TIJUANA (Mexico): While the US government was building its last stretch of border wall, Mexico made its own statement by placing the remains of the Berlin Wall a few steps away.
A gray concrete slab weighing 3 tons sits between the bullring, the lighthouse, and the boundary wall that juts out into the Pacific Ocean.
“May this be a lesson to build a society that tears down walls and builds bridges,” reads the sign below the towering Cold War relic, attributed to Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero and titled “A World Without Walls.”
For Caballero, as for many of Tijuana’s 2 million residents, the American wall is personal and political, part of the urban fabric and reality.
The installation was launched on August 13 in a ceremony with Caballero and Marcel Ebrardo, the former Mexican foreign minister who is now a leading presidential candidate.
Caballero, 41, is married to an Iranian man who has become an American citizen and lives in the United States. She and their 9-year-old son were crossing the border between Tijuana and San Diego.
As of June, Caballero has been living in military barracks in Tijuana and said she acted on credible threats brought to her attention by U.S. intelligence officials and recommendations from the Mexican federal government. A few weeks earlier, her bodyguard survived an assassination attempt.
Caballero said she doesn’t know who’s out to kill her, but she suspects it’s retaliation for taking the guns of the violent criminals who plague her town. “Somebody’s probably mad at me,” she said in her spacious office at City Hall.
Fragments of the Berlin Wall were scattered around the world after it fell in 1989, with collectors placing them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks. Social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall, but at the end of the day it is a wall. And the wall is always a sphinx that divides and bleeds nations.
President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to halt construction of the wall, ending his predecessor Donald Trump’s signature effort. But his administration has moved forward with small projects already under contract, including replacing San Diego’s 5.5-meter-tall double-layered wall with one rising 9.1 meters and stretching one kilometer to the ocean.
The wall passes through Friendship Park, a cross-border site inaugurated in 1971 by then US First Lady Pat Nixon as a symbol of binational ties. For decades, families separated by immigration status met through barbed wire and later wire fencing. It is a popular, festive destination for tourists and residents of Mexico.
At the 2005 Arts Festival, David “The Human Cannonball” Smith Jr. flashed through the waist in Tijuana when he barrel-rolled and was shot over a wall and landed in a net on the beach with US border agents nearby. In 2019, artist Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana covered the Tijuana side of the wall with paintings of adults who immigrated to the U.S. illegally as young children and were deported. Visitors who held up their phones to the barcodes were directed to a website that told their stories in the first person.
Cline said he was rebuffed at the White House when he tried to deliver a Berlin Wall relic to Trump and then trucked it across the country to find a suitable home. He said the piece found “its second life” in a Tijuana park alongside colorful border wall paintings that express views on politics and immigration.
Over the past 15 years, the U.S. government has gradually restricted access to the park from San Diego in a state park that once allowed cross-border yoga classes, religious services and music festivals. After much consideration, the Biden administration agreed to keep the wall at 18 feet for a small section where some access would be allowed.
Dan Watman of the Friends of Friendship Park, which advocates for cross-border access to the park, said the 18.3m section that will remain at a lower elevation is only a symbolic gesture. “The park on the Mexican side has become kind of a one-sided party,” he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it expects to replace the “degraded” two-layer barrier by November and that the taller one under construction will “provide much-needed improvements.”
The Tijuana mayor said she understands the need for U.S. border enforcement. She said Ken Salazar, the ambassador to Mexico, had asked her to evict migrants who had camped out hoping to gain asylum in the U.S. and block access to a U.S. border crossing in 2022. She followed his advice.
Any failure at the border is the collective responsibility of the governing nations, the mayor said.
“We’re against violence, we’re against family separation, we’re against division, and that’s what the wall represents,” she said.
