We were paddling the Rio Grande about 7 miles upstream from San Ygnacio, not too far from the Webb County line, when we came upon the monstrosity of a section of Gov. Abbot’s border wall, the curved tops of its 30-foot steel bollards reaching like claws into the sky. It looked so unordinary against the tranquil setting of Zapata County ranchland, the river vega so void of human presence, so serene and quiet save for the occasional slap of a catan tail, the splash and draft of our paddles, and the birdcalls of waterfowl and shorebirds so well known to us.
Before us lay six miles of the Border Wall, built within the past year with taxpayer funds from the State of Texas and courtesy of Gov. Greg Abbott.
Steel bollards: a foreign alien presence on so beautiful a stretch of the Rio Grande.
Crews hired by the old Trump cronies Fisher Sand & Gravel were out there working on a calm sunny Sunday morning. The sound of their heavy-duty truck engines and construction equipment shattered the sounds of bird chatter and a gentle southeasterly breeze rippling over the water.
It felt out-of-place and looked so foreign on wild, pristine land filled with memories and stories of ancestors who traversed these lands and the life-giving waters of the Río Bravo.
After Trump’s defeat by Biden in the November election of 2020, efforts by the No Border Wall Laredo Coalition and South Texas Landowners Association resulted in the federal government rescinding four federal contracts that had been dropped onto the Laredo Sector (Webb and Zapata) totaling more than $1 billion to confiscate and destroy 71 river miles. The goal of those federal contracts had been to create an off-limits Security Enforcement Zone (SEZ) along the river filled with BP vehicles, high intensity lights, and the 30-foot steel wall, worthy of the East German Berlin Wall crawling, ready for far right paparazzi anytime a far right politician wanted to pop in for a visit and a photo op.
Enter Greg Abbott.
In January 2023, the State of Texas awarded two border wall contracts (same specs as the Trump border wall) to North Dakota-based Fisher Sand & Gravel ($224 million for 9 miles) and Galveston-based SLSCO ($137 million for 6.6 miles) for Webb and Zapata counties. That comes out to nearly $23 million per mile of wall.
The wall 7 mi. upriver from San Ygnacio.
When you think about how $1 million could fund the launch of a brand new and deeply needed 24-7 police force for Río Bravo and El Cenizo, the money is obscene. It’s highway robbery.
As with Trump, the wall is and was about money. Big Money benefitting the same little circus of crony contractors and campaign donors.
Only this time, the state was gonna’ do it different than the feds.
Rep. Tracy King had maneuvered to prevent eminent domain of Texas land for Abbott’s sweeping border security bills that reached into the billions of dollars.
But Abbott was desperate to feed his base and his ego. He was willing to pay money for riverfront easements. And they were gonna’ start with the small guy for chump change – tiny parcel landowners along the riverfront in Río Bravo and El Cenizo.
They offered about $5,000 to the City of Rio Bravo for its entire acreage of riverfront parkland. The City’s Mayor and Commissioners said no.
Without land, Abbott couldn’t get his wall, so he had to dig deeper into the State’s pockets and spread the money around.
That meant starting at the very northern tip of Webb County and reaching out to his Houston oil and gas buddy, Stuart Stedman, who happens to be one of Abbott’s biggest political donors and compadres. Abbott agreed to pay him millions in January 2023 to acquire five miles of riverfront easement on Stedman’s private 40,000-acre Faith Ranch, not the measly $5,000 that he offered those poor Mexican-American folks down in Río Bravo.
But back to the paddling story further south down in Zapata County on that early November day in 2024.
A lof of plumbing infrastructure for crop irrigation?
Based on Zapata maps, it seems like the Abbott/Trump wall continues through big payments to private landowners, who like Stedman, are absentee landowners. The Knapps out of Brownsville, the Fenders out of Tyler, and the Schwartzs out of McAllen.
He’s also bought up a few more easements along smaller parcels in El Cenizo, too – landowners all eager to take state taxpayer money for whatever reason, and give Abbott the green light to helicopter in and invite those far right paparazzi lackeys to his contrived movie set anytime Austin needs to look tuff’ on border security.
Those transactions reek of a cheap dinner date who’s willing to settle for some chips and a soda once you realize that that easement you’ve just signed over to Big Austin is forever, and you’ve just lost the most valuable and stunning part of your land.
But the river will have his way. Its waters won’t be restrained or held back by steel bollards or steel gates.
Impermanence is part of nature’s story.
A hard, prolonged rain’s a-gonna’ fall to reclaim those river lands, washing them free of this foreign, frenzied, alien Machiavellian metal cage.
