CHAPTER 3
Necroviolence
EXPERIMENTING WITH DEATH
Everyone knows that something really awful is about to happen, especially the pig. As soon as Freddy gets close, the animal starts jumping back and forth in his tiny metal cage, slamming his head into the sides and grunting loudly. Somehow this pig recognizes the gun and wants nothing to do with it. He is afraid.1 The desert is quiet this morning; no wind, no birds chirping. All you can hear is grunting and the sound of the cage shaking. Freddy coolly places the .22-caliber pistol a few inches from the pig’s head and squeezes the trigger.2 The gun makes a pathetic pop that is immediately followed by squealing and the cage rattling as it gets kicked by muscular hind legs. A calloused brown hand reaches down and flicks the door open. The 150-pound animal comes staggering out: a punch-drunk boxer at the end of the twelfth round. He loosely steps left and then right before stumbling and falling flat onto the ground. High-pitched squealing. Floating dust. The pig forces himself back up and begins the death dance again. It’s a pitiful sight and several bystanders look away. Blood mixed with foamy white cerebrospinal fluid drips out of the quarter-inch hole at the top of his skull. He is screaming in pain.
I have read that this is the most humane way to kill a pig in the field.3 It sure as hell doesn’t feel humane. It’s also not instantaneous. The animal keeps falling down and getting back up. He walks in half-circles and defiantly refuses to die. “I gotta do it again,” the gunman tells us. “His skull is too thick.” Freddy grabs a piece of dirty rope from the back of his truck. I walk over and take hold of the pig’s stomach and hind legs. I am trying to be gentle, which is ironic given that I purchased this animal from a university meat vendor for a dollar a pound and paid for someone to come out and kill him on site.
I pull the pig to the ground and Freddy grabs his legs. He literally hog-ties him. The animal is now whipping his head and splashing blood everywhere. It’s on the dirt, our boots, our shirts. We try to hold him still, but he starts flopping against the ground. The weight of his body makes a deep dull sound every time it hits the dirt. Thud. Thud. Thud. Puffs of dust rise into the air with each spasm. Deep crimson mixes with the brown soil. “OK, step back.” I let go and the pig tries to stand up. In an instant, another shot rings out, and he falls to the ground heavy like a sack of dry cement. This time he can’t get up. I drop to my knees and put my hand on his warm body. Blood is dripping from his mouth and forming a shallow pool. I start patting the coarse white hairs on his stomach and whispering, “It’s OK. It’s OK.” A hind leg twitches. One of his large eyes is wide open and seemingly staring at nothing. Dirt and grass are stuck to his cornea. For a few seconds his breathing is rapid and shallow and then it stops. I keep quietly saying, “It’s OK,” even after he is dead. I keep saying it even though I don’t believe it.
Because of their fat distribution, degree of hair, torso size, and internal anatomy, pigs have long been the preferred proxy for a human body in forensic experiments.4 Scientists shoot them with bullets to measure gunshot residue on their tissue; they kill, bury, and try to find them with ground-penetrating radar; they rub lubricants on their skin in hopes of better understanding trace evidence associated with sexual assault.5 Sus scrofa domesticus is the unsung hero of forensic science experimental research. On this day in the summer of 2013, we are in the midst of conducting a second season of experiments on body decomposition in the desert, and this pig is one of our case studies. After years of listening to migrants, colleagues, Border Patrol, and the media speculate about what happens to corpses left exposed to this environment, I decided to see for myself.
In 2012, three juvenile female pigs were killed, dressed in clothes similar to what migrants wear, and placed in different environmental contexts (e.g., direct sunlight and shade). We monitored the decomposition process via daily field observations and motion sensor cameras that recorded still images and videos of any movement near the animals.6 In 2013, two adult male pigs (including the one described above) were killed. One was placed in the shade of a large tree, and the other was covered with a pile of rocks and brush mimicking an ad hoc burial. The goals of this research are to observe how fast decomposition happens in the desert and to document the impact that scavenging animals have on bodies.7 I also want to provide an up-close view of what it looks like when carrion eaters descend on a corpse. This latter aim is connected to my desire to show how the hybrid collectif of border enforcement has set the stage for scavenging animals to come into close and (from a human perspective) violent contact with the bodies of hundreds of fallen border crossers a year. To understand this postmortem violence, I have had to commission several brutal acts against the pigs used in this research.
There is no other way to say it. Killing these animals was violent despite all the precautions we took. They all writhed in pain for upwards of three minutes before succumbing to the gunshots. None of them went peacefully. These acts were justified, I argue, because other than obtaining human bodies that have been donated to science for forensic experiments,8 I found no feasible alternative to using pigs for this research. I, along with others, have argued that the federal government holds the problematic view that migrants are bare life, or individuals whose deaths are of little consequence.9 My killing of these animals in the name of science thus reeks of hypocrisy.10 How can someone hope to critique violence against one group while simultaneously carrying it out against another?
I convinced myself that the death of these animals was a means of generating knowledge about a hidden sociopolitical process that affects hundreds of dead bodies a year. Still, this was no easy decision. By highlighting the gruesomeness of these pigs’ deaths, something completely avoided in forensic science publications, and providing an up-close perspective of how other animals engage with both human and Suidae bodies in the desert, I strive for what Kirksey and Helmreich call a multispecies ethnography; that is, an ethnography that focuses on how the lives and deaths of humans and nonhumans are closely intertwined and jointly shaped by cultural, economic, and political forces.11 As others have recently done,12 I too seek to complicate the concept of biopolitics by drawing animals into the equation.
