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The Current Transcript for August 12, 2016

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

SOUNDCLIP

If a country goes to war with another country, or another people, or another community, you know, they have to be prepared for things like that to happen. And when it does happen, you know, they shouldn't act surprised, they had it coming to them. They deserved it.

CONNIE WALKER: That's Aaron Drivers speaking to the CBC last year defending the terror attack on Parliament Hill. At the time, he told Canadians he wasn't to be feared, but something changed. His peace bond limited what he could do, but clearly that wasn't enough to stop him from planning an attack here in Canada. We will ask just how effective peace bonds are for radicalized Canadians, and if imposing them can actually make things worse. And then...

SOUNDCLIP

I see that's this forcing ourselves to listen to these very tiny sounds, as an effort to hear the voices of his children.

CW: Guillermo Galindo collects everyday objects left behind by migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, creating a unique form of art that bears witness to those struggling to find a better life. That documentary coming up in our second half hour.

'A 180 degree turn': Aaron Driver's lawyer on the effectiveness of peace bonds

Guests: Leonard Tailleur, Lorne Dawson, Michel Juneau-Katsuya

CONNIE WALKER: I'm Connie Walker, and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Oh Canada, you’ve received many warnings. You were told many times what would become of those who fight against the Islamic State. And perhaps you found yourself safe from retaliation, because you ran away from the battlefield. No, no, by Allah you still have much to pay for. You still have a heavy debt which has to be paid. You still have Muslim blood on your hands, and for this we are thirsty for your blood.

CW: That was 24 year old Aaron Driver, speaking in a video he hoped would be seen after the attack he was never able to carry out. Driver was killed during a confrontation with police in Strathroy, Ontario on Wednesday night after detonating an explosive device in the back of a cab outside his sister's home. The cab driver suffered minor injuries. Aaron Driver had a troubled childhood. His mother died of cancer when he was seven. In his teen years he ran away from home and converted to Islam at the age of 17. Aaron's father Wayne Driver spoke to CBC News yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

It's something that we dreaded, something that we talked about. When we first learned that he was an ISIS supporter, we were actually afraid at one point for our own lives in the house where he was living with us. We got to locking our bedroom door at night. He was never disrespectful, but you could tell tension was rising. And some of the things that I could hear through the bedroom door, the radicalization videos that he was listening to. And he said he wasn't harming anybody, had no intention of harming anybody, so it was none of my business.

CW: Aaron Driver had been known to police for some time before his death. He was arrested in Winnipeg last year, after posting statements in support of ISIS on social media. He agreed to a peace bond earlier this year, but the RCMP said yesterday he was not under surveillance. Police were tipped off about Driver's intentions on Wednesday morning by the FBI. To give us a clearer picture of who Aaron Driver was, I'm joined now by Leonard Tailleur. He's a senior attorney for Legal Aid Manitoba and he represented Aaron Driver. Leonard Tailleur joins me this morning from Victoria, BC. Good morning.

LEONARD TAILLEUR: Good morning.

CW: So Leonard, what did you think when you heard that your former client died allegedly preparing to commit an act of terrorism?

LEONARD TAILLEUR: Oh, shocked about it. But I saw the video yesterday, and to be frank with you this is like a 180 degree turn from his appearance with the police, from time to time when they spoke to him, his eventual arrest as my client. It sounds to me that in a period of five months or where he's under this peace bond, which I was assuming the police were actually surveilling him quite extensively, that he appears to have been radicalized to a much higher degree. I mean it was much more overt and much more aggressive than I've ever seen him before. I'm actually shocked. When I saw the videos that this is not the same guy that was in Winnipeg. Where the police you know, spoke to him from time to time and then eventually arrested him with myself in my office. When I saw that video, that's a 180 degree turn.

CW: Well you as his lawyer you had him assessed by a psychologist what was revealed in those examinations?

LEONARD TAILLEUR: There was also psychopathology, sociopathology, no psychiatric illness obviously, as the papers note and so on. There was a fractured relationship with his father. Been a long standing thing, estranged from his father. And even the relationship, which they tried to join again there was tension. So, I mean, that is really as even his father says the root of a lot of his issues. He left the church. You know, he had gone on to other things. But as his father also said he straightened up when he converted to Islam--

CW: [interposing] His, I just want to--

LEONARD TAILLEUR: Yup.

