The other U.S. Border? Techno-cultural-rationalities and fortification in Southern Mexico

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and “technified” along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico’s Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy’s goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two inter-related arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.

Keywords

Border fortification geopolitics policy mobilities Mexico Herbert Marcuse

The Guatemalan border with Chiapas, Mexico, is now our southern border. (The United States Department of Homeland Security’s Alan Bersin, quoted in Miller, 2014b )

Technological rationality operates as political rationality. (Marcuse, 1961 [2001]: 47)

Introduction

The two opening quotes, one by the Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for International Affairs (and former border czar) and the other by the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse, span a period of seven decades. Time notwithstanding, the first statement could be construed as evidence for the latter, proof that ongoing processes of fortification are steeped in a politics of rationality. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mexico’s Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur),¹ announced by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in July 2014 in response to pressure from the United States and flows of Central American youth traveling to the US-Mexico border (Isacson et al., 2015). While the implementation of the Program’s security-based measures is diffuse, ongoing, and difficult to track, evidence of its impact is apparent throughout southern Mexico, particularly in the municipality of Tapachula, about 20 km from Guatemala. The Soconusco region (where Tapachula is located), has long been an important site of agricultural production serving as a port between Mexico and Central America. Because of its role as a first stop for migrants en route to the United States, Mexico’s “other border” is more visibly geostrategic than in recent years (Ángeles Cruz, 2009). As a result, Mexico has gradually begun to enforce strict policies aimed at shutting down transit routes. In an effort to promote “regional security and prosperity” (CRS Report, 2016), the Southern Border Program promises to increase security at 12 points of entry with Guatemala and Belize as well as along several well-worn routes popular with migrants.

Concrete divisions have historically not been part of the landscape delineating the 572-kilometer shared boundary which continues to be bi-national in socio-cultural and economic terms (Ordoñez Morales, 2011). People have migrated across this border for generations for a variety of reasons: for work, because of ancestral linkages, for marriage, and to escape violence. During the Guatemalan counterinsurgency war,² thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled the country. This exodus and its resultant targeting of indigenous peoples by the Mexican government worked to concretize Mexico’s border enforcement policy. Following the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, the majority of Guatemalans returned to Guatemala while others were naturalized or resettled on both sides of the border (Cruz Burguete, 1998; Galemba, 2012). If border fortification has experienced theoretical and empirical resurgence, Mexico’s southern border has remained relatively understudied in the Anglo-speaking world. When it is an object of research, treatment has focused on the discursive construction of a “border crisis” (Galemba, 2015), the politics of illegality in the constitution of subjectivities (Galemba, 2012, 2013; Sanchez, 2014), consequences of uneven enforcement (Castillo, 2003; Ogren, 2007), and the futility of preventing undocumented migration to the United States by investing more resources into Mexican border policing (Andreas and Duran-Martinez, 2013; Morton, 2012; Meyer and Seelke, 2014). This article recalls attention to the site of the political border as a manifestation of technological rationality by examining how border regimes continue to be embedded in coordination across space through the reproduction of the border industrial complex (Dear, 2013). Border security (managed by public and private interests) occurs through a coalescing of standardized administrative practice, vernacular forms of efficiency, and the illusion of neutrality, all of which is undergirded by long histories of trilateral tensions.

The process through which porous boundaries are transformed into fortified borders must grapple with the inner-workings of the containment of social change e.g. how borders become a form of truth. Enter Marcuse. As a member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse ([1944] 2002, 2014) was heavily influenced by Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason. Like his colleagues, Marcuse politicizes the “dialectic of enlightenment” by distinguishing substantive rationality from purely instrumental rationality. The latter operates as a form of reductionism seeking to bolster forms of power by linking means to ends while upholding the logics of efficiency.

Marcuse defines technology as a mode of production or totality of instruments, coinciding with the modern distinction between science and art, consolidated in European thought by the mid-19th century (McGuire, 2006) and characterized by the creation of new tools, processes, and products. In his time, he specifically wrote about machinery, transportation, roadways, automation, the assembly line, and what he termed the “terroristic technocracy” (Marcuse, 1941: 139) associated with the Third Reich. He argued that the intensification of labor and the organization of governmental, industrial and party bureaucracy were integral to the war economies of Germany and the USSR. Currently, technology is almost too extensive and pervasive to list although the material devices associated with increased border fortification provides an excellent example. While technology carries with it the potential for liberation, modern technology is rooted in an ideological structure calling for unconditional compliance and coordination wherein human beings are enlisted in a competitive and destructive social order (Marcuse, 1964). A highly rationalized and mechanized economy geared towards the greatest efficiency has ordered the social and economic process resulting in oppression and continued scarcity.

Under advanced industrial capitalism, technology functions as an instrument of expediency dominated by ruling class interests which engenders its own rationality. Marcuse argues that the decision to incorporate technological advances into society transforms what is considered rational in that society (technological rationality). In other words, technology comes to replace ontology (Marcuse, 1960). Technological rationality³ is a pervasive rationality oriented towards the performance principle wherein every technical item is given a mission furthering competition and production. Comprising operational definitions, formal logic, and the objective order of things (Marcuse, 1941) truth becomes defined by measurement, calculation, internal coherence, and the reduction of experience to practice organized by technology. Because technological society tends toward the annulment of its foundational conditions, social relations of domination are mystified and oppression can occur without physical domination (Farr, 2009).⁴ The result is “… the non-terroristic, democratic decline of freedom-the efficient, smooth reasonable unfreedom which seems to have its roots in technical progress itself” (Marcuse, 1961 in Kellner, 2001: 37).

