NEAR MIDNIGHT ON February 25, 1992, Enrique Arguelles Palos must have felt like a lucky man, because he decided to risk wading across the Rio Grande at El Paso with a duffel bag stuffed with dope. Conditions had seemed auspicious for smuggling. A quarter moon had yet to rise. And the spindly, waist-high brush on the American bank provided good cover and appeared quiet. Only it wasn’t. When a U.S. Border Patrol van cruising the river without lights happened onto the scene, both agents jumped out, and one shattered the night’s stillness with a single shotgun blast. Arguelles’ comrades — he’d crossed the border with at least three other “mulas” — splashed in panic back into Juarez, Mexico. A patrolman took an errant pellet in his leg in the confusion. And 26-year-old Arguelles, described in his autopsy as “a well developed, well nourished, rather muscular Latin male” absorbed, at point-blank range, about a dozen pellets of buckshot into his chest. He died instantly, face-down in America.
The story of Arguelles’ death wasn’t exceptional on a border growing more brutal with each passing year. But the tale of its aftermath says a great deal about federal law enforcement secrecy — and accountability — on the border. Suspecting possible bungling by the agents, the media and civil rights groups on both sides of the Rio Grande demanded more details about the shooting after Mexican newspapers ran grisly photos of the body lying handcuffed on the U.S. bank. The Border Patrol in El Paso, following a long-standing policy, wouldn’t release the agents’ names. A routine internal investigation was promised, but its findings too were never announced. And finally, following a time-tested pattern, the public spotlight shifted elsewhere and Arguelles quietly became the latest episode in a story of eight similar shootings (five of them fatal) involving El Paso immigration officers over the previous five years. The agency also was implicated in a drowning, sporadic beatings, illegal deportations and even a case of arson.
I waited behind police and Border Patrol blockades the chilly night Arguelles mis-calculated his odds. The “no comments” were ritual. Nevertheless, over the next six months, trying to crack the Border Patrol’s wall of secrecy for the El Paso Times, I began to badger the agents who manned those bar-ricades. And for the first time ever, after weeks of false starts, they began to talk back.