CW: His father spoke to As It Happens yesterday. Let's just take a listen to what he told them.

SOUNDCLIP

I was hoping it would force him into some kind of counseling to help turn him around. But when that didn't happen, I could just see things going from bad to worse.

CW: In your opinion could counseling have helped de-radicalize Aaron Driver?

LEONARD TAILLEUR: My understanding is that he was having some association with the London mosque and they were trying to speak to him. So, I mean, you know you’d have to ask them I think their indication is that you know, he didn't appear to be that interested in a particular type of Islam, which they were trying to convey to him. You know, because he had always had this perception about Islam that is consistent with ISIS. That is in terms of what the West was doing in the Middle East was an attack upon Islam generally, and therefore it was worthy of being defended internationally. And [unintelligible] has held that, but it was always in the third person. But see the personalization of it by that video. That is a step up and that's what concerns me. That once he's under a peace bond, which the Federal Department of Justice wanted, the police wanted, because that's the proceeding that they instituted. Not anybody else but it was the RCMP and the Federal Department of Justice. Now he's under surveillance, or he should be because he's now squarely in their sights for the period up to December the 31st. And in a period of five months he is radicalized to the nth degree, which he was never before. He was not in 2014, he was not in 2015 in any fashion. All of a sudden it's 180 degrees, and that's when he's under a peace bond. That's disturbing.

CW: Well we definitely want to talk a bit more about the peace bond, and how that was working or not working, clearly. But just one last question for you, do you have any regrets in terms of fighting to have the peace bond restrictions on your client weakened?

LEONARD TAILLEUR: Well there was hardly anything we were able to do. The reality is that the Aaron Driver that you saw in that video was not the Aaron Driver that you saw giving you know, an interview with I think it was the Globe and Mail initially in 2014, and then to the police in 2015, and in our offices until his eventual release. As it were, we were agreeable to the peace bond. It was the only question that some of the conditions that they wanted. And as it turns out one of the conditions being the GPS is really nothing to do with this thing, because I was really redundant. He had to notify the RCMP wherever he was. They absolutely knew where he was. They knew what he was doing, where he was, where he was situated, but to find out that he wasn't even under surveillance, there was nothing tapped, I mean the police gave them their phone, it was the RCMP phone that he had with him, which is even more astonishing to me. And then you know, he was supposed to get his own phone by the end of the month. But that was an RCMP phone issued to them. They had the right to check it as many times as they wanted it to. There was more than enough conditions for him. But you got to implement them.

CW: OK, I'd like to bring a couple of more voices in to discuss a little more in-depth how the Canadian authorities, including the courts handled the case of Aaron Driver. Joining us alongside Leonard Tailleur, we have two other guests. Michel Juneau-Katsuya is a former senior intelligence officer with Canada's federal spy agency CSIS. Today, he runs a security and intelligence company The Northgate Group. He joins us from Ottawa. And Lorne Dawson is the co-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society at the University of Waterloo. He joins us from Waterloo. Lorne, after Driver was arrested in 2015 you interviewed him. What was your impression of him then?

LORNE DAWSON: You know, we got a chance to interview him on August 6 for about two hours. It was actually at Leonard's request. It was part of the legal case surrounding the conditions of the peace bond. And you know, there's two aspects that we came away in terms of his nature. On the one hand, he was a very calm, somewhat shy, fairly intelligent, articulate young man who was very cooperative with us. We had a very successful interview with him, but it did become clear that he had very black and white understanding of things and that he was very committed, welded, to the jihadist viewpoints. It's clear that that had become a way of stabilizing his world, organizing his world, I would say securing or anchoring his identity and sense of purpose and meaning in life. After, as Leonard has indicated, he had quite a troubled and difficult adolescence.

CW: Michel, I'm curious what do you think of the peace bond that was given to Aaron Driver?