On the one hand, this is a useful and enduring theory. On the other, Marcuse did not engage in the kind of empirical work that the Frankfurt School envisioned (Jay, 1996). With this thought in mind, I propose the concept of “techno-cultural rationalities” to attend to the contextualized and culturally specific path of fortification regimes. The term refers to the ways that rationality and the apparatus of technology (an accumulation of practice, actors, objects, desires and discourses) moves from the abstract to the concrete. How does the ontology of technology, replete with historical specificity and grounded logics of contingencies, proceed in particular places?

I make the two-fold argument that the Southern Border Program (1) administers scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies; and, that (2) informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. The separation of the argument into two parts serves primarily as a heuristic device. Points one and two are entangled. In contrast to understanding border fortification regimes as grounded instances of technological rationality, the purposeful consideration of cultural context weaves together historical, performative, and socio-spatial norms crystalizing the idiomatic circumstances facilitating or obstructing the implementation of the border industrial complex. Techno-cultural-rationalities takes seriously the emergence of situated practices—or localized substantiations—which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts. The specific socio-material alignments, which facilitate, produce, obstruct, or reconfigure instrumental reason can uncover the de-politicizing of bordering processes and bring to light winners and losers of securitization by laying bare vested interests.

What enables border fortification to be so resilient in Mexico is undoubtedly a complicated affair. Nevertheless, certain elements of bordering should be highlighted. First, along Mexico’s southern border, fortification cannot be separated from militarization associated with the war on drugs. The intersection with supra-national geopolitical agendas is enfolded within convoluted histories between the United States and Mexico and Mexico and Central America. As a result, the calculation and efficiency, which is a cornerstone of techno-rationalism is tied in with historical antagonisms often evolving into a politics that legitimizes itself.

Second, the ongoing efforts and failures of fortification including the bordering, unbordering, and performance of order must be read not solely against the logics of securitization but also from the perspective of particular cultural forms. An ontological commitment to the productive apparatus (built upon technological rationality) does not occur in a vacuum. For example, Mexico’s border regime is imprinted with a long history of strong national identity (Mexicanidad) defined in part by the conception that the cultural and political imperialism of the US is a threat to Mexico’s interests (cf. Bartra, 2002; Del Val, 2006; Walker, 2011). There is also, contradictorily, a refusal to reject the northern neighbor’s influence because of its association with progress. Related to that is the preference to replicate “the other”, that which is not Mexican (Malinchismo) (cf. Day, 2005). Finally, there are the layers of bureaucracy that feature prominently in administrative practices within Mexico and are arguably one of the lures of the Southern Border Program. The inclusion of these historical and contextualized elements allows us to provincialize or adapt Marcuse’s theory by attending to hybridization, localization, and human agency. But, quite crucially, a Marcusean optic retains the importance of technology as a psychic process rooted in the structure of experience. Read this way, “technifying” the border is simultaneously a scientific achievement and an alteration of our relationship to reality.

After reviewing literature on borders and fortification, the remainder of the paper explores how fortification is enacted and negotiated in one key policy along the Mexico–Guatemala border. The insights are based on the examination and compilation of documentation related to the Southern Border Program. Data consists of extensive database searches across Mexican media, promotional videos and available government documents along with US media coverage, Congressional Research Service Reports and websites with coverage of the Southern Border Program. While this intervention is primarily theoretical, interspersed throughout are observations culled from multiple trips to Mexico’s southern border, which have included discussions with border crossers and Mexican government officials.

Border fortification logics

Fortifying political boundaries is nothing new. The vast literature on the subject suggests a renaissance of bordering practices. Jones and Johnson (2016) note that there are almost 70 border walls around the world. These constructions are accompanied by a host of hardware and sophisticated technologies freighted with material and symbolic significance (Gregory, 2011; Till et al., 2013). State wall-building has indicated a waxing and a waning of sovereignty. Brown has suggested such infrastructure can reflect vulnerability in the face of globalization and “late modern colonization” (2010: 24). Others have argued for fortification as the re-inscription of state power (Butler, 2006; Jones and Johnson, 2016; Murphy, 2013; Nevins, 2010). Whether conceived as sites of securitization or as mobile spaces of encounter (or both) (Walker and Winton, 2017), bordering occurs amidst and in fact, enacts contradictory juxtapositions of flows and orderings within and beyond the state. Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) go a bit further to discuss how the border is a methodological tool, a way of thinking allowing us to grasp the struggle between heterogeneous mobilities and changing economic processes.