My expansion of the ethnographic lens to encompass more than humans doesn’t excuse the fact that I paid to have five sentient beings shot in the head, proceeded to dress them up like Latino border crossers (admittedly another questionable endeavor), and then fed them to nature.13 The animals described here are agentive creatures that were sacrificed so that I could better document the demise of people the federal government has constructed as nonsubjects; people whose lives have no political or social value. The desert, like the beef slaughterhouse studied by Timothy Pachirat, is a “zone of confinement,” a place no upstanding citizen is supposed to see.14 However, ethnography in this instance is used not just to bear witness to animal suffering but also to demonstrate how pigs can do the social work of providing humans with access to the largely invisible suffering and violence associated with the postmortem lives of migrants.15 This is a strange role reversal given that these pigs are beings that many “manage to ignore, to unsee, and unhear as if the only traces of [their] lives are the parts of their bodies rendered into food.”16 These animals are now tasked with humanizing death. My hope is that their demise gets us closer to understanding the intimate connection among animals, insects, the environment, and humans in the Sonoran Desert hybrid collectif.
Deceased male pig dressed and placed in shade. Photo by author.
As soon as the pig is dead, everyone gets to work. We untie his legs, and a graduate student and I drag his lifeless body over to the shade of a large mesquite tree. He is quickly dressed in a bra and underwear, blue jeans, a gray T-shirt, and tennis shoes. These are the same clothing items we would expect a female border crosser to wear. Someone puts a wallet in one of his pockets along with other personal effects, including several coins and a slip of paper with a phone number written on it. A black backpack and bottle of water are placed next to his body. Final checks are made on the angles of the cameras mounted nearby. Batteries are at full power and memory cards are empty and ready to record video data. We turn the machines on and walk back to the field house. In a few days birds will rip this pig to shreds.
NECROPOLITICS
Contrary to the Border Patrol’s sterile language (“Prevention Through Deterrence”), feigned naiveté (“this policy has had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of fatalities along the border”17), and deflection of blame (“Not a day goes by when we don’t find immigrants who say they were abandoned by their smuggler”18), it is the federal agency that has created an infrastructural funnel along the US-Mexico border that intentionally directs people toward the desert. This arid landscape is the federal government’s savvy political-ecological response to Middle America’s periodic calls for more border security. It is also a money-generating landscape where overpriced technologies of exclusion underperform (see chapter 6) as they simultaneously fill the coffers of government contractors and the Washington lobbyists whom they have in their back pockets. But what of the human costs of this politicized terrain? How do the lives of those lost to the most extreme forms of “deterrence” articulate with notions of American sovereignty?
Achille Mbembe has critiqued the tendency of Foucault’s concept of biopower to conflate politics, war, racism, and homicide to the point that they become difficult to disentangle and interrogate individually.19 This consolidation, he argues, does not adequately account for the specific ways that death and the right to kill (or let live) are exercised in contemporary forms of political power.20 More generally, rather than seeing politics as simply “a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition,” Mbembe calls for the pessimistic acknowledgement that, increasingly, the political is masked as war, resistance, security, or the battle against terror. Each one of these endeavors “makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.”21 Necropolitics, or killing in the name of sovereignty, is not about abstract notions of reason, truth, or freedom. It’s about the tangibles of life and death: a suspected terrorist disappears forever into the bowels of Guantanamo Bay;22 a drone strike in Yemen intended to kill Al Qaeda fighters ends up vaporizing members of a wedding procession;23 a fifteen-year-old kid walking down a Nogales, Mexico, street is shot in the back eight times by Border Patrol standing on the US side because they thought he was throwing rocks at them.24 Mbembe may very well have been thinking about the United States when he wrote, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”25
Even a cursory glance at the technology (e.g., drones and night-vision goggles), discourse (“bodies,” “aliens,” “Homeland Security”), and casualties associated with southern boundary enforcement (more than 2,600 bodies recovered in Arizona alone since 200026) suggests that a war on noncitizens is in fact taking place on US soil. The geopolitical boundary with Mexico is ground zero where federal law enforcement battle both armed drug smugglers moving loads of mota on their backs and Oaxacan peasants running across the boiling sand in huaraches. This conflict even makes great television. Just ask the producers of the National Geographic show Border Wars, who proudly proclaim they aren’t “afraid to show the heartbreaking, jaw-dropping, and action-packed side of issues like illegal immigration and smuggling.”27 American television audiences cheer on their favorite Border Patrol agents as they chase Mexicans through the desert. Stephen King’s dystopian boob-tube nightmare The Running Man is now reality.
While many people, both citizen and noncitizen, have been shot and killed by Border Patrol in recent years (42 since 200528), of the 2,238 dead migrants examined by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner between 1990 and 2012, 1,813 either had a cause of death linked to “exposure or probable exposure” (45% of the 2,238) or had remains too fragmented or decomposed for the cause of death to definitively be determined (36%).29 Given the location where they were recovered, the people represented by this latter statistic (i.e., rotting bodies and animal-gnawed bone fragments) were likely also killed by “exposure.”30 These numbers represent only bodies that were found.
As the policy documents highlighted in chapter 1 attest, the desert is a tool of boundary enforcement and a strategic slayer of border crossers. The federal government doesn’t call the policy killing; they call it deterring, and justify it as the cost of guarding the homeland. The fact that this violence has been outsourced to mountains, extreme temperatures, and thousands of square miles of uninhabited terrain does not mean these fatalities should be characterized as “unintended consequences” or natural events. It’s not that simple. These deaths are the fruits of an innovation in murder technology, like the guillotine, gas chamber, or the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone—more refined forms of homicide. Nature “civilizes” the way the government deals with migrants; it does the dirty work. As the architects and supporters of PTD are well aware, this policy also cleverly increases the degrees of separation between victim and perpetrator.31
The US government has little regard for the rights or lives of border crossers, a point exemplified by a security apparatus that transparently seeks to deter them through pain, suffering, and death. Migrants exist in what Agamben terms a state of exception: the process whereby sovereign authorities declare emergencies in order to suspend the legal protections afforded to individuals while simultaneously unleashing the power of the state upon them. The US-Mexico border has long existed as an unspoken space of exception where human and constitutional rights are suspended in the name of security.32 Border crosser deaths are justified by a person’s lack of citizenship (i.e., exceptional status), his or her commission of a civil offense, and the hypocritical desire to protect the United States from the very people we rely on to pick our strawberries, pluck our chickens, and valet-park our cars. Lacking rights and protections when they illegally cross into sovereign territory, undocumented people are killable in the eyes of the state. Prevention Through Deterrence is necropower operationalized.