MICHEL JUNEAU-KATSUYA: Unfortunately I think from a counterterrorist investigator point of view, what seems to be quite on the present in the entire case is a little bit of the misunderstanding, close to naivety that exists around the issue of terrorism, and the form of terrorism that we are currently facing. It's very obvious to me, to a certain extent, that the kind of tools that we currently have is inadequate to deal with the kind of threat that we are dealing. It starts with the premise that we are not dealing with common criminals. The people and the judge in Manitoba in particular that were assigned to the case, they were experienced in dealing with common criminals. But we're dealing here with terrorists. A common criminal will not be ready to kill himself for his bag of weeds, or the break and entry that he's done, or anything like this. A terrorist is committed. And all the signs that our guests have shared were the indicators that he had the potential, if not already hiding the potential that he had in him to be capable to go further. It reminds me very very much the experience that the RCMP had in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, where they interviewed Couture. And Couture said that he repented, that he understood he’s misguided, he wanted to change, and two weeks later he ran with his car on four soldiers. It reminds me also very much the comments made by Judge John Major, who was the judge presiding the Commission on Air India, the investigation on Air India, and his delivery of his report. He made a very interesting comment in front of the press when he said when it comes to deal with terrorism the justice system, not the law enforcement, the justice system in Canada, and I paraphrase, is extremely juvenile, meaning that we lack experience. And I think we should inspire ourselves very much from the experience of countries who unfortunately had to deal with terrorism for decades like France or England, where you've got judges assigned to the issue of terrorism, they understand little bit more what terrorism is about, and the tools that they are given to work with are totally different. Like, you could be assigned to residence, you could be assigned to be guarded as well if need be. And that's the challenge we are currently facing. Is it sort of difficult? It will be very very difficult, because already the RCMP Commissioner and the director of CSIS has appeared in front of the government and said we don't have enough resources, we don't have enough money, there's too many kids to watch. And that's the challenge that we currently have.

CW: Lauren, what do you think of what Michel has said. Was it clear that Driver was you know, that black and white about his opinions and whether or not he would actually risk his life for this cause?

LORNE DAWSON: I don't think it was clear. And I think that the actually the overwhelming position of scholars in the field of Terrorism Studies, building up over a decade of research and study, is that there's a really significant problem and that is that a very large number of people talk a radical line, and a very small number of people ever cross the line over into taking some kind of action. And so if we were to go after or respond to or you know, result to a large scale sort of law enforcement response to everyone who is speaking in a radical way, the situation would become overwhelming, plus it would lead to a lot of false positives, it would lead to a lot of wasted resources. So, this is a dilemma. I'm not saying this is why the peace bond is probably the only measure we have at present to go after the individuals whose level of talk rises to a certain point, where we think maybe we have to take some action. But it's a rather kind of dull instrument to use in this situation. So, we're caught. The other issue that I think is a key one here that has come up already a couple of times, is that once someone is put on a peace bond, they're more or less left to their own devices. It's not a matter of whether they're being surveilled, it's a matter, as also the record of scholarship shows, that what do you do about it afterwards? People need some kind of counseling, some kind of program that they can be placed into. They may resist it, but at least it offers the opportunity that's in dialogue with professionals and dialogues with other religious leaders, they may come to moderate their views, and that may is an important may. Right now, there was no opportunity provided to Aaron to have anything along those lines happen.

CW: What do you think of the peace bond that was applied to him and how it affected him in this case?

LORNE DAWSON: Well, this is you know, part of the worrying concern is that we are operating on the impression from just one interview. But the one thing that came forward again and it's in alignment with what scholarship would show, is that this is really about his identity, it’s really about organizing his sense of point and purpose and meaning in life, and he's an individual who wanted a really significant role to play in this world. It was all welded to this jihadist identity and to the support network of other jihadists online. So, I'm only speculating but it is quite possible that under the conditions of the peace bond, he felt that this fundamental identity was threatened. He was cut off from channels of communication with the people that made his life worth living. Regrettably, in this case it may have caused him to double down on this identity. Whenever you intervene, any kind of intervention, whether it's by a psychologist or by police authorities, or something of that nature, you're always running the risk that you may cause the person to pause, have a moment of sober second thought, and start to moderate their views. But they also may take it as a sign of persecution, and a sign that they need to become even more strident in their orientation.

CW: Leonard is that what you think happened here? Is it possible the peace bond actually radicalized him more?