In studying the global landscape of blockading, scholars have identified how domestic and international scales are enmeshed and manipulated through the war on terror, entailing the conflation of military, police, and civilian activities (Amoore, 2006; Coleman, 2007; Cooper, 2006; Dunn, 1996; Vaughan-Williams, 2008). Border militarization becomes part of a geo-economic logic driven by private corporations’ desire to expand market opportunities related to security projects (Mercille, 2008; Vallet and David, 2014). The role of vested interests in the flattening of security into securitization and the ways in which supra-national geopolitics factor into the maintenance of fortification practices is an aspect of border literature that relates directly to Mexico’s Southern Border Program. Closer examination reveals that private companies are the winners of border fortification. Their ties to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) include everything from IT services to the uniforms worn by employees. Many of these companies imbricated in the border industrial complex are in the top tier of political giving in the United States (Hesson, 2013). Who wins and who loses in the reproduction of the border industrial complex highlights how current policies operate as a “long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to global capitalism” (Paley, 2014: 5). Paley argues that US-backed security strategies promoting fortification and militarization can be a front to strengthen the business environment ripening Mexico and Central America for foreign investment.

The US border with Mexico has long been considered a valuable economic resource, but little attention has been directed at the cultivation of similar circumstances on the Mexico-Guatemala border. Put another way, how and upon what logics has Mexico agreed to be the “wall” for the United States? And how does the SBP proceed at its site of implementation? Because the border is at once material and symbolic (Heyman, 1994; Jusionyte, 2015; Reeves, 2014), the answer is hardly straightforward. In southern Mexico, fortification is a manifestation of a tug-of-war between economic and cultural logics. Attendant processes are an articulation (however incomplete) of historically uneven spatial relationships shaped by (Walker, 2015) geopolitical pressures and practices. The “borderlands” between Mexico and Guatemala are a place where securitization is pulled in different directions. The ongoing hardening of the political boundary reflects the lure of closure, which is beginning to take hold in familiar ways. Recent developments along this border indicate: a loss of alternative understandings in opposition to the status quo; and reflect how common sense is corrupted in service to conformity through the obfuscation of the underlying causes of securitization. Thus, fortification is an ideological formation that contrasts with Mignolo’s (2000) “border thinking”, an emancipatory inclination recognizing the potential for transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the subaltern position. That is not to say that transgression and porousness are not foundational to any theory of borders, nor that geopolitics “from below” is not integral to quotidian geographies.⁵ Neither is it meant to project a hopeless scenario connoting the futility of resistance. Instead, a Marcusean framing privileges how new forms of social control are internalized with particular attention to the tools used to mold a reality in which change is nullified through the perpetration of a formal rationality. Marcuse writes this of the technical-political ensemble:

The technical apparatus of production and distribution functions, not as a sum total of mere instruments which can be isolated from the social and political context without losing their identity, but rather as an apparatus which determines a priori the product as well as the individual and social operations of servicing and extending it, that is to say, determines the socially needed demands, occupations, skills, attitudes-and thus the forms of social control and social cohesion. (Marcuse, 1961 in Kellner, 2001: 42)

So, to contemporize Marcuse’s theory I would suggest that fortification is the contingent socio-historical triumph of “thinking like an apparatus”. It is the circulation and introjection of instrumental reason perpetrated in part through standardization, categorization and administration along with binary constructions of order and disorder. But, as shown in the next section, border fortification is never a fully actualized regime, nor does it operate according to immutable laws. It is transformed through interaction and it is here that the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities is elucidating. When abstractions are grounded, they intersect with the vernacular elements of the Mexican context to produce a particular “mechanics of conformity” (adjustment to the prevailing socio-economic order) (Marcuse, 1941: 145) that is fractured, contradictory, violent, and incomplete.

Reproducing the complex

The official crossing at Ciudad Hidalgo-Tecún Umán is marked by a large concrete bridge outfitted with metal gates, security agents and monitoring equipment. Underneath is a view of the Suchiate River where dozens of rafts travel back and forth with goods and people. The quick passage, occurring right under the gaze of border officials, costs US$1.35 (Personal Interviews) and is a bustling operation. The formal infrastructure appears stark and lifeless when juxtaposed to the “actually existing” crossing. The ever-expanding border enforcement apparatus proceeds amidst and seemingly (at least here) apart from business as usual at the intersection of rhetoric and the reality of social conditions. This collision might be interpreted variously as a politics of ambiguity or as a site of dissonance punctured by dramatic slips between policy formulation and implementation. Amoore (2006: 338) writes on the “ambivalent, antagonistic and undecidable moments” that make borders contestable and unstable. Going further, it would seem that borders are not just about maximizing the power of the state but are, in fact, leaky for a reason. While that reason may be deeply rooted in the “macro”, it is the vacillation between the “micro” and “macro” that is illuminating.