NECROVIOLENCE
As the state’s power to kill people in the name of political projects has attracted the attention of social scientists, a growing number of researchers have focused on the postmortem biographies of the dead, including the sociopolitical contexts of burial, the agency of corpses, and the political afterlives of bodies.33 Many of these studies of death emphasize corpses as actants and focus on how a multitude of cultural, economic, and political factors shape the dead’s interactions with the living.34 Some argue that the reach of modern necropolitics now extends beyond the moment of death: “If the exercise of sovereignty is tantamount to the prerogative of pursuing war on life, then it is equally pertinent to consider its war on the corpse.”35 Although they are unarmed civilians, the bodies of border crossers are not immune to this war.
Hostility directed at the dead is by no means a new cultural phenomenon. Humans have been doing it for millennia and with fervor: Achilles dragging the lifeless body of Hector around the city of Troy; enraged Aztecs mounting the heads of conquistadors and their horses on a tzompantli (skull rack) as a not-so-subtle message to Cortez and his men that it is time to evacuate Tenochtitlán;36 Catholics during the French Wars of Religion feeding the bodies of Protestants to crows and dogs in hopes they would carry their souls to hell.37 As Foucault notes, excesses of violence are what make these deeds “glorious” to the perpetrators and allow torture to extend beyond the moment a person stops breathing: “Corpses burnt, ashes thrown to the winds, bodies dragged on hurdles and exhibited at roadside. Justice pursues the body beyond all possible pain.”38
Attention may have shifted during the Enlightenment away from the body as a site of punishment, but waging war on the dead has never stopped being an important cross-cultural practice.39 The United States is not immune to this impulse, a point driven home recently when four Marine Corps snipers were reprimanded in 2012 after a video was posted on the Internet showing them urinating on the dead bodies of alleged Taliban soldiers. When asked about it later, Sgt. Joseph Chamblin bluntly responded:
These were the same guys that were killing our family; killing our brothers. . . . We’re human. Who wouldn’t [want to get revenge] if you lost your brother or mother? Wouldn’t you want revenge? . . . If anything it was more of a psychological effect on the enemy because of their cultural belief. If an infidel touches the bodies they’re not going to Mecca or to paradise. So now these insurgents see what happens when you mess with us. . . . I didn’t do it to be appreciated. I did it because I love my country and love what America stands for. I don’t regret my service.40
Such forms of humiliation have long functioned as a tool to alienate the victims from their entire social context so that spectators to this violence can be united in feeling morally superior while ridiculing them.41 In moments of war, the desecration of the enemy’s body is practically a cultural universal.42
These different engagements with dead bodies are forms of what I term necroviolence: violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane by the perpetrator, the victim (and her or his cultural group), or both. Unlike Mbembe’s necropolitics, which centers on the capacity to “kill or let live” associated with modernity and the exercise of sovereignty, necroviolence is specifically about corporeal mistreatment and its generative capacity for violence. These macabre social processes are ancient and transcend cultural, geographic, and political boundaries. By labeling this phenomenon, I seek both to connect it to modern forms of political power and to provide a framework for facilitating a conversation about this postmortem violence across subdisciplines of anthropology. Much can be learned about ideologies of conflict and social inequality by interrogating necroviolence across time, space, and fields of study.
Corporeal mistreatment has a diverse range of forms and functions. In some cases, postmortem violence is aimed at the victim’s spirit, soul, or afterlife, and historical and contemporary examples of this abound. In the Iliad, Diomedes tells Paris that “he who faces my spear shall redden the earth with his blood, and there shall be more vultures about his body than women (mourners).”43 The implication is that Paris’s body will be desecrated and his soul robbed of funeral rites. The vultures represent a “threatening and horrifying image of the future,” making for a “brutal, degrading, and solitary” death.44
A manipulated dead body can also be a vector for violent messages directed at the living.45 Putumayo Indians were dismembered and decapitated for failing to collect sufficient amounts of rubber for their British overlords.46 Their body parts became rotting trophies that simultaneously illustrated colonial power over native life and what happens to those who don’t work hard enough. Racist mobs in the American Deep South lynched and burned black men, women, and children accused of various indiscretions against whites. These gruesome spectacles were followed by the crowd digging through the ashes for souvenirs while the victim’s family waited their turn to collect whatever was left for burial. For the angry mob this dismemberment transformed the corpse into “lynching souvenirs,” which erased both the “whole” body and the person who inhabited it, while simultaneously constructing objects that embodied a brutal ritual and represented the “determination to prevent the social ascendancy of African Americans.”47 Mexican drug cartels hung the corpses of their rivals from bridges, skewered their heads on fence posts, and dressed bodies in costumes for media photo ops. You don’t have to speak Spanish to understand the message intended when someone rolls a bag of severed heads onto the dance floor in a Michoacán nightclub: “Do not test us, because our violence knows no bounds.” Rather than viewing these types of performances as senseless or random, anthropologist Rocío Magaña pointedly demonstrates in her discussion of narcoviolence in Mexico that as a “technique of terror,” body mistreatment is a recurrent theme in the construction of state authority and sovereignty, a point long recognized by archaeologists.48
Finally, the complete destruction of a corpse constitutes the most complex and durable form of necroviolence humans have yet invented. The lack of a body prevents a “proper” burial for the dead, but also allows the perpetrators of violence plausible deniability.49 As many recent historical events highlight, corporeal destruction is often a deeply political act. Dissidents during Argentina’s Dirty War were naked and sedated when navy officers dropped them from airplanes into the ocean, forever exiling them to oblivion and the status of “disappeared.”50 Forty-three troublemaking students from a teacher’s training college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, vanished without a trace. Rumors abounded that corrupt local officials and narcotraffickers burned them alive and then disposed of the bodies through various insidious means. The Mexican government says that the investigation is still pending. Although such practices are relatively “subtle” compared to grotesque displays of severed heads and limbs, having no corpse is arguably more sinister in that it robs an enemy of voice and agency and “confines the traces of . . . repression purely to the discursive domain.” Eradicating flesh and bone is now part of the postmodern “politics of disappearance.”51
The erasure of a body also prevents the necessary funeral rites associated with mourning from taking place. It stunts the development of the social relationships that the living need in order to “make sense of the life and death of the deceased” and negotiate (and renegotiate) the positions of the dead inside the living community.52 What is more troubling about this form of necroviolence is that it places mourners in a permanent state of what clinical psychologist Pauline Boss calls ambiguous loss, a loss that remains unclear.53 Not knowing where your loved one is, if she is dead or alive, is traumatizing and long lasting. This ambiguity “freezes the grief process” and renders closure impossible.54 It is the form of necroviolence that is seemingly without end.
