by Paul Dickerson
This morning, I was crossing the Puente Paso del Norte back to El Paso after running a pressing errand in Ciudad Juárez. It’s the world’s busiest international border; a vital economic link between two countries, and an important part of my personal livelihood. My life and sensibilities are structured around access to that bridge, and in some regard, most of my worldly affairs are hopelessly dependent on my right as a U.S. citizen to freely cross back into my homeland there unmolested.
What should have been a routine exchange with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent turned into an hours-long nightmare resulting in me being detained in a holding facility with blood stained walls, searched, photographed against a police height chart, fingerprinted, weighed, and endlessly interrogated. Why? Because they were completely baffled that I had numerous Armenian entry/exit stamps in my passport. Armenia? Fuck. They had never heard of such a place.
I asked if I was being arrested. Standard operating procedure, sir.
I asked if there was some diplomatic dispute with Armenia subsequent to my last visit that I was blissfully unaware of. Standard operating procedure, sir.
I asked why I was being strip searched, photographed, and fingerprinted. Standard operating procedure, sir.
I asked them how they could sleep at night. Standard operating procedure, sir.
It occurred to me sometime between the INTERPOL database fingerprinting and an officer’s hands on my balls, that the real problem was they are accustomed to one thing and one thing only, and Armenia ain’t it, so what to do? No one enjoys being confronted with something so far removed from their reference points that they feel perplexed. This is human nature, but if that person happens to be holding a gun on you and couldn’t find Armenia (or much of anything else) on a map, then ¡Chingada madre!, they can and will stop at nothing in order to make it fit into their narrow and fluid interpretation of the law. I kept looking at the bloody handprints on the walls of my holding cell and thinking that one could see in them the very blueprint of history, time, space, and politics on the U.S./Mexico border, all the while wondering if I was about to be put on a flight to Yerevan in handcuffs for no discernible reason.
I was eventually freed with no real explanation other than the obvious insulting lie of it being, you guessed it! Standard operation procedure, sir… and the worst part? Perhaps it isn’t a lie at all. Perhaps I was some random errant gringo who they could practice on until they get things in place to really show ’em who’s in the driver’s seat. Whatever the case, I am lucky. It wasn’t my blood on the wall. I am safe at home ranting at a computer screen and listening to my wife playing with the cats in the next room. I caught a glimpse into a grotesque, cancerous nightmare that many thousands of people get completely swallowed by. It seems clear that Charles Bowden’s notion of Ciudad Juárez functioning as the laboratory of our collective future has come home to roost and the serpent is constricting on the whole of humanity.