LEONARD TAILLEUR: No, and I have to speak to parliament that instituted the Safe Streets and Communities Act and actually lower the threshold for allowing peace bonds. It's much easier to get a peace bond under a terrorist allegation now than it ever was before. So, it's not the judiciary. The question is what steps the RCMP and Department of Justice are going to take when they're faced with a situation like this. And to be frank with you he had the open opportunities as Aaron did to be regularly at the mosque. Compelling someone to do something, as I've learned through 25 years in criminal law, it doesn't do anything. They have to have their own volition. So, in this case the major issue was was he properly surveilled? And I think that's what it's going to come down to. I mean, the end of the day this peace bond was over on December 31st, right? So what happens afterwards?

CW: Michel what did you think of the RCMP and CSIS` handling of the situation?

MICHEL JUNEAU-KATSUYA: Well, I totally agree first of all with both, that the follow up is lacking very very much. We cannot expect the RCMP or CSIS to play social worker or psychologist, they are not. So, therefore we need to be capable to come out with an arsenal of other tools and other professionals who are capable to come and try to assist. Now in this particular case we're talking about the tail end of a story, but unfortunately it is much more difficult to de-radicalize than to prevent the radicalization to take place. And that's where the previous government, and currently we're not seeing enough action, but we're seeing some more action than the Harper government, where we can focus a little bit more on this. And this is what is said. I totally agree that the studies have been sort of conducted many years ago by several institutions all over the Western Hemisphere. And we have a lot of data about what we should do and how we should go about doing it. But unfortunately the lack of political will to do so has been omnipresent, and that's why we are now paying a certain price and individuals are lost in that process. Because Mr. Driver is not unique, Mr. Driver is not unique. Matter of fact the RCMP again and CSIS has warned the government that there's over 350 kids that are currently on the list of people of high interest. People who already went to Syria and came back, or people who already sort of been flagged for having followed a similar path that Mr. Driver had followed.

CW: So yesterday Public Safety Minister Goodell mentioned plans for the creation of a centre of excellence for community outreach and engagement, which is supposed to help identify people who are vulnerable to radicalization. I mean, would an office like this have been useful to a person like Driver, Leonard in your assessment?

LEONARD TAILLEUR: Again, I think, as Professor Dawson has indicated and your other guest, a lot of it is their own volition and will to engage in these sorts of things. So, you know, I don't know the extent of it. I think the primary point is that first of all surveillance and access that way and intervention that way, and then you come with the second aspect, which is to intervene in some fashion. I mean, as I was reading here yesterday, a mosque had been dealing with him in London, Ontario. I mean he regularly attended the mosque, in fact, one point intervening where I wanted to get him to go to our forensic psychologist, he said no I need to go, my prayers. I don't know if that stopped. The last several weeks it appears as though he was attending the London mosque and he stopped going. That's an alarm, that’s an alarm bell there.

CW: Sorry to interrupt. I'm sure that there will be more that we learn about this in the coming days. But thank you all for joining me today.

MANY VOICE: Thank you.

CW: Leonard Tailleur is a senior attorney for Legal Aid Manitoba, he represented Aaron Driver. We reached him in Victoria, BC. Michel Juneau-Katsuya is a former senior intelligence officer with CSIS. He now runs the security and intelligence company The Northgate Group. He joined us from Ottawa. And Lorne Dawson is the co-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society at the University of Waterloo. He was in Waterloo. We did reach out to the RCMP and public safety minister Ralph Goodale for comment, but they were not available. I'm Connie Walker, and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE: Gone with a Trace, the story of lost items on the US/Mexico border

CONNIE WALKER: Hello, I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. Every year thousands of would-be migrants put it all on the line, making their way north from Mexico and trying to cross through the sweltering no man's land that forms the US border. Hundreds will die on their journey. Hundreds more will be picked up by border patrol agents. But every year some will successfully slip into the land of the free. But that might soon change. Nearly one third of the border between the US and Mexico is walled off by border fences. And many Americans want to see that expanded. But others, such as the California-based artists you're about to hear from, are instead calling for increased compassion with help from a unique art project. It's made up of the everyday objects that are lost or abandoned along the border by those seeking a better life. The Current’s Joan Webber brings us her award-winning documentary about their project called Gone With A Trace. And just a note if you go to our website at cbc.ca/thecurrent, you'll find photos and more sounds from this story. This is Gone With A Trace.