Mexico has been grappling with unilateral directives related to fortification from its northern neighbor since the United States backed deportation campaign known as Plan Sur in 2001⁶ (Meyer and Seelke, 2014). More recently, in 2014, the State Department reported that US$112 million was designated for Mexico’s border policing and militarization. An unknown amount for the Mexican Navy/Marine facilities and training—has come from the Defense Department’s counter-drug budget (Isacson et al., 2014; Miller, 2014a). One of the challenges to understanding the foundations of the Southern Border Program is the lack of transparency,⁷ which stands in stark contrast to the visibility of the infrastructure and its message. Tracking—whether it be dollar amounts, the identity of recipients, or delivery of training and equipment—is complicated by several factors. Most coverage describes the policy in general terms with little specificity. Funding comes from different sources, much of it subsumed under the Mérida Initiative. The U.S. Department of Defense has spent nearly US$60 million since, 2014 and the State Department an additional US$90 million during the same time period but amounts designated specifically for Mexico’s southern border are unclear. A recent memo from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs reports that in, 2016 US$86 million USD was budgeted for Mexico’s National Institute on Migration (INM), the agency in charge of detention and eventual deportation of migrants (Castillo, 2016). Another communication delineates that in FY, 2016 US$14 million was to come from the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), which falls under the Mérida Initiative, to support “the strengthening of Mexico’s borders, with a focus on its southern border, with crucial nonintrusive inspection and communications equipment as well as further related training” (Isacson et al., 2015: 16). As of this writing, new figures have not been published. What we do know is that the SBP is governed by the Coordinación para la Atención Integral de la Migración en la Frontera Sur (CAIMFS, or the Agency for Comprehensive Attention to Southern Border Migration) with two main headquarters in Villahermosa, Tabasco and Tapachula, Chiapas and divided into five action areas, the exact nature of which are difficult to verify and distinguish from one another. In addition, there is sufficient documentation through media and US and Mexican sources to distill some of the discursive machinations of the SPB.⁸ Finally, some information is available as to the categories of assistance. These read like a laundry list of predictive calculability. Included is the aforementioned non-intrusive equipment (e.g portable VACIS scanners, X-ray vans, and CT-30 contraband detection kits); biometric kiosks; construction facilities for the INM, Customs, Marines, Federal Police; training for these agencies; intelligence-sharing; workshops sponsored jointly by U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command; and a “Document Verification for Travelers” program for the INM. Government documents also suggest that U.S. geopolitical interests are at work in the provision of equipment, training, communications, intelligence analysis, detection and monitoring, and the planning and oversight of headquarter offices (Isacson et al., 2015). A small U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations office has been set up to monitor a Tapachula detention facility. The pressure of soft power has been applied through terms like transparency, efficiency and accountability with the effect of partially devolving US border patrol tasks to Mexico’s southern boundary. The violence of policing mobility pre-dates fortification. In Mexico there is a long history of institutional corruption (Morris and Klesner, 2010; Tyburski, 2012), the establishment of impromptu military checkpoints/roadblocks and repressive actions by state and non-state actors against whistle blowers (Lakhani, 2016; Ureste, 2016).

Technifying hierarchies

In this section, I outline the SBP’s attempts to discipline borderlands and migrants by delimiting, reordering and securitizing movement. The extent to which the policy “succeeds” is due in part to the construction of spatial hierarchies operating under discourses of order and accompanied by increased documentation in service of sorting bodies. The recent buildup of border infrastructure and paraphernalia effectively administers scarcity by rendering security in its narrowest form. Such a practice should be read against the regional histories and hierarchies (e.g. techno-cultural-rationalities) of this area. Central tenets of techno-rationality like profitable efficiency, systems of standardized control and self-administration appear in new technical forms and techniques removed from moral considerations and political, social, and economic realities. The strength of boundary policing wherein borders both thicken (Rosas, 2006) and migrate under the cloak of a highly rational and professional bureaucracy lies partly in its intersection with Mexican nationalism.

The first action area of the Southern Border Program seeks to regularize border movement through formal and orderly border crossings. An internal government document from Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior obtained from The Globe says the program’s goal is to “overcome common challenges related to migration and respect for human rights” and to establish “a more modern, efficient, prosperous and secure border” (Nolen, 2017). The US government has praised the technology and training accompanying the first plank of the program for establishing order (Joffe-Block, 2016) suggesting a pragmatic matter-of-factness.

Part of the first action area is the increase in regional visitor visas which effectively reifies the spatial and ethnic hierarchies between Mexico and its southern border states. In 2011, the US Department of Defense launched a Mexico-Guatemala-Belize Border Region Program designating as much as US$50 million for training, patrol boats, night vision equipment, communications equipment, and maritime sensors. Guatemalans and Belizeans became eligible for visitor’s visas allowing them to cross into Mexico to shop or work for a few days. Hondurans and Salvadorans, highly represented among migrants heading north, were excluded. Under the Southern Border Program, Mexico plans to grant citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua regional visitor permits. A Regional Visitor Card can be obtained with proof of official identification, fingerprints, and an interview with Mexican diplomatic representatives and immigration authorities. Valid for five years, visitors from these countries can enter four southern Mexican states (Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, and Quintana Roo) for up to three days. While SBP enables “regularly and orderly” trips, these visas are not useful to trans-migrants (immigrants whose daily lives depend on interconnections across international borders). The regulations associated with the Southern Border Program stand in stark contrast to the free passage accorded Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua through the Central America-4 Border Control Agreement, which does not require any presentation of documents between those four countries. It has recently come to light that the Mexican government aims to establish five poles of economic development in five southern Mexican border states (for a total of 187 economic projects) with the understanding that the program will depend on migrant labor in the agricultural sector. Whether bureaucratic protocol will infuse that sector is open to question. Historically, enganchadores (recruiters) have connected Guatemalan workers with Mexican farmers. Apart from that, those who cross the border for labor, shopping, or small-scale commerce generally do not pass through the official crossings (Isacson et al, 2014; Personal Interviews).

