The Adventures of Chester: Back from Mexico

Well, I'm back after a short jaunt into Mexico. It was interesting to say the least. The reason was the wedding of a very close friend of mine and Mrs. Chester. The setting was Cabo San Lucas.

My experience in Mexico had been of only two kinds: the week before I got married in San Diego in 2003, I piled four Marine buddies into my Subaru and we drove south on a Saturday morning with no plan whatsoever. We ended up in Rosarita, where we got a cheap room, drank a lot of beer, and generally celebrated the end of my bachelorhood. My big takeaway from that experience was that Mexico was not as underdeveloped or as poor as I had thought.

The second trip wasn't really into Mexico but it pretty much dealt with the biggest issue out there in the realm of US-Mexican relations. I participated in planning a company-level construction project in support of JTF-6, which is a very strange military headquarters: based in Fort Bliss, Texas, it is responsible for construction projects that reinforce the US-Mexican border, and which support the US agencies that deal with border issues, whether the Border patrol, or the DEA, or others.

I thought JTF-6 was strange because even though it had a clear mission, and even though it had lots of money to execute the construction projects, it had no units permanently assigned to it, and even those that were assigned to it had chosen to be there themselves; that is to say, all engineer units in the US military are offered a go at any JTF-6 project that's out there, the units decide if any projects meet their training objectives, and then they ask to do certain projects.

Probably sounds ok, but the result is that JTF-6 has a lot of projects that are never executed because no engineer unit thinks they fit their mission profiles. The mission of engineering units is to prepare for war of course, and the tasks they will perform during a war, not to do some of the specific tasks required by JTF-6. At least, that seems to be the opinion of many units, commanders, and staffs that make such decisions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that any engineering mission is a good one for any engiineering unit because even if it doesn't match what that unit's projected wartime missions might be, the exercising of planning and thinking skills that the Marines (or solidiers, or Seabees, or airmen) will gain is invaluable.

Anyway in the spring of 04, I went down to the border around San Diego and tooled around for a day or two with some National Guard soldiers, and some field grade officers from the JTF-6 HQ who had flown out to meet us. We visited "the border" itself in several different places and it was fascinating. In many cases, it consists of nothing more than an eight foot high wall of corrugated steel -- with lots of gaping holes. We went to the beach and saw the fence that divides the US from Mexico. Unless it's been upgraded in the past 18 months, it consists of telephone-pole-sized timbers planted into the ground very tightly together, and then joined by some welded steel cross-pieces. It goes about 100 or so meters into the Pacific then peters out. Not to hard too bypass that obstacle!

Also interesting were the observation points of the Border Patrol. Along the border itself, the BP uses suburbans and Jeeps, if memory serves. They have observation points at various places that make good crossing points -- one for example, was overlooking a large drainage and culvert system that it would be very easy to crawl through. Others are in areas of very good visibility over long distances. They also have tightly woven nylon screens -- kind of like a combination of an overhang, and the kind of fence that is behind the catcher in a baseball park -- that serve to keep the rocks and bottles that the locals throw from damaging their vehicles. They seemed to work frequently in pairs of vehicles and seeing groups of Jeeps working together reminded me of Combined Anti-Armor Teams using bounding overwatch or traveling overwatch techniques.

Cabo San Lucas is certainly a phenomenon to behold. It's a boomtown: ten years ago, there were 10,000 residents; now, there are 140,000. I had never been to one of the Mexican resort cities (Cancun, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, etc etc). I really wonder a lot about the expatriate community there, and throughout Mexico. Not tourists, but those who have chosen to up and live down there for the majority of the year, or permanently. How many might there be? How does this impact the services and products available to the native population? What implications does this have for governance in Mexico to have a large number of relatively affluent US citizens living down there?

Anyone who does live in Mexico, or who knows more about JTF-6, please comment as these are very interesting issues.

Posted by Chester on November 16, 2005 7:58 PM to The Adventures of Chester