Bullets on the Border

The policies and procedures governing the use of force by American border control agents in their contact with Mexican nationals are examined by director Charlie Minn through a consideration of three specific cases that resulted in a death. In 2010, Sergio Hernandez Guereca was shot by agent Jesus Mesa Jr., who claimed the teen was among a group transferring something over the border in Juarez and throwing rocks at him, although surveillance footage shows the boy hiding behind a pillar until he was struck. The second incident involved José Rodriguez, who in 2012 was shot by agent Lonnie Swartz from a bridge as the young man was walking along a border street in Nogales (Swartz also claimed that he was being targeted by rocks). The lawyers for both victims’ families dispute the justification behind the shootings, as do witnesses, and the remarks from Guereca’s father and Rodriguez’s mother are heartbreaking. But while Swartz is being prosecuted as a result of popular protests, Mesa has been protected through legal technicalities. In the third case, from 2013—presented in the form of a dramatic re-enactment without testimony—Cruz Velázquez, who had been hired to smuggle two bottles of liquid meth, was induced to drink some by interrogators, who then failed to get Velázquez medical aid before he died (his family received an out-of-court settlement from the U.S. government). Minn’s film clearly suggests that the rules covering agents’ use of deadly force should be re-examined and that the government should be more cooperative in seeing justice is done in these kinds of cases. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)