A death on the border.

• Author: Nathan, Debbie
• Position: Border Patrol agent Michael Elmer acquitted of murder of Dario Miranda Valenzuela

The U.S.-Mexico border just had its Rodney King case, minus the video camera, but this time the victim wasn't an African-American. He was an "illegal alien." His murder inspired no insurrections, and hardly any press.

Twenty-six-year-old Dario Miranda Valenzuela was a Mexican laborer, married, with two small children - an auto mechanic, tortilla-maker, and soccer fan. He and his family lived in Nogales, Mexico, in a house made of scavenged sheet metal, with no bathroom.

At dusk last June 12, Miranda was crossing into the United States through a canyon near Nogales, Arizona. The area is known as a drug-smuggling corridor and, that evening, five U.S. Border Patrol agents were patrolling it. One of those agents was twenty-nine-year-old Michael Elmer. As Miranda made his way, gunfire suddenly rang out. When the air cleared, Miranda had two bullets from Elmer's AR-15 in his back. Instead of calling an ambulance, Elmer dragged the wounded man 175 feet and hid him in a crevice under a tree.

A coroner later noted the corpse's clutched hands, indicating that Miranda had died in agony. If medical aid had been summoned immediately, Dario Miranda might have lived. But the shooting wasn't reported until fifteen hours later - by Elmer's partner. The partner later told authorities that Elmer planned to come back the next day to bury the body and asked him, at gunpoint, to help. Instead, the partner reported the shooting to his superiors and Elmer was arrested.

Arizona authorities charged Elmer with first-degree murder. It was the first time in memory that a Border Patrol agent had been criminally indicted for killing a civilian while on duty.

Since the mid-1980s, the Border Patrol has been beefed up with personnel and weaponry - ostensibly to fight a "War on Drugs" against invading hordes of wetback narcotraficantes. During the past few years, the number of Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico line has more than doubled, and their turf now extends far beyond mere immigrant-chasing: They are authorized to enforce all Federal laws and often pack such high-powered weapons as M-16s or the AR-15 Elmer was carrying.

This skyrocketing level of paramilitary readiness "has confused the Patrol's mandate and created an us-versus-them mentality," says Maria Jimenez, coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee's Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project in Houston. Jimenez's group and several others have lately documented dozens of reports of Border...