Border killing 20 years ago changed military tactics
Border killing 20 years ago changed military tactics
Esequiel Hernandez was herding his family's goats when he was shot and killed by Marines training in the area around Redford, TX, on May 20, 1997. A modest cross marks the spot where he was killed. His grave is ... more
May 13, 2017
John MacCormack
REDFORD — On an overcast Tuesday afternoon 20 years ago, Esequiel Hernandez, a quiet, gangly youth who grew up in this dusty border hamlet, set out after school on his regular walk to the Rio Grande with his herd of goats and an old .22 rifle.
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Heading back, with storm clouds gathering, he was trailed through the brush by four armed and heavily camouflaged Marines. The surveillance team from Camp Pendleton in California had been sent in secretly days earlier to watch for drug smugglers along the river.
Thus the stage was set for an accidental drug war tragedy that would bring heartbreak to a close-knit family, ignite a national debate about militarization of the border and force a suspension, albeit temporary, of the use of armed troops for border security.
Within sight of his home, Hernandez, 18, was shot and killed by Cpl. Clemente Banuelos after he allegedly pointed his rifle at the Marines.
According to them, Hernandez earlier had shot twice in their direction. He died quickly of a chest wound, without receiving medical aid.
“When I got the call that he was shot, I was in Alpine. I got here in about two hours, and he was still here. The justice of the peace had not arrived yet,” Margarito Hernandez, 48, an older brother, recalled during a recent visit to the site, marked by an ornate white metal cross.
Hernandez doubts his younger brother ever saw the hidden Marines, much less shot at them intentionally. The Texas Rangers came to a similar conclusion, as did the local prosecutor who sought a murder charge.
Three grand juries heard evidence but did not indict Banuelos or the other Marines, leaving the Hernandez family bitterly disillusioned.
“I understand he did what he was trained to do. I don’t say he should have been sent to prison, but it was wrong. In this case, there was no justice,” said Hernandez, a police officer in nearby Presidio. “My mom never came out of shock. She died a few months ago. She never recovered.”
Although the family members eventually were awarded $1.9 million to resolve a civil suit filed against the government, they were denied their opportunity to publicly vindicate Esequiel, said Bill Weinacht, their lawyer.
“Because their grievances were never aired in court, we didn’t have a tribunal take up these matters and get to the bottom of them. If we’d had a public jury trial on the criminal aspect of this, the family would have gotten some closure on this at least,” he said.
Historically, the killing of a U.S. citizen on American soil by the military is a rare and politically explosive event.
When National Guardsmen fired on Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War in 1970, killing four and wounding nine others, the nation reacted with shock. Hundreds of universities closed during the student strike that followed, and opposition to the war intensified. The killings prompted an intense re-examination of how public protests should be handled by armed soldiers.
In the wake of the Hernandez killing, the subtle militarization of the border, in which active- duty Marines and soldiers had worked alongside Border Patrol agents and others since the late 1980s, came under harsh scrutiny. A few months earlier, a Green Beret had shot and wounded an armed Mexican intruder near Brownsville.
“The Esequiel Hernandez case was a watershed. It really did make things pause for a number of years in the use of armed troops,” said Timothy Dunn, a professor at Salisbury University in Maryland and author of a book on border militarization. “It wasn’t entirely stopped but it was scaled back, and 9/11 couldn’t undo that immediately.”
Soon after the Redford shooting, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen suspended the use of the military in antidrug patrols along the border. Border Patrol sector chiefs in Texas also announced a halt to the collaborations with armed military personnel.
Multiple investigations ensued, citizen delegations went to Washington when congressional hearings were held and fingers were pointed. But the only thing on which most agreed was that the death of Hernandez, a high school sophomore who loved folkloric dancing and horses, was a senseless tragedy.
As more light was shed on the incident, it seemed that everything that could have gone wrong did so, beginning with the out-of-state Marines’ failure to grasp that a lightly-armed teenager meandering through the brush with his goats might not be a menacing drug scout.
“This encounter was fraught with misunderstanding, misperceptions and gross errors, and it graphically illustrates the dangers to human rights posed by the militarization of domestic law enforcement,” Dunn wrote.
A review by the Marine Corps found fault with numerous aspects of the covert mission. A House subcommittee led by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, likewise was critical of the Justice Department for its investigation of the killing, which absolved the Marine Corps of wrongdoing.