It is all the more interesting if we consider the state of Chiapas as a window on cross-border relations and state-sponsored nationalism. Until, 1822 Chiapas was part of Guatemala. Galemba (2012) writes that the post-colonial imposition of the political boundary cut off ties between indigenous populations spanning the border. In the early-20th century, the Mexican state conducted nationalist Mexicanization campaigns. These were aimed at differentiating Mexico from Guatemala with specific attention to indigenous populations that shared cross-border identities and languages. Hernández-Castillo (2001) (cited in Galemba, 2012: 829) comments on the explicitly anti-Guatemalan elements of Mexican nationalism during this period: “these indigenous populations at the border didn’t just represent a cultural backwardness, but also anti-nationalism”.

Despite such campaigns, for most of its history Chiapas has had ties with bordering Central American states through ancestry or seasonal migration patterns (the coffee plantations function as one major attractor of Guatemalan migrant workers). The state is known for its agricultural richness and natural resource base, the control of which has spawned uprisings by indigenous and activist groups. From a state-centric perspective, Chiapas has been perceived as a site of extraction that periodically must be tamed (Castillo, 2003; Collier and Quaratiello, 2005). The Mexican army has over 60 encampments in the highlands of Chiapas, a region with historical or contemporary Zapatista influence (Isacson et al., 2014). The official rhetoric of the five-pronged SBP with its veneer of neutrality promoting safety in efficiency, is all the more compromised in light of recent reports that a growing number of indigenous Mexicans are detained by agents (Lakhani, 2016). Mexicanidad is veiled as neutral administrative efficacy.

The SBP is engaged in hemispheric re-mappings reliant upon tiers of subordination. Thus, the border-fraught with contradictory and improvised policies becomes the node around which new economies are based (and old ones are reinforced?) It actively divides up and sorts places into greater or lesser importance indicating “how persistent colonial modes of thought are in geopolitical reasoning and how Northern specifications of the global continue to reproduce the South as inferior; subject to surveillance, development and management in Northern terms” (Agnew, 2003: 104). The socio-political aspects of techno-rationality are metabolized through the localized imperatives of vested interests⁹ whereby higher prosperity requires spatial differentiation. State-led bordering practices produce and reproduce value and exchange that on the surface appear illogical. Borders are not simply about stopping movement, they are about the politics (and political economy) of movement. In this instance, the incompleteness of fortification at the national scale facilitates what is already happening, i.e. the business as usual model of procuring labor for development in Mexico’s border states. Some flows are to be detained, others are to continue informally; almost a formalization of transgression. The Guatemala–Mexico border now becomes the dividing line between the North and Central America all the while upholding an enforcement regime honoring and reinforcing uneven relations between Mexico and the United States. Informalization as an organizing logic espouses the taken for granted liaison between freedom and repression reflecting an inveterate hesitancy to think beyond the given. The effect is a denunciation of any reckoning with existing conditions. The power of negativity, so crucial to individual liberation and defined through autonomy and dissent, is liquidated. Once again, a fortified border advances through the denial of historical and technical foundations.

One-stop bordering

Business, technics, human needs and nature are welded together into one rational and expedient mechanism. He will fare best who follows its directions, subordinating his spontaneity to the anonymous wisdom which ordered everything for him. (Marcuse, 1941: 143)

In this section, I focus on the second line of action in the Southern Border Program: the improvement of infrastructure and equipment at customs ports of entry and other border-crossing stations. The checkpoints, “belts of control” and infrastructure described below should be understood in multiple ways. First, processes of border fortification are an adaptation of a technical regime (referred to in the section’s opening quote) that always includes informality. Second, the application of technology is at times efficient and at others misguided but cannot be separated from the imperative to produce an image of security. Border security in southern Mexico is increasingly employing strategies to “secure the volume” (Elden, 2013) as part of extra-territorial geopolitical initiatives related to distanced security concerns about human mobility. Peña Nieto has been a vocal proponent of U.S. backing for a stronger security effort along the southern border, perhaps seeing the writing on the geopolitical wall. Pillar 3 of the four-pillared Merida II Initiative, “creating a 21st Century Border”,¹⁰ is becoming the largest of the pillars, in dollar terms, due to deliveries of expensive scanning equipment to both of Mexico’s borders (Seelke and Finklea, 2016). As such, the SBP continues to be caught up in multi-scalar webs of policy making and subject to the US–Mexico bilateral agenda. Critics have noted that using funding from Mérida is problematic from the inception because that initiative is intended to combat drug trafficking not to address migration and border issues (Vega, 2016).

Under the second objective of the SBP is the strengthening of mobile checkpoints (volantas) and the creation of Comprehensive Attention Centers for Border Transit (Centros de Atención Integral al Tránsito Fronterizo, (CAITFs). Technically the CAITFS pre-date the Southern Border Program but they have now become a central pillar of the border zone strategy. Similar to shiny new shopping malls, these “super-checkpoints” portray a picture of convenience and efficiency representing a single window of interaction for those who pass through. All vehicles must go through the checkpoints and drivers and passengers of buses must dismount. The CAITFS combine eight agencies: Customs (Servicio de Administración Tributaria, SAT), the Army (Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, SEDENA), the Navy (Secretaría de Marina, SEMAR), the Federal Police, the INM, the federal Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la República, PGR), and agricultural and health inspectors (Isacson et al., 2015; Vincenteño, 2016). Construction, in conjunction with support and advice from the United States, has not been completed on all checkpoints.