A brief stroll through the annals of war, conflict, and aggression suggests that necroviolence is a cultural practice whose genealogical tree has deep roots and many branches. It is also a type of violence that can be easily outsourced to animals, nature, or technology. Feeding someone to the dogs, leaving a person to rot on the battlefield, incinerating bodies in an oven: these forms of corpse (mis)treatment all have an intermediary between the human perpetrator and the victim, but nevertheless achieve their primary goal of producing different forms of violence against the dead and the living.
It is the postmortem lives of those who succumb to the Sonoran Desert hybrid collectif that I am most interested in. How does the desert operationalize necroviolence? How can forensic science and a multispecies ethnographic approach make visible a violence intended to be inaccessible to the human eye? What physically happens to the bodies of the people killed by nature and left to decompose in its embrace? What can animals scavenging a corpse tell us about the political nature of migrant fatalities? In what follows, I argue that the unique deaths that border crossers experience and the ways nature affects their bodies are a form of postmortem violence that developed out of the underlying logic of Prevention Through Deterrence. When examined as part of the hybrid collectif of desert deterrence, the seemingly “natural” physical, chemical, and biological processes of decomposition show themselves to be political facts representative of the value placed on the lives and deaths of undocumented people. These facts become inscribed upon the bones of the dead.55
TAPHONOMIES OF VIOLENCE
How we have physically handled corpses through all time periods of protohuman and human existence has been of major interest to anthropologists.56 The depth of the grave, the position of the body, the items commingled with the skeleton: the postmortem treatment of the dead tells much about the cultural perspective of the living. It is not, however, just the actions of the deceased’s loved ones that impact their physical remains. Depending on the scenario and timing, wind, rain, groundwater, insects, chemicals in the soil, grave robbers, floods, gravity, and animals are but a few of the multiple factors that can transform bodies.57 Soviet paleontologist Ivan Efremov coined the phrase taphonomy in the 1940s to refer to the analysis of the combination of human and nonhuman elements that impact biological remains.58 In its modern usage, taphonomy is typically considered “the science of postmortem processes,”59 or the “study of the phenomena that affect the remains of biological organisms at the time of and after death.”60 It is also a crucial element of many forms of necroviolence.
Interest in taphonomy gained traction in the 1970s, especially among archaeologists focused on the biasing effect that postmortem events have on the material record (e.g., how erosion impacts burials). Their goal was usually to find ways to strip these effects away under the assumption that the only thing nonhumans did was destroy important “cultural” information.61 By the 1980s people began to recognize that some of these nonhuman processes were in and of themselves quite interesting.62 For example, rather than seeing scavenging animals as only negatively impacting archaeological data, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman argued that identifying their presence taphonomically could be used to test theories of early hominid hunting and scavenging.63 Still, despite some groundbreaking work on postdepositional patterns, taphonomy continues to be a source of confusion for some researchers, particularly archaeologists who have erroneously tried to exclude cultural processes or human behaviors from the definition.64
Whether it is pounding on a corpse with a wooden mallet to render it useless to grave-robbing witches or interring bodies in soils that quickly lead to mummification,65 all processes that impact dead organisms are “taphonomic.” Recognition of this fact has been an important step toward overcoming the nature-culture dichotomy that has often stunted our analytical ability to understand the complex intermingling of animals, insects, humans, and environmental processes that occurs once a body stops pumping blood. By far the most important contribution to this more nuanced anthropological understanding of depositional and postdepositional patterns comes from anthropologist Shannon Dawdy: “Taphonomy describes the complexity, the mix of accident and manipulation, the silences and erasures, the constraining structures, and the sudden ruptures that all go into the creation of history and into the formation of the ‘ethnographic present.’ . . . [Taphonomic] processes are not simply an archaeological mirror of social processes—they are social processes.”66 Building on this idea that taphonomy is a social process constructed of equal parts human and nonhuman, animal and mineral, living and dead, I argue that the postmortem events that affect the bodies of migrants in the desert are a form of necroviolence largely outsourced to nature and the environment but intimately tied to Prevention Through Deterrence, territorial sovereignty, and the exceptional (i.e., killable and disposable) status the US government ascribes to undocumented border crossers. Rather than stripping away the net effect of processes that erase biological information, in the following discussion I illustrate the destructive and inhumane elements of taphonomy in the Arizona desert and how they produce violence.
