal drug-fighting agencies, JTF-6 regularly promotes what a senior official at another agency terms “services they want you to use, as opposed to what we need.” Canine training, first-aid instruction, fence building, map reading—all useful, but are they unique or simply a way for one agency to spend another’s money?
JTF-6’s biggest federal client is the Border Patrol, an agency whose primary function is not narcotics interdiction, but people interdiction. When I asked a senior Border Patrol official at the Marfa sector about what use he had made of the military through JTF-6, he enthused, “They improved a shooting range out at the Marfa airport and saved us seventy percent of the cost. They also built a radio workshop for us much cheaper than we could’ve done it.”
Compared with such dubious pursuits, the interdiction mission against El Cubano’s backpacking operation must have resembled the invasion of Normandy in the eyes of the officials who reviewed it for merit. In truth, though, when U.S. Border Patrol assistant Marfa sector chief Rudy Rodriguez penned the proposal last June or July, he knew that the request for several LP/OPs (listening posts–observation posts) to be stationed in and around El Polvo wasn’t actually going to snare El Cubano. “The backpacking situation had something to do with the request,” Rodriguez told me recently, “but it wasn’t just that. I knew there wasn’t a pattern I could point them to by the time they got there. Mainly, we wanted to use them here as a force multiplier because of our lack of personnel.” Though Bossch of JTF-6 would later explicitly tell me, “We’re not a force multiplier—they’re not using us for that purpose,” it seems clear that despite all the sophisticated gadgetry offered by the military, Rodriguez called upon JTF-6 for one basic reason. The Border Patrol Marfa sector—having been reminded once again that a small-time smuggling scheme could crop up anywhere within its 115,000-square-mile jurisdiction and operate with impunity—needed more bodies and didn’t care where it got them.
Perhaps an objective review board would have seen through Rodriguez’s request and discarded it. But there is nothing remotely objective about Operation Alliance, the bizarre outfit at Biggs Field that evaluates all agency requests for military assistance. Funded by the very federal agencies (such as the Border Patrol and Customs) that file the lion’s share of the requests, Operation Alliance’s nineteen members happen to work for those agencies as well. Not surprisingly, then, the organization—which, apart from receiving policy guidelines from Washington, answers to no agency—dutifully passes on to JTF-6 85 percent to 90 percent of the requests (or about 1,500 annually), according to Operation Alliance’s senior tactical coordinator, Brian Pledger. Predictably, Operation Alliance rubber-stamped the Marfa sector’s request. The proposed mission, like all others, was then forwarded to one of JTF-6’s four lawyers. What followed was a painstaking, time-consuming review to determine whether the project in any way violated the Reconstruction-era Posse Comitatus statute, which was enacted to ensure that the military does not get into the business of domestic law enforcement. (Though watered down somewhat in the eighties, the statute still limits domestic policing on the part of the DOD in ways that do not apply to the National Guard, the Border Patrol, Customs, the FBI, and the DEA.) In signing off on the El Polvo mission, the JTF-6 lawyers would, in effect, give the lie to the fiery oratory of politicians who promised their constituents, amid the popping of flashbulbs, to wage this war the old-fashioned way.
Shortly after one of the attorneys okayed Rodriguez’s proposal, a JTF-6 message went out to every Army and Marine base in America, soliciting volunteers for an operational mission along the Texas-Mexico border. The message billed the El Polvo mission as a real-world encounter with drug smugglers, a challenge more bracing than the usual numbing base drill. All the same, it was a military exercise. The unit that signed up for the operation would do so not to win the War on Drugs but to satisfy one portion of the unit’s “mission essential task list”—the checklist of duties any outfit must fulfill before becoming eligible for deployment in an actual battle. According to Bossch, the unit that was selected was simply the first that volunteered. That happened to be the 5th Batallion, 11th Marine Regiment, an artillery unit stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California.
In October, fully four months after Castañeda had received word about the backpacking operation, the Border Patrol met with JTF-6 and Camp Pendleton officials to plan their mission. In that span of time the backpackers had doubtless altered their route, as smugglers do. Nonetheless, Castañeda, Rodriguez, and the military advisers elected to station an LP/OP unit near El Polvo, with a sensor to be buried at the crossing to signal comings and goings. Meanwhile, the 5th Batallion was transported to Biggs Field, where the troops engaged in situational military exercises, strategy sessions, and Posse Comitatus statute seminars for a few weeks. Following this, the unit returned to Camp Pendleton and intensified its mission planning, which included setting up a prototype operational center. All in all, the Marines engaged in a phenomenal flurry of activity, considering that the initial justification for the mission had long since evaporated.
Included in their standard military training was something known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff Standing Rules of Engagement. In essence, the rules of engagement dictate that when a soldier perceives an imminent threat to the lives of his fellow soldiers, he responds not as a police officer would—with a warning or with intent to disarm or wound—but instead as a warrior would on a battlefield. As Marine colonel Thomas Kelly explained in a press conference two days after the death of Ezequiel Hernandez, “If you reach the point where you fire for fear of your lives, then you usually fire to kill.”
Rudy Rodriguez of the Border Patrol knew, as he put it, “In times of stress, you revert to your training.” According to Rodriguez, “I mentioned to the planners when they were making their threat assessment, ‘You’ll see guns everywhere all along the border.’ I told them, ‘In daytime, a guy with a gun is not a threat.’”
Apparently, the planners forgot to pass this information on to U.S. Marine corporal Clemente Bañuelos.
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