Relatedly, in March 2014, Peña Nieto’s administration devised a plan to organize border security efforts into three virtual geographic tiers, called “belts of control”. The proposal entails establishing three security cordons at fixed distances. The first line runs approximately 30 miles from the Guatemalan border, and comprises 11 official entry points already in existence at the international borderline.¹¹ The second is about 100 miles from the Guatemala border at four sites in Chiapas and one in Tabasco. The third security belt stretches along the Isthmus of Tehuántepec in Oaxaca. The mission has been characterized by the Mexican government as the “technification of vigilance along the southern border” replete with recommendations for drone use, the installation of sensors, and instructions for collecting biometric data. Mexico’s National Security Agency (CISEN) has denied financial support for these operations given the current economic climate of the country implying that most of the funding comes solely from Mérida (Tourliere, 2017).

The mobile checkpoints, which frequently change geographic location, are outfitted with personnel from security, migration, and customs agencies (some include Federal Police) in addition to US-donated scanning, sensors, and intelligence-gathering equipment (Isacson et al., 2015). Some have more sophisticated equipment than others. The goal of the checkpoints is to channel and trap migrants and smugglers. Attempts to witness firsthand the interactions at the volantas were thwarted but subsequent conversations yielded some information including the fact that Mexicans and Central Americans are stopped randomly and that upgrades in technology are in part an attempt to keep better records for the Mexican and U.S. governments (Personal Interviews). Reports generated at the volantas suggest that border logics are propagated and internalized through a slew of performance-based indicators relying primarily on quantification. Effectiveness of the program hinges on statistics such as: apprehensions of “Northern Triangle” citizens;¹² deportation of unaccompanied children; numbers of CAITFS; the issuance of visiting and work permits facilitating the movement of (some) border residents; and Mexican Federal Police presence (INM, 2015; Isacson et al., 2014).

To cast action areas 1 (regularization of border movement) and 2 (infrastructure improvement at crossings) in explicitly Marcusean terms, achievement has been transformed into standardized efficiency: “…the individual’s performance is motivated, guided and measured by standards external to him, standards pertaining to predetermined tasks and functions. The efficient individual is the one whose performance is an action only insofar as it is the proper reaction to the objective requirements of the apparatus, and his liberty is confined to the selection of the most adequate means for reaching a goal which he did not set” (1941: 142). The rationalization of border fortification appears in administrative form through the atomization of function. Personnel are employed with goals of demarcating the border, surveilling, and controlling flows of drugs and people. Under the cloak of efficiency, the person in charge of an element of enforcement is transformed into an extension of border fortification. Casey and Watkins write about this in relation to the US–Mexico border: “They too become a kind of technique, a matter of training rather than individuality, requiring the expert rather than the complete human personality” (2014: 17).

In the context of southern Mexico it is not much different. Personnel act as agents of techno-rationalism, administering questionnaires verbally according to pre-set standards. The Southern Border Program narrows the scope of security, in effect producing “progress in domination” (Marcuse, 1966: 89). In its conflation with securitization, security becomes a measurable and visible outcome. Its nationalization is bolstered by (and perhaps equivalent to) market security achieved through contradictory policies that lead to freer trade but more restriction on labor and human mobility. Centered on the state, security is to be doled out on the individual scale through selective visas. Thus, security is about making eligibility finite; abandoning a robust view of a multi-faceted human security. The logic of safeguarding Mexico’s national space results in the saturation of the southern border with soldiers and police.

Marcuse (1941), drawing on Veblen (1918), is eerily relevant when he describes how technological forms of life keep watch over socially constructed limits. The machine process requires a knowledge oriented to a:

ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably exact quantitative terms. This class of knowledge presumes a certain intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of the workman, such an attitude as will readily apprehend and appreciate matter of fact and will guard against the suffusion of this knowledge and putative animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties, quasi-personal interpretations of the observed phenomenon and of their relations to one another. (Marcuse, 1941: 142)

Critical or substantive rationality, based on a deep understanding of the means and the ends, or, the meanings and values circulating in the lifeworld, is replaced by a common sense that is corrupted in the adjustment to the facts of life that the exploitative system has established in the first place.

The mixed messages of border technologies

Infrastructure associated with the SBP can be instructive on Mexico’s contradictory relationship with the United States. While Marcuse himself did not take up the subject of border infrastructure specifically, he did focus on how technology reflected social processes. For Marcuse, fortification (itself based on technological rationality) is an instrument of accumulation and authority, a point supplemented here by highlighting the idiomatic internalization and enactment of the Southern Border Program. The peculiarities of context, i.e. the blurred lines of legality culminating in the visibility and tolerance of the “illicit”, work as facilitators of the status quo. Geopolitics unfolds through the paradoxical simultaneity of blockage and passage. The border is disciplined in line with techno-rational logics while mundane “unauthorized” crossing ensues, diverting, subsuming and observing fortification.

In one of his more pessimistic writings, Marcuse explains how thought and behavior are reproduced within a given system, rendering alternatives illusory. In short, the individual comes to identify with society:

… But the term ‘introjection’ perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the ‘outer’ into the ‘inner.’….Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole (Marcuse, 1964: 10).

