US Border Patrol troops’ free-fire zone over borders

[Once, when a country attacked another by force of arms, it was called WAR, and human rights violations were identified as WAR CRIMES.  Now, as the US shoots Mexicans in Mexico, it is called an approved, acceptable, police action.  It is another obscenity of arrogance and impunity.  Frontlines ed.]

US border patrol agent looks towards Mexico from the bank of the Rio Grande River. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

US border agents shouldn’t have the courts’ permission to shoot people in Mexico

If you shoot an unarmed teenage boy in the head, 3 days of administrative leave isn’t nearly enough punishment

Guinevere E. Moore, The Guardian (UK), Tuesday 28 April 2015

A United States court has all but declared open season on Mexican nationals along the US-Mexico border. Border patrol agents may shoot foreign nationals in Mexico with impunity – provided that those at whom they aim are standing within feet of US territory.

According to a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last week, agents who shoot and kill people in Mexico while standing on US soil will never be held to account, except before their administrative agencies. No court will ever review these actions and the families of the victims will be left with no avenue for justice. An agent’s actions will not be governed or restrained by the constitution nor subject to review by US courts.

This isn’t a hypothetic situtation: all of this has already happened.

Central America’s 60,000 missing migrants

Report reveals that from 1998 to 2008, 60,000 South and Central Americans went missing in Mexico on their way to the US

Emilio Godoy, al-Jazeera, 14 Nov 2010

Some 500,000 undocumented migrants from South and Central America cross Mexico every year [EPA] The last time Estela Domínguez of Mexico saw her daughter Estela Paz was in April 2006, when the young woman left home with the goal of reaching Las Vegas, Nevada. Paz, who was 27 at the time, planned to cross the US border at the town of Altar in the northwestern state of Sonora. She was travelling without documents, and with her six-year-old son Emiliano. She was heading back to her job making bracelets. But she never made it. “I talked to her on the phone just before she was to cross the border, but I never heard from her again,” Domínguez, a supermarket bagger in Córdoba, a city in the southeastern Mexican state of Veracruz, said.