CPTnet
19 July 2005

ARIZONA/SONORA REFLECTION: The cross and collateral damage

by Orlando Redekopp

Just over a week ago I returned from a Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT)
delegation to the Arizona/Mexico border. One story has refused to leave me.

Just outside Douglas, Arizona the border patrol has erected a fence/wall
along the border (made with panels left over from the Vietnam war),
stretching maybe a mile long. Several weeks before we arrived, CPT's Arizona
team, early in the morning, went to this wall to paint crosses in
remembrance of those migrants who had died in Cochise County that
week--three white crosses on the wall along a barren road just outside
Douglas.

During our week, the team planned another visit, since two more migrants had
died attempting to cross the border. Several delegation members joined the
team for the 6:00 a.m. litany of remembrance. When we arrived at the spot,
the team members drove past the spot several times, until they realized the
border patrol had painted over the crosses. The border patrol also had
called in a back hoe to remove the little "bridge" crossing the ditch
between the dirt road and the wall.

That image of the Border Patrol's "cross-removal" has refused to leave me.
Why would the border patrol expend so much energy to remove or to hide the
cross from such a barren place? The only travelers along this road are
migrants, border patrol, and, of course, the CPT witnesses. Yet I continue
to wonder, "Does the cross threaten the border patrol, and the policy behind
it?"

The border patrol, somewhere in the bureaucracy, has referred to the migrant
deaths in the desert as "collateral damage." Innocent deaths are simply a
spillover from the war against whom? Migrants? An extension of the war
against terror?

But why cover the cross? Is there power in the cross? I used to sing a song
in church entitled, "There is power in the blood." Maybe Herod and Pilate
told Rome that Jesus' execution was collateral damage--necessary to maintain
the empire. But fear lurked somewhere--otherwise why cover the cross?

[Members of the June 25 to July 2 CPT delegation were Ruth Fast, Cheryl
Harris, Jessica Phillips, Orlando Redekopp and Brian Young, all of Chicago;
Marie Heft and Philip Heft of Kent and Treye McKinney of College Place,
Washington; and Daniel Izuzquiza of Spain.]