DESERT TAPHONOMY
Before the Undocumented Migration Project began experiments in 2012, only two academic publications had focused on human body decomposition in the Sonoran Desert.67 These studies were based exclusively on retrospective analyses of coroner reports from the 1970s and 1980s when most of the deaths in this region were murder victims, individuals who died of natural causes in their homes, or US citizens who went missing in the desert.68 This forensic research predated the era of Prevention Through Deterrence and thus did not address the skyrocketing number of border crosser fatalities in the early 2000s associated with this policy or the unique demographic and depositional profiles of this particular population.69
These two published reports improved our understanding of some of the unique taphonomic conditions found in the Arizona desert, but the data they presented have been relatively difficult to correlate with migrant death. This is because border crossers die in depositional contexts different from those of murder victims buried in shallow graves or people who expire in their houses and are shielded from the outside environment and wild animals. Moreover, while both of the previous studies briefly mention scavengers, primarily coyotes and dogs,70 their presence is inferred from skeletal analyses, and there are no data from direct observations of animals interacting with bodies. Surprisingly, neither study mentions vultures, a long-recognized member of the Sonoran scavenging guild.71 Because migrants often die in remote areas and lie undiscovered for months or years (or are never recovered), it has been difficult to document what decomposition looks like over time or how animals engage with corpses. The following descriptions attempt to make these hidden postmortem processes visible via experimental research.
“Fresh”
When death approaches in the Sonoran Desert, there are few places to hide. The region has no giant oaks or cool elms to seek refuge under; just spindly cacti and bony paloverdes. If you can find shade, it is a luxury that often lasts only as long as the sun sits still. Anyone dying of dehydration or hyperthermia may or may not have their wits about them, but they may be aware enough to crawl under the nearest tree to temporarily get away from the light.72 Unfortunately, the shelter found in the early-morning shade of a scraggly mesquite may not last long. By noon the sun is staring directly down at you, its rays easily cutting between the narrow green leaves (if you can call them leaves) and baking the ground underneath you. To protect yourself, you end up having to chase the sombra, jumping from shadow to shadow like a dog on a hot summer afternoon. Border crossers on the verge of death often huddle under trees, only to be found later dead after being rotisserie-cooked by the rotating sun.73
The pig described at the start of this chapter was dressed and placed upright in the shade, leaning against the trunk of a large mesquite tree. The animal sat for four days relatively undisturbed.74 In the mornings his body was shaded and in the afternoons it was exposed to direct sunlight. During the course of an average day the air temperature around him fluctuated between 50 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you have ever come across a carcass left out in the open that is in the early stages of rot, you know such bodies are miniature biological laboratories. Flies buzz around. Ants crawl on skin. Maggots shuffle inside of mouths and nostrils. Gases build up and are then expelled. Over the course of just a few days this is what happened to the pig’s body as it passed through the “fresh” and “early” stages of decomposition.75 His skin became discolored and began to slip; his stomach ballooned; maggot activity became intensive. Swelling in the legs and abdomen caused one of his shoes to fall off and his shirt to ride up, exposing his fleshy white belly. Fluids dripped from the anus and the umbilical area, staining both his pants and the surrounding ground. As his body slowly mutated and expanded, scavenging birds patiently sat in nearby trees waiting for their moment. It took five days before turkey vultures (Cathartes aura), the most widely distributed carrion bird in the New World,76 descended upon him.
Meet Cathartes aura
Get up early enough in the Sonoran Desert to watch the sunrise and you may catch a glimpse of a turkey vulture perched high in a tree. She sits motionless with her large black wings spread open to the sun. Her red fleshy head is turned to the side. For those unfamiliar with this bird, the first view of this posture can be frightening. The large wings and hooked beak cast a long shadow across the desert floor. It looks like the ending of most vampire movies, when the cloaked protagonist raises his gangly arms in terror as he meets the punishing rays of the sun. For turkey vultures, this posture is less about drama and more about thermoregulation and feather drying. This stance, however, illustrates that despite having a mass of only about 2 kilograms, these birds are large (average length, 64–81 centimeters) with an impressive wing span. It can be even more intimidating to see these animals out on the migrant trail when their silhouette moves rapidly back and forth across your path. Unlike the Old World griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus) in Spain and southern France, which have reportedly started to kill and eat cattle,77 Cathartes aura (roughly translated as “purifying breeze”) is almost exclusively an opportunistic feeder of wild and domestic carrion.78 Since the late 1990s this carrion has included the flesh of dead migrants.
Turkey vultures rely on a highly developed olfactory sense to find carcasses in the optimal state of decay. In other words, these creatures specialize in eating the rotting dead, those left unburied. But even when a carcass is located, these birds may observe from a distance for days before approaching. Researchers posit that the dead flesh of large mammals has to reach a particular level of putrefaction (with its associated aroma) before these animals will commence feeding. As Eduardo Kohn’s Runa informants in the Upper Amazon of Ecuador say, “What we humans perceive as the stench of rotting carrion, a vulture experiences as the sweet-smelling vapor emanating from a boiling pot of manioc tubers.”79 It took 120 hours before the vapors emanating from this pig’s body were sweet-smelling enough to convince Cathartes aura that it was time to eat.