To extrapolate from that, I would argue that the infrastructure of fortification is a telos that operates in myriad registers. Its stubborn materiality echoes the internalization of the performance principle but also embodies imaginations of the future, government visions and psychic desires. A wall is a living archive. Within it lies the impetus to replicate the United States despite Mexico’s contentious relationship with it (for some examples of US–Mexico relations see Riding, 1985; Purcell, 1997; Fox, 1999). Ongoing construction of border fortifications could be read as a manifestation of that desire. This may be tied in with notions of modernity—the desire to consume and emulate products and ways of life. In this instance, the logics of fortification operate as a sort of bureaucratic Malinchismo,¹³ defined as the pursuit of the foreign at the expense of one’s own culture.

But techno-cultural-rationality must also grapple with the meaning of long-term investment in various stages of completion, including suspension (Gupta, 2015). The production of a recognizable form does not always achieve duplication and processes of emulation are neither coherent nor complete. Performative sovereignty and acting as a (cracked) buffer state suggest flexible securities that advance and retreat according to long-standing cultural and political tensions. To return to the border for a moment, reports from the Washington Office on Latin America (Isacson et al., 2014) have confirmed that US-donated equipment was either not used or unsuited for the geography of the Mexico–Guatemala border. Biometric equipment was largely unemployed at the checkpoints. Observation towers were seemingly useless amid the densely forested region. While I would contend that there is significant evidence that informality and transgression are enlisted in governance along this border, periods of suspension in construction, ongoing porousness, and intermittent implementation are their own condition with their own accomplishments. Slippages and incoherences in the transformation of a porous boundary to a fortified one do not signify that there is not a disciplining and re-ordering at work in line with technological imperatives. Although the project remains unfulfilled, the enactment of the border regime produces its own contradictions and disorder. Likewise, SBP is “successful” in producing an image of security at the national scale to some degree because of contextual and historical factors described throughout the paper some of which can be more fully understood by taking a longer view of hemispheric relations and the history of U.S. intervention (cf. Andreas, 2012) hinted at here but beyond the scope of this paper.

Whose security?

In this final section, I examine the last three action areas of the Southern Border Program to reveal the costs of technological rationality on this border. Enhanced border securitization translates into the triumph of vested interests, maintenance of the status quo and increased burdens upon certain populations. The protection of migrants is the third action area of the Southern Border Program. The most visible result has been the increased presence and activity of the INM supported by the Federal Police. President Peña Nieto assured the assembly at the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants in, 2016 that Mexico has always been “a place of origin, transit, destination, and return for people” (Castillo, 2016). Contrary to such statements, experts have commented that the protection of migrants and security do not weigh evenly. Between July 2014 and June 2015, there was a 71% increase in apprehensions of Central American migrants (Meyer et al., 2016). In 2016, arrests were 63% higher than in 2014 and 88% higher than in 2013 (Castillo, 2016). The crackdown indicates that Mexico has retained its restrictive policy towards those fleeing gang violence while scores of human rights abuses continue to be reported (Ureste, 2016). The militarized security-based approach has included increased policing of cargo trains (known collectively as La Bestia “The Beast”), and the Mexican Navy’s (SEMAR) construction of 12 “advanced naval stations” in the southern border zone where at least 50 Marines are stationed at each post (SEMAR, 2013). The stated purpose of the stations is to combat “the criminal groups that have attacked and systematically harmed the migrant population and the inhabitants of [the] country’s south-southeast region” (Isacson et al., 2015:11). In addition, SEMAR is in the process of building a large naval installation “for important activities” outside of Tapachula (Mexican Government, 2016). Heightened vigilance means that migrants must seek more dangerous routes in order to escape violence and survive now that they are isolated from networks of shelters along traditional routes (Sorrentino, 2015). Academic and media sources confirm that enhanced border securitization has made travel and crossings more illicit and risky (Brigden, 2016; Galemba, 2017). Efforts along Mexico’s southern border coincide with government seizure of the country’s railroad system. In August of 2016, the Communications and Transport Ministry reclaimed ownership of “The Beast”. Interestingly, the two lines of northbound cargo trains are lightly policed suggesting that the priority here is line with US interests but continues the “selective permeability” (Anderson, 2001) characteristic of borders in general (Castillo, 2016; Ureste, 2016).

Differentiation through technologies of fortification begs the question: security for whom? Policing is highly racialized and not just the job of the authorities. In her ethnographic work, Galemba (2017) shows how border residents themselves use racial stereotypes and fears to construe the Central American migrant “other” to protect themselves from being mistaken as smugglers and as migrants. Mexicans are also stopped at these checkpoints, particularly those marked as indigenous (Lakhani, 2016). Scalar (and narrow) visions of security translate into a subset of inhabitants bearing the burden of these logics.

The fourth and fifth areas of action of the Southern Border Program are overlapping. They include regional co-responsibility (efforts to coordinate personnel based on a vision of shared responsibility) and inter-institutional communication among various government agencies. The Coordinating Office for Comprehensive Attention to Migration at the Southern Border (Coordinación para la Atención Integral de la Migración en la Frontera Sur) was established under the fifth action. This body was officially created on 8 July 2014 under the leadership of Senator Humberto Mayans, who left the Senate to become the Southern Border Coordinator and returned to the Senate in fall, 2015 after leaving the Coordinating Office. In August 2015, the Coordinating Office was closed and functions have been distributed throughout southern Mexico under various names¹⁴. The impact of the office is difficult to identify. At the discursive level, one of the main tasks has been to investigate crimes against migrants. Mexico’s particular process of decentralization wherein authority is vested at the regional scale but not empowered with financial or bureaucratic resources (Wilson et al., 2008) has sometimes meant that offices play a limited role in contrast to the stated mission.