Two years later, the military announced a new policy: Armed ground troops could only be deployed along the border with the “specific permission of the secretary of defense or his deputy.”
In the wake of 9/11, as many Americans came to see immigration as a national security issue and accept that a hardening of the border was necessary, the Hernandez incident faded from the public consciousness.
By 2006, President George W. Bush was sending thousands of National Guard troops to the Southern border. And now, President Donald Trump has vowed to impose harsh new immigration controls and build an impenetrable border wall.
At one point this spring, according to a draft internal document obtained by the Associated Press, the Trump administration apparently considered mobilizing 100,000 National Guardsmen for the Southern border, an idea that was quickly disavowed.
But even without such a dramatic event, the border military paradigm has changed, said Camilo Perez Bustillo, formerly of the Border Human Rights Documentation Project in El Paso.
“The rhetoric permeates everything we say and think about immigration, basically the assumption that immigrants are dangerous and are criminal and have something to do with a threat to the United States,” said Perez Bustillo, now director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton.
“The nightmare began with the Hernandez case. It became prophetic of something we couldn’t imagine 20 years ago. Now it’s playing out in slow motion with the wall and all that,” he added.
History of tensions
Throughout Redford’s history, its strong cultural ties to Mexico, periodic cross-border tensions and occasional friction with American authorities have been recurrent themes.
Founded in the 1870s by Mexican colonists who were offered free land in Texas, the isolated settlement downriver from Presidio first was known as “San Jose del Polvo.” The first major task for the settlers was to build a 6-mile-long canal to divert irrigation water from the Rio Grande.
For more than a century, the river bottom fields produced cotton, melons, onions, alfalfa and other crops in abundance.
Redford had a public school by 1886 and a post office a year later. In 1912, residents erected the San Jose Catholic Church.
A century ago, during an extended period of border unrest during the Mexican Revolution, U.S. cavalry troops were sent to Redford to protect it from bandits and incursions by Mexican troops.
In one battle of the revolution at “La Loma de Juarez,” government troops defeated those led by Pancho Villa, prompting a panicky retreat across the Rio Grande.
“After the battle, Redford was a mass of confusion as both refugees and retreating soldiers crossed the river and promptly surrendered to American troops,” Sul Ross State College student Jack Chappell wrote in a 1965 history of Redford.
Still standing on a bluff south of town are the ruins of a large adobe trading post erected near the old cavalry barracks during that chaotic era. Hernandez regularly passed it on his way to the river, and once scratched his name in an outside wall.
At times, conflicts arose between Redford residents and the armed outsiders sent to keep peace, Chappell wrote.
“Sometimes during this turbulent period on the border, lawmen, or those appointed to keep law and order, were as much to be feared as the bandits and smugglers who followed the Rio Grande,” he wrote, describing confrontations between villagers and soldiers, as well as the killings of several Texas lawmen “under mysterious circumstances.”
Questions remain
Twenty years after the shooting, the Hernandez criminal case remains unresolved, at least in the minds of those who investigated.
“We were not satisfied with the final conclusion at all, but it is what it is. In my personal opinion, some criminal violations occurred but the grand jurors saw fit not to indict,” said retired Texas Ranger Capt. Barry Caver, who oversaw a case that quickly ran into unusual problems.
The first came on the day of the killing when his lead investigator was denied access to the four Marines in order to question them, he said.
“We felt we were being stonewalled by the Marine Corps and their leaders because we didn’t feel like we were getting all the information. It’s sort of like when you go against Big Brother. It’s very tedious and problematic,” he said.
Caver said he came to believe that Hernandez never saw the armed intruders in the brush, and that any shots he fired on his walk were random.
“The kid was totally minding his own business and they killed him because they were a little trigger-happy. It was a totally messed-up situation,” he said.
Former District Attorney Albert Valadez, who presented the case to two Presidio County grand juries, believes a prosecutable homicide was committed.
“As I look back on it, I still feel the circumstances were such that the grand jury should have indicted Banuelos for the murder of Esequiel Hernandez. None of the others were criminally responsible,” he said.
Undermining the Marines’ self-defense claim, that Hernandez was pointing the rifle at them when he was shot, was the location of his fatal wound, according to
“He was right-handed and right-eye dominant. When he fired the rifle, he would shoulder it on his right shoulder. He was hit in the right rib cage and it couldn’t have happened if he was aiming his rifle at the Marines,” he said.