The three birds to approach at daybreak are timid. Unsure if the pig is dead, they pace around the body and avoid close contact. A motion sensor camera mounted on the ground catches several close-up shots of their blood-red heads and black eyes. Their ivory beaks, like tiny meat hooks evolved to flesh-tearing perfection, cut a sharp profile across the picture frame. It’s 5:30 A.M. and a cool 52 degrees outside, but the temperature is quickly rising. More pacing and circling; it goes on for hours. Finally, at 8:37 A.M. one of the vultures makes a bold move and darts in to rip a piece of tongue away. The pig doesn’t move, so the bird goes in again. A few more nervous pecks. Small hesitant chunks are ripped from the mouth and neck. It flinches with each bite, expecting the pig to yelp or squirm. No movement, so it tugs on a leg. Nothing. Within seconds a beak is ripping at the urogenital opening on the pig’s stomach.
The feeding builds slowly, a grotesque crescendo. Talons claw at pink flesh as one of the brave pioneers climbs on top of him. Another bird continues to rip at the hole in the stomach, the pig’s stiff body reluctantly rocking with each bite. Others continue to pace as if planning an attack strategy in their bird brains. Flies loudly buzz in and out of the camera view. At 10:33 A.M. the stomach starts to bleed and ooze through various puncture wounds. These holes have caused the abdominal cavity to deflate, and pungent gases are slowly expelled into the air. Shadows pass overhead from all directions. A bird flies across the camera frame and shows off its silvery gray ventral feathers. It is 90 degrees and someone has rung the communal dinner bell.
The bird picking at the stomach makes a breakthrough and draws out a two-foot piece of intestine. The body teeters as it is opened up. The chunk of digestive tract is inhaled in just a few seconds. Immediately two more vultures swoop down and start jockeying for position. Black wings with silver undersides are spread in hopes of intimidating a rival. According to ornithological field reports, “Feeding vultures rarely tolerate conspecifics at carcass; usually only 1 bird feeds, sometimes 2, although others may wait nearby.”80 By 11 A.M., six birds are simultaneously feeding on him. On the camera audio you can hear flesh ripping and feathers ruffling. More entrails have been exposed. Claws crunch down on dried grass as creatures play tug of war with a long piece of pink meat. It is now 100 degrees. The pace of the feeding continues to build.
Vulture scavenging activity recorded by motion-sensor camera.
Eight are eating. Then it’s nine. Others gather around and watch from the trees. More approach the body. Heads boldly dive into flesh. It soon becomes difficult to count them. There are black wings everywhere. Three vultures stand on the body picking at the stomach, while others go for any other open skin. Flesh rips; wings extend. Newcomers swoop in. At one point as many as twenty-two birds will be near the body to feed, with another eight monitoring from a close distance. He is completely surrounded. The piles of defleshed bones and ripped migrant clothes found over the past fifteen years make it clear that this scene has happened, and continues to happen, to the bodies of mothers, fathers, daughters, and husbands who have died while crossing the desert. The feeding rages on.
A black vulture (Coragyps atratus) shows up and is swiftly pushed out of the way. The fighting has started: low guttural hissing, biting, more intimidating wing displays. You can’t see the body anymore. There is just a giant black ball of moving feathers. Every orifice and piece of exposed skin has small white beaks nimbly picking at it. More entrails shoot out of the stomach like a magician’s handkerchief; it looks as if it will go on forever. Two red faces step back to fight over the stomach contents. Another set of birds aggressively flare their wings and crash into each other as they tussle for a feeding position. The loser is pinned to the ground by his rival’s more powerful claws. During these brief bouts a leg or the head is momentarily exposed to the camera only to be quickly obscured by a new set of feathers. The T-shirt is ripped to expose untouched skin. A barrage of ivory beaks snap at meat, snap at one another. Birds continue to swoop in and out. Dust and feathers are everywhere. The body lies helpless as talons and beaks manipulate and destroy it. It is 11:17 A.M. It is 108 degrees.
This scene goes on all day and varies in intensity between daybreak and sunset. When the number of vultures eating decreases, it becomes possible to observe individual animals meticulously working the body over. Claws keep digging into flesh as they try to steady themselves for better tearing. By noon, the other shoe and both socks have been removed. As the sun starts heading west, beaks dig deeper into open holes. Sporadic fighting continues. The birds tear more clothes, exposing every last bit of precious organ meat and muscle. The temperature gets as high as 122 degrees. As the sun goes down, a few stragglers keep working. The shoes and socks have been moved several feet away from the now deflated body.
The sun rises the following day and casts a soft orange light on the now ravaged figure. The shirt is torn to pieces and covered in blood, other bodily fluids, and vulture shit. Black feathers decorate the ground around the body. Early-morning camera footage shows some birds patiently waiting in trees, while from high above shadows zigzag. Once there is enough light, they descend again. More hissing, more ripped flesh. By 12:30 P.M. an enterprising vulture has managed to remove the blue jeans and the underwear. While one bird digs at the flesh stuck to the denim pant legs, another crams its head deep into the anus, demonstrating the selective pressure to evolve featherless heads. This is the hybrid collectif at work, and it will once again continue unabated until nightfall.
Pig head and femur after several days of vulture scavenging. Photo by Michael Wells.
Just like the previous two days of feeding, the third starts at daybreak. The difference is that by now the body is a pathetic shell of what it used to be. Even though the bulk of the viscera and muscle were consumed within the first forty-eight hours, the birds keep working. One of them finally manages to rip the shirt off and expose the red bra underneath. The shoes and pants are nowhere to be seen. Hooked bills continue to pick at the remaining meat, though there is not much left beyond skin and bone. Ribs and femurs are defleshed and exposed. Maggots work on what little tissue remains between the vertebrae. By the end of the day he is reduced to a mummified skin suit with the red bra still attached. The body is now light enough for birds to pick up and move around to access any remaining meat. Later, some skeletal elements and personal effects will be recovered over 50 meters from their original location. Cathartes aura will continue to scavenge at the remaining spine and skull for fourteen more days until we stop the experiment and collect what bones we can find.
