Declaración: No guerra contra migrantes

The pounding drum, the stomping feet with rhythmic rattles, and the resounding echo of "Pueblo, ¡Si! Guerra, ¡No! thundered up both sides of Broadway in Los Angeles this morning. One hundred and twenty-five people marched in the drizzle and unseasonable chill from Olympic to the Federal Building on Temple to declare that the U.S. war on migrants must end.

As shoppers and workers poured to their doorways to support the marchers, twenty members of Danza Cuauhtémoc, escorted by the Aztlan Nation Harmony Keepers, spun, stepped, twirled, and dipped at the head of the procession. The youngest danzantes, ninas and ninos of five and six years old, led the way. A boy of about ten pulled the drum, while a teenager pounded out the complex rhythms.

Following the danzantes were members of Comité pro democracia en México, AnswerLA, Jornaleros Unidos de Valle San Gabriel, Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos (FUPA), Colectivo Tonantzin, the Orange County Red de vigilancia contra cazamigrantes, brought together by the Anti-Minuteman Watch Network, with an outpouring of anarchists.

At each intersection the east- and west-side contingents faced the passing motorists and each other, and bullhorned across the street, "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!" Signs boldly announced Migra: racista y asesina." Marchers declared, "Esta mi tierra, esta mi lucha."

Outside the Federal Building speaker after speaker decried the U.S. assault on migrants, proclaiming the southwest U.S. and Mexico as ancestral territory. Today's marchers had coalesced around the needless and tragic Border Patrol killing of Guillermo Martínez Rodríguez on December 20.

Eighteen-year-old Martínez, father of two small children, was shot in the back and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent at a distance of less than eighteen feet with a hollow point bullet as he tried to cross into the United States. He was the last to die on the border in 2005. A record number of people, estimated at 500, died crossing the border last year, and four have been shot by the Border Patrol since October. In the eleven years since the U.S.’s Operation Gatekeeper policy authorized the construction of walls and increased patrols across parts of the U.S.-Mexico border, some 4000 people have died trying to migrate. Prior to Operation Gatekeeper, annually fewer than a dozen people died making the southern passage.

One march leader deplored the increasing U.S. military presence in Central America and the Caribbean. In another conversation, a person remarked on the inhumanity of the upcoming trial of Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss in Arizona. The two face up to fifteen years in prison for transporting two dehydrated border crossers to a local hospital.

Meanwhile, in the next few weeks the Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant bill will be debated in the Senate. The bill would classify border crossers, including 1.5 million children, as felons; enable deportation and imprisonment of border crossers without legal counsel or family notification; 700 more miles of wall to divide Mexico from the United States; militarize the border with the newest war technology; and make it a felony to aid an undocumented worker, putting charities and family members at risk of three to thirty years in prison. While fewer than a dozen police lounged on either side of Temple Street, marchers brought together the messages of the day laborers, migrants, those who aid them, and from beyond the grave, the message of Guillermo Martínez and rest who died because of U.S. immigration policies: no war on immigrants.