THE WALL: COMING TO A BORDER LEVEE NEAR YOU:

By Juan Montoya

Despite the grandstanding and hullabaloo by public officials, the Wall that is supposed to keep out undesirable aliens is here.
Reams of newsprint and reels of videotape featuring some of our most notable academic, political and civic leaders were all for naught as the construction crews edge inexorably toward the heart of downtown Brownsville.
Forgotten is UTB-TSC president Juliet Garcia's line in the sidewalk pavement outside the federal courthouse where she told cheering throngs of students that the university stood tall against the wall.
Little did anyone know that at the same time her protege Michael Putegant was negotiating a surrender to the federal government. Yes, the college would get a wall, albeit a designer wall. And to sweeten he deal, Putegant would get a lucrative contract to build the pretty wall on university property and pocket a cool $100,000 in fees.
No matter how hard Mayor Pat Ahumada tried to stave off the construction, his fellows on the city commission submarined his sometimes quixotic stands and undermined his efforts to get the city to act in concert with a coalition of border cities fighting the construction of the fence.
Pat's plan to use the PUB weir (not too shabby, really) as a way to stop from constructing a physical obstacle resulted in the feds agreeing to build a "moveable" fence, so that when the city got the bucks to move the levees and replace the temporary fence with another one at some other site, is, at most, unrealistic.
The final nail in that coffin was hammered home by Mexico's refusal to go along with the weir plan.
And all along, commissioner Charlie Atkinson, a U.S. Customs Agent, was in on the confidential legal briefings and legal strategy sessions that the city's legal representatives planned to fight the fence. No one, it seemed, wanted to tell Charlie that having a fox in the hen house was not a good thing.
It wasn't until Atkinson was called on it that he began to abstain from voting on the issue during city commission meetings.
On the county side, the federal government just steamrolled by Judge Carlos Cascos' attempts to use levee reconstruction as part of the wall, a tactic successfully employed by Hidalgo County. The commissioners' hearts, it seemed, were not in fighting the construction of the fence so much as seeming to be against it without supporting (or funding) legal obstacles against the federal government.
Everybody, it seems, got something our of it.
The Republican administration used the fence as a way to appease the disaffected Right and conservative Democrats, even when most analysts doubted the effectiveness of the fence to deter illegal immigration. There was the bogeyman of terrorism, too.
The Yellow-Dog Democrats got to howl at the insensitivity of the Republicans, but then lacked the strength to really do anything about it. And the border – trying to maintain close relations with their southern neighbor out of a sense of economic necessity – got bypassed and was badly served by everyone.
If you're about the Old Bridge (B&M) in the next few days, you can see the construction well on its way to Hope Park. Across the river, a huge Mexican flag flutters framed by the steels posts used for the fence.
The Wall will continue to be an eyesore to all (except for the pretty section at the college). It will be interesting to see how the presence of the 800-pound gorilla will be ignored when the balloons are let out at the annual Charro Days celebrations with dignitaries of both countries standing within a stone's throw of the Thing.