In January, two Mexican women were thrown from the back of a pick-up truck on the side of a Southern California highway. They died instantly. They were Mexican migrants being shuttled in a flatbed across the line at the Tecate checkpoint. In a story that Mexicans have gotten to know all too well, the Border Patrol gave chase as the driver pushed the truck to 80. It all came to a tragic end when the pick-up hit the strip of spikes the Border Patrol had thrown across the road; the truck ripped through a guardrail, and the search for a new life ended in two anonymous deaths.

" The line always wanted to suck the private out of you, " a character from Paul Flores’s recent novel Along the Border Lies (Creative Arts) remarks. " Spit you out and make you part of the noise. "

The noise comes from helicopters and turnstiles, padlocks and shotguns. It’s the noise of armed soldiers fighting unarmed civilians, the soundtrack to what Naomi Klein described in a recent issue of the Nation as " Fortress NAFTA, " the birth of a new " security continent " selectively militarized by Presidents Bush and Fox to maximize commercial mobility and labor exploitation. Klein indicts Fox’s Bush-backed inauguration of " Plan Sur, " a close-the-Southern-border initiative that deports Central American migrants headed to the US; it recently resulted in the US’s footing the bill for the detention of Indian refugees in a Guatemalan holding pen.

But as the migrant deaths on Interstate 8 remind us, a fortress continent does not mean the end of fortress nations. The Web site for the Arizona vigilante group American Border Patrol provides downloadable software that lets you monitor and report border-crossing activity through Web surveillance cameras, " bringing you to the front lines, " as the organization’s slogan puts it. The US/Mexican border remains its own battlefield — and a makeshift cemetery. On the southern side of the border wall near the Tijuana Airport, there are even improvised tombstones: hundreds of white crosses commemorating those who have died on the line.

Revolución de amor (WEA International), the new album from Guadalajara pop-rock giants Maná, includes " Pobre Juan, " a song about a Mexican migrant who gets jacked by his coyote (i.e., people smuggler) and never makes it across the border. Buried beneath the polished hook is a devastating verse — " en la línea se quedó, " or " he stayed in the line, never arriving, never returning. "

The new video from Mexico City’s Molotov, " Frijolero " (from their third Universal/Surco album, Dance and Dense Denso), is in heavy rotation on MTV Latin America. It turns the real-life game of the border chase into an animated, red-white-and-green South Park–ian comic drama complete with Bush caricatures, falling missiles, and chorus lines of dancing girls. The band’s bi-national make-up gives the video’s border plots extra racial weight. White, New Orleans–born drummer Randy Ebright plays the two most prominent gringo roles: the white contractor cruising street corners for day laborers and the Border Patrol agent hunting the same turf for illegals. His three Mexican bandmates — one for each color of the Mexican flag — are both the day laborers and the defiant cholos who flip off the agents from their lowrider bicycles.

That the same gringo represents the American who hires the illegals and the law enforcers who arrest the same workers only highlights the cruel paradox of a sealed, militarized border that agribusiness and industry desperately need to keep open. Having the same Mexicans play the roles of the illegal workers and the street cholos only highlights Mexican typecasting — the laborer is the illegal is the laborer.

The drama is the visual companion to a song that in its lyrics boils the battle raging on the US/Mexico border down to the violence of racial insults, to a bout of bi-lingual name-calling that radio stations will have to bleep out. The song flits between the Mexican telling the gringo to stop calling him " frijolero " ( " beaner " ) and the gringo telling the frijolero to stop calling him " gringo " : " Don’t call me gringo you fuckin’ beaner/Stay on your side of the goddamn river. " It’s a rare case where both sides of a sociopolitical clash of cultures get equal airtime.

" Frijolero " cuts no deeper than any of Molotov’s other lefty frat-boy politics — in the video a mountain transforms into a naked woman’s breast. But at least it reveals the degree to which George W. is wreaking global devastation in the name of " homeland security. " Molotov drop in oil and drugs and remind us that the same imperial mindset that’s pushing us toward war has long been workshopped at the border itself, where death and democracy are all too familiar neighbors.