New military protocols
Over the past 20 years, the military has adopted measures to avoid violent encounters between civilians and troops on the border, said Marine Col. Ladaniel Dayzie, deputy commanding officer of Joint Task Force North, based in El Paso.
Formerly known as Joint Task Force 6, it provides volunteer military personnel to assist the Border Patrol and other federal agencies in conducting “counter drug and counter transnational organized crime operations.” The military support missions range from road construction to ground reconnaissance to intelligence analysis.
“I can’t see how it could happen again. The rehearsals and the process we go through with the law enforcement partners is such that we can almost completely rule out it happening,” Dayzie said.
For starters, he said, military units assigned to the border are now required to work with a local law enforcement agency while in the field, and are ordered to avoid confrontations, even if threatened. If something like the Redford situation arose, they would respond entirely differently, he said.
“The military personnel would take cover and avoid getting shot at, versus maneuvering to follow the threat,” he said.
But despite these changes, the basic problems with militarizing a domestic security mission remain largely unchanged, Dunn said.
“The essence of militarization is the military acting like police and the police acting like the military, either of which implies treating social issues inherent in law enforcement as though they are military problems or threats to be eliminated or otherwise ‘neutralized,’ too often via force which such is unnecessary,” he said.
Exhibit A of police acting like soldiers, he said, was the 2012 killing of two unarmed Guatemalan immigrants near La Joya in the Rio Grande Valley. They were shot from a Texas Department of Public Safety helicopter while riding under a tarp in the bed of a fleeing pickup.
Public records showed DPS officers had fired guns from helicopters five times while pursuing vehicles.
The DPS said its officers thought the truck in LaJoya was carrying drugs. It later modified its policy on shooting from aircraft to make self-defense a critical component.
The La Joya killings provoked a wave of protests by civil rights groups and Guatemalan consular officials.
“There is no law enforcement use-of-force policy anywhere in the country that would justify that kind of callous killing,” said Elliott Tucker of the South Texas Civil Rights Project.
Dying town
Redford had more than 100 residents in 1997, but since has lost both vitality and population. To the casual motorist passing by on Texas 170, the vacant buildings and adobe ruins might suggest a town slowly being abandoned.
In recent decades, the elementary school, the Baptist Church, the post office and the last store in town have closed. Farming went into decline after a failed attempt to clean out the canal in 2004, and after the dikes along the river were breached by the great flood of 2008 and left unrepaired.
In the aftermath of 9/11, traditional informal crossings all along the border were closed, including one in Redford.
Here they still joke that they can hear the roosters in Mexico crowing in Spanish, but no longer can residents freely visit friends and relatives just across the river in El Mulato, Valle Nuevo or El
Most of the Hernandez clan still lives here, and Margarito comes regularly from Presidio.
“Redford is dying, The big change was the river crossing,” he said, fondly recalling weekend trips as a boy to visit relatives in Mexico.“When I was a kid, we had three stores and a gas station. There was an old man who had a donkey who would come over here from Mexico to get the mail.
“It was a community then. Almost everyone had a little herd of goats. When someone killed a pig, everyone got a taste. But time has gone by and people have lost their way of living,” he said.
To Enrique Madrid, 69, a local activist, historian and former storekeeper, the Hernandez killing remains an unhealed wound.
“We’re all suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome that’s 20 years old. It’s something we’ll never forget and I don’t guess anyone will give us any medication for it,” he said.
Madrid says the anniversary comes as human rights and security issues on the border again are at the forefront.
“It’s very timely. We’re heading in the same direction again. All those drones they are flying on the border. I’m sure they are armed. And that wall. It’s not only inhuman, it’s un-American. You don’t wall people off, you sell them refrigerators,” he said.
Back in 1997, Rosendo Evaro, 84, was both the postman and bus driver who drove Redford kids to school in Presidio. He remembers Esequiel as a quiet teenager who rode in the back of the bus and never caused trouble.
“There was a great sadness about what happened to this boy. I had just left him at home and a few hours later, he was dead. They were a very good family,” he said of the Hernandez.
“It’s all mistakes that people make. When I was in Korea, our own airplanes bombed us,” he said, adding that now, 20 years later, there is little left to be said.
“We people just forget about it because nothing can be done.”
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