So many places are slated to become the front lines for his agency's expanding national security regime, and where it goes, technology must follow. No wonder that the same industry people are here, year after year, devouring Borkowski's every word in search of clues as to how they can profit from his latest border enforcement schemes. After all, some of the sophisticated technology now on the border was only a futuristic pipe dream 20 years ago.
It's here at Border Security Expo 2014 that the future seeds get planted; here that you can dream your corporate dreams unimpeded, sure in the knowledge that yet more money will flow into borders and "protection."
Between the unbridled enthusiasm of the vendors with their techno-optimistic "solutions" and the reality of border life in the Tohono O'odham Nation -- or for that matter just about anywhere along the 2,000-mile divide -- the chasm couldn't be wider.
On the reservation back in 2012, Longoria called in the GPS coordinates of the unknown dead woman, as so many agents have done in the past and will undoubtedly do in the years to come. Headquarters in Tucson contacted the Tohono O'odham tribal police. The agents waited in the baking heat by the motionless body. When the tribal police pulled up, they took her picture, as they have done with other corpses so many times before. They rolled her over and took another picture. Her body was, by now, deep purple on one side. The tribal police explained to Longoria that it was because the blood settles there. They brought out a plastic body bag.
"Pseudo-speciation," Longoria told me. That, he said, is how they deal with it. He talked about an interview he'd heard with a Vietnam vet on National Public Radio, who said that to deal with the dead in war, "you have to take a person and change his genus. Give him a whole different category. You couldn't stand looking at these bodies, so you detach yourself. You give them a different name that detracts from their humanness."
The tribal police worked with stoic faces. They lifted the body of this woman, whose past life, whose story, whose loved ones were now on another planet, onto a cart attached to an all-terrain vehicle and headed off down a bumpy dirt road with the body bouncing up and down.
When you look at a map that shows where such bodies are recovered in southern Arizona -- journalist Margaret Regan has termed it a "
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