Replication
This experiment was repeated several times with similar results.81 Every animal that we dressed in clothes and left exposed to the elements was eventually picked clean by scavengers. The pig we placed in direct sunlight at the top of a small hill in 2012 rotted for seventeen days before vultures became interested, a delay likely caused by early rains that came that summer. During this time, however, coyotes (Canis latrans) and domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) from a neighboring residence were spotted ripping chunks of back meat and chewing pieces of ruptured intestines. A map of migrant deaths that have occurred in southern Arizona in the past two decades reveals that many people die near rural residences while seeking help.82 A number of canine companions in this region likely have dined on human flesh and then trotted home to lick their owner’s face.
When vultures did finally approach this particular animal, it took eight of them only twenty-four hours to completely skeletonize the body. For two days they scattered bones and personal effects as far as 27 meters away from the original site of death. In the end, our survey recovered 66 percent of this animal’s bones. The great distances from the skeleton that many of the clothes she was wearing were carried would, in a human death scenario, make it difficult to connect personal effects to a corpse. Even though the body was placed in a semi-enclosed area and an extensive surface survey was conducted, the card with a phone number that we placed inside her pants pocket was never found.
In 2012, we also laid a female pig under a mesquite tree several hundred meters from the one left in direct sunlight. She was visited on numerous occasions by two local dogs that sniffed her, moved the body with their paws, and urinated on her. The intense scavenging of this animal’s body by vultures did not occur until twenty-two days after death. Over the course of five days, between two and eight birds were recorded intermittently feeding and attempting to remove her clothing. It took approximately twenty-five days for her to be completely skeletonized, and afterward vultures were spotted circling the area and sporadically moving bones and clothes across the landscape. Parts of her were carried as far as 20 meters from the original death site. In addition, the slip of paper with a phone number written on it that was inserted into her pocket was found 20 meters from where the body was originally placed and not directly associated with any clothes or bones. After only five weeks of exposure to the elements, we recovered just 62 percent of her skeleton. Had we not collected the remaining bones, scavenging would have continued. This constant physical movement and destruction of body parts and personal effects suggests that with enough time, a person left to rot on the ground can disappear completely.
Burying the Dead
The old man is lying on a bunk in the Juan Bosco shelter, blankly staring up at the ceiling. He is wearing a white button-down shirt, brown polyester slacks, and dusty black dress shoes. I notice him because it is 6 P.M. and no one is supposed to be in the men’s dormitory for at least another two hours. I say hello as I pass him on the way to the kitchen, but he either ignores me or doesn’t hear. I ask Samuel, one of the shelter workers, who he is. He tells me, “They just brought him in. His wife died out in the desert and they had to leave her body behind. Can you imagine that? They just covered her up and left her.” He is in shock. That’s why he gets to lie down early. Even in this space, where everyone is in dire straits, there is a clear hierarchy of suffering.83 The old man will remain mute for the entire evening. At one point two shelter workers will take him by the arms and escort him to the kitchen. His feet barely leave the ground as he shuffles down the hall. He sits quietly and stares at an untouched bowl of beans for twenty minutes before being escorted back to his bed. There is nothing left to say.
Later I am sitting with another shelter volunteer named Patricio, and we talk about death in the desert. He tells me:
Sometimes on the trail you will see pieces of skin or pieces of human bone. I think it’s people who stayed behind. It’s coyotes or I don’t know what kind of animal [eats them]. People get left behind. People who get cramps get left behind and then they get eaten. All that’s left is bone.
Jason: Have you seen this on the trail?
Patricio: Yes, I don’t think they are animal or deer bones because they are normal looking. They look like leg and knee bones, ankles, an arm with finger bones.
I show him a photograph of a pile of rocks I encountered while hiking.
Jason: Have you ever seen something like this in the desert?
Patricio: Yeah. Sometimes when people die, they cover them with rocks. It’s like when they can’t dig a hole they will cover the bodies with rocks so that desert animals can’t get to them. That’s why they do it. A lot of times it’s when a family member or someone from your group dies. They will organize the group to do this.
Three months after this conversation I am piling brush and rocks on top of a dead pig. I tell two other students working on the experiment that we have fifteen minutes to cover the body and we can only use our hands to break branches and carry stones. This is what I imagine a hasty burial would be like if someone in my group died en route. Rocks from a 20-meter radius are collected and carried over to the body. Bare hands bleed as we rip dried mesquite branches off trees and pile them up. We finish covering the body and turn the cameras on.
Placing material on top of a dead body to protect it from the elements and animals seems logical, which is why migrants often do it. In preparing our experiment, we too anticipated that this activity would slow the rate of scavenging. What we failed to remember is that rocks are excellent for conducting and retaining heat. That’s why you find them in ancient hearths and modern saunas. Encasing this body in stones in the middle of the summer when midday temperatures were in the low 100s had the opposite effect of what we expected. The rocks quickly absorbed the sun’s radiation and ended up cooking the body. Of all our experiments, the rate of scavenging by vultures was fastest when we built this ad hoc cairn. Winged shadows circled the body within forty-eight hours and feeding began on the third day. The birds easily picked between the brush and cobblestones. Some bones and clothing were immediately carried as far as 20 meters away from the original death site. The pig was skeletonized in less than a day. In the end, all that was left under the rocks and brush were two polished leg bones and a moist pair of blue jeans.
DESERT NECROVIOLENCE
Differential treatment or deposition of remains reflects the beliefs and attitudes of the agents involved.