Nevertheless, the need for coordination among various agencies ranging from the military to the municipal police has been central to SBP. The southern border region has been a primary site of coordinated federal and state operations to, in the words of the INM, “rescue” migrants (Mariscal, 2015). The reality is a focus on the apprehension and detention of migrants which, under law, can be carried out with the support of Mexico’s Federal Police (Isacson et al, 2015). What is more, the distinct institutional mandates of the numerous security agencies with overlapping responsibilities have been confusing to those most affected. As noted earlier, media, official reports, and observation confirm border residents’ and crossers’ impressions that opportunities for corruption have proliferated. The INM has a small unit called “Grupo Beta”, charged with providing humanitarian assistance to migrants. The group has offices in towns along the train line in Chiapas, Tabasco and Oaxaca. Reports of Beta agents aiding in migrant detentions and alerting police to migrant locations are on the rise (Sorrentino, 2015). This comes on the back of a longer legacy of distrust of institutions.¹⁵

Scholars have focused on the “biopolitical turn” of fortification (Dillon, 2002, 2007; Larner and Walters, 2004) but few have commented on the techno-rationalism implicit in these policies. The Southern Border Program represents an epistemological shift in thinking about mobility. Mexico now views migrant flows as a threat to be controlled rather than a humanitarian phenomenon concerned with the management of vulnerable groups. Habitual geographies are transformed through hardening boundaries, encompassing a politics that is legitimized by the administration and management of processes. The accompaniments to smart border agreements, technology transfers, and spending not only ensures that Mexico passes the hegemon’s security test but reflects the transformation of a porous and complicated geography into a policy site reduced to control. According to Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center:

I’m aware of the criticisms, but I see (The Southern Border Program) as a positive development in terms of Mexico getting more of a handle on who is coming into the country. You’ve actually now got a Mexican strategy for the southern border, when before you had a policy vacuum. (Eulich, 2015)

The southern border is now marked by and celebrated rhetorically for a technological and bounded consistency that was not present before. Border fortification is assessed by its proximity to a regulative ideal; an abstraction obfuscating politics and profit maximization. Techno-rationality’s neutralizing tendencies conceal what Marcuse calls the materialization of values “the translation of values into technical tasks” (Marcuse, 1964: 232). On the surface, the pragmatism of technical reason works to cast the Southern Border Program variously as the best (i.e. only) option, a necessity to solve a “crisis”, or as a success. The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the policy leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. Reform and assistance- no longer construed as urgent- do not move beyond the goal of creating a “21st Century Border”. The persistent reiteration of a securitized border (that can only be realized through “technification”) is contingent upon the denial of contradictions upholding claims to reality. The problematic nature of prevailing social and economic relations (e.g. why are people migrating? How has the war on drugs exacerbated mobility?) is not the object of scrutiny because a central feature of the instrumentalism of techno-rationality is the elision of the political nature of “truth”. One such truth is how geopolitical security conceals economic interests, all the while eclipsing alternatives and confining change to its own institutions. This much is clear: techno-cultural-rationality works to neutralize the politics of complex geographies quietly cultivating the growth of the border tech industry and concealing the market incentives backing militarization and securitization.

Conclusion

In order to account for the site specific reconfigurations associated with the securitization of the Mexico–Guatemala border, this paper has developed the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities, an extension of Herbert Marcuse’s technological rationalism. Techno-cultural-rationalities understands fortification as an historical form of instrumentalized reason; one which seeks to ground rationality and the apparatus of technology, which Marcuse wrote about in a general way. Specifically, I have highlighted the routes through which hegemonic policies are negotiated and implemented in Mexico’s Southern Border Program. Vernacular elements of efficiency, standardization, administrative practice, the veiled neutrality of policies, and the complex histories of trilateral relationships become the basis for the reproduction of the border industrial complex. These turn on the duality of the administration of scarcity buttressed through the renewal of spatial hierarchies, and informality and transgression as a mode of governance. Under the auspices of security, order and bureaucracy, we are able to see a process of redistribution and accumulation conceived as a complex of methods and tools that advance rationality.

The “technification” of borders reminds us of the continuity of conditions compelling us to revisit Marcuse. The value of techno-rationality lies in the acknowledgement that humans may control individual technologies but the technological system shapes activities and relations. The concept of techno-cultural rationalities hones in on the interplay and outcomes that are reproduced and transformed through forces in real places. In other words, unmooring Marcuse’s work from his original spaces of engagement urges a reckoning with the particular conditions supporting the status quo. Marcuse argues that the taken-for-granted liaison between freedom and repression, productivity and destruction, and domination and progress results from our own historical organization of society and therefore is open to re-imagining (Marcuse, 1955). Although Marcuse argues that the technological apparatus has eroded individuality, he sees the liberatory potential of technics in the pursuit of individual fulfillment: “Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil” (Marcuse, 1941: 139). Through “spatializing’” his writings, it becomes possible to see how technological rationality in its varied contradictory guises and registers enacts spaces of limitation. Significantly, the extension of Marcuse’s original theory in the form of techno-cultural-rationalities illustrates that border processes are not simply a matter of whittling down, but rather a constrictive and productive re-spatialization, which carries with it the potential to produce new sites of resistance and conformity.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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