—Komar 2008:123
Unless you are a Tibetan Buddhist making a final offering of generosity via a sky burial or you knowingly donate your body for a forensic science experiment involving raptors,84 having your corpse ripped apart and devoured by vultures and your remains scattered to the wind is what many would call a “bad death”—a death that occurs in the wrong place and at the wrong time. It’s a demise that signals a loss of control and inhibits the performance of culturally appropriate burial procedures and rites.85
For the predominantly Roman Catholic people who migrate from Latin America, this destruction of the corpse is threatening for at least two religious reasons. An absent body makes it virtually impossible to have a wake for the deceased and prevents the family from constructing a grave where they may visit the dead and pray for his or her soul. On an ideological level, a destroyed or incomplete corpse is seen as a threat to the afterlife in that it may stop people from rising from the dead to be judged at the end of time.86 This breach of Catholic burial norms in the desert is “symbolically potent, as an exceptional and avowedly demeaning act.”87 Close examination also reveals it to be an inhumane handling of remains even for secular people or some enemies.88 This necroviolence reflects the physical and symbolic disregard that border enforcement policies like Prevention Through Deterrence have perpetuated against migrants. Such taphonomic events have systematically occurred for more than a decade, and we can now add it to the tail end of the social process of undocumented migration.89 Dying in the desert has become routinized enough to now warrant labeling it.
This (mis)treatment of bodies is an ethical concern, but the physical destruction by the environment has other implications. The remote locations where people die, the rapid scavenging of corpses, and the destruction of clothes, personal effects, and bones by various processes mean that the current death tally for the desert undercounts the actual number of people who die out there. The hybrid collectif destroys evidence and there are few witnesses to this act. Flesh is shredded by beaks, bone is cracked by mammalian canines, and ants carry off what is left.90 Nature sanitizes the killing floor. Given what we now know about desert taphonomy, it is clear that there will never be an accurate death count, a point echoed in a 2006 Government Accountability Office report titled Border Crossing Deaths Have Doubled Since 1995: “The fact that a number of bodies may remain undiscovered in the desert also raises doubts about the accuracy of counts of migrant deaths. . . . [T]he total number of bodies that have not been found is ultimately unknown.”91
This destruction of corpses erases evidence of thehuman costs of federal policy and simultaneously sends shock waves of grief back to the families of missing migrants, whose members are left wondering whether their wife or son, husband or daughter is dead or alive. Drawing parallels with those in Latin America whose loved ones disappeared during moments of political conflict, many have adopted and repurposed the term desaparecidos to refer to those swallowed up by the desert and never heard from again.92 My graphic descriptions of what happens to bodies are not meant just to shock. The broader goal of this chapter is to contextualize the bones of border crossers in the desert geopolitical landscape, make manifest the hidden deaths and postmortem lives of migrants, and show that these violent taphonomies are logical extensions of a political process. As this book progresses, I add names, faces, and life histories to ravaged human remains in the desert.
The federal government has knowingly created a border security infrastructure that puts people in harm’s way. The “natural” processes that impact or destroy bodies may be carried out by animals, insects, and various chemical and environmental actants, but they are nevertheless part of a larger enforcement paradigm designed by the Border Patrol. The vultures eating flesh and ripping clothes represent the final stage of “deterrence” that emerges from this hybrid collectif. While at various moments the US government has expressed sympathy for migrant deaths, this usually occurs only when considered a politically savvy move.93 However, officials have never accepted direct responsibility for setting the death machine in motion. Describing necroviolence in the desert operationalizes less obvious elements of deterrence and illustrates how this theory can help us better understand the context, form, function, and effect of postmortem violence that largely happens out of sight. Like Agamben’s camp, the desert is a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.94 This desert ossuary is eerily similar to archaeological descriptions of medieval and early modern times in places like Ireland: “There is . . . a patterning to the location of remains within the centers of power: the heads and body parts tend to occur at the boundaries of the medieval sites. Placing the remains in liminal locations would have amplified the visual messages sent to those both inside and outside the settlement while also reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of those whose body parts were treated in this manner.”95 Looking at the bodies left in the desert reveals what the physical boundary of sovereignty and the symbolic edge of humanity look like.
Postscript
Vicente is sitting under a mesquite tree on the side of a dirt road when Bob Kee and I encounter him one afternoon while leaving the Coronado National Forest. From a seated position he waves a weary hand to attract our attention. Had we been driving fast, we would have missed him. Vicente is a short portly man in his late forties. His clothes are sweat-stained and tattered and he is carrying a jug half-filled with opaque water. He can barely stand up to greet us. “I was with a group but they left us behind. A lady and I couldn’t keep up with the guide. I left her on the trail by a big tree and went to get help,” he tells us. This was hours ago. Vicente is in bad shape and obviously needs to go to the hospital. His story unravels as he gingerly drinks the water we have given him:
I live in Idaho and was deported a week ago for driving without a license. I need to get back because I was supposed to have internal surgery next week. I just need to get back to my family. They need me. Can you tell me how far it is to Idaho? I have to keep going.
Every aspect of him radiates desperation: his voice, his eyes, his physical movements. What can you possibly say to someone in this condition? Bob and I walk a few feet away to discuss the situation. We decide that to let him continue walking would likely be a death sentence. There is no way he will make it another day by himself. We talk to Vicente about his physical state and his family.
Bob: Vicente, you can die out there alone. You are in no condition to keep walking. Tucson is over forty miles away and Idaho is even farther.96
Vicente: I have to keep going. I need to get back to my family.
Bob: We know you don’t want to go to the hospital or back to Mexico, but we think your family would want you to be alive. Will you please let us call an ambulance?
He nods his head and looks down at the ground. It’s too much for him to handle—the physical strain of walking so far, the mental anguish of being removed from his family, the desperation to keep going at any costs. He starts weeping. Someone puts an arm around him. We dial 911. An hour later we watch paramedics load Vicente into the back of an ambulance. We then get into our vehicle and start driving around the desert aimlessly until the sun sets. We are looking for a lady who was left on the trail near a big tree.