[Mexican music]

RICHARD MISRACH: Along the border I have found clothing, backpacks, water bottles, tennis shoes, human artifacts everywhere.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: Ultimately these are the objects that these people chose to bring with them to the US.

RICHARD MISRACH: Every one of these artifacts has a human story.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: They are items that we all use in our daily lives.

RICHARD MISRACH: I find toothbrushes and rolls of toilet paper, empty cans of beans...

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: And we can relate to the human tragedy and to these people that cross the border with these items.

RICHARD MISRACH: I’ve found stuffed animals, wallets, passports, soccer balls, border patrol shotgun shells, border patrol drag tires, these are the tires they pull along the sand to smooth out so that they can see the footprints of migrants.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: Well, I didn't know much about the border when I lived in Mexico. I learned about the border, I was starting here. My name is Guillermo Galindo, I'm a composer. Every day I see people that are immigrants, and it caught my attention, and I started investigating about this, about the building of the wall.

RICHARD MISRACH: My name is Richard Misrach, I'm a photographer. I've been photographing the American West for almost 40 years, and in recent years in 2009, the border wall, the building of it has been escalated to a level where it's basically a militarized border. In the 2000s, I decided to start photographing that in earnest.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: The first time I went there I found a child's backpack. You'd have this cartoon character Blue's Clues. And my son that was at that time very young used to love this cartoon character. I opened the backpack and there was soda that is a very popular soda in Mexico that I used to drink when I was a child. So it really hit very hard when I saw that.

RICHARD MISRACH: Ever since I met Guillermo his idea initially was collecting all these items. But since then I'd sort of picked up the job. And every time I go on a trip and I photograph the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, I find things along the border you know, that could be sections of the border wall itself. Each of these things I send back to Guillermo so that he can turn into instruments.

[Flute music]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: My idea of starting working with instruments made out of personal objects started when my father died. My mother told me to go to the closet where his clothes his clothes were, and I started going through the clothing and I found that my father was in every piece of clothing that I was looking at, the way they were fold, the way they were chosen. And I think there's a very personal thing between the objects that go through our lives and ourselves, is something that we touched and something that we went through.

[Flute music]

RICHARD MISRACH: So you'll find a discarded backpack, and for example a pink one had all kinds of things that indicate a little girl, which included everything from a compact mirror to a tampax, to a small purse with 78 pesos. One young man's had four condoms, a green glass bottle of musk cologne, a baseball cap.

[String plucking sounds]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: So the micro orchestra is not one instrument, it’s several items. And all of these items are children's items or small tiny items that we found.

[Scratching sounds]

RICHARD MISRACH: Early in 2014, after several years of coming across adult items and children's items, a combination of things everywhere along the border. In Texas suddenly I came across fields of just children's items.

[Scratching sounds]

RICHARD MISRACH: And that's where I found the little girl’s tweezers, two Bibles, children's Bibles, the tennis shoes of like four year old kids, there was actually a toy helicopter. All kinds of items that just indicated children, and it was very disturbing and mysterious, because normally you find a combination of things if there's any children involved.

[Strings being plucked]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: What I'm doing here is I went to the studio and we picked up some very sensitive microphones. And literally what I'm doing is playing sounds that these objects produce that are very very difficult to perceive with our bare ears.

[Squeaking sound]

SOUNDCLIP

Barack Obama spoke again today about what he's called an urgent humanitarian situation. Thousands of unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States.

RICHARD MISRACH: It was only several months later as stories came out, that indicated that this was part of a group of 52,000 unaccompanied children that were coming from Central America.

SOUNDCLIP

The US is emphasizing children who don't meet the criteria to stay will be returned to their home countries.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: I take this as an analogy of the thousands of children that are crossing the border. And their voices are heard.

[Strings being plucked]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: I see this forcing ourselves to listen to these very tiny sounds. As an effort to hear the voices of these children.

[Scratching sounds]

RICHARD MISRACH: And in 2009, I found these human effigies made out of migrant clothing that were put on agave sticks, they look like scarecrows lined along the California border. And they were very eerie, very mysterious. They just they were just all along the border with no information or signage. And so I did a series of photographs of those.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: I saw the photograph of the effigies that Richard took, and I was very inspired.

RICHARD MISRACH: You know, I wasn't sure if they were supposed to be [drum stroke] warnings to other migrants coming across, or if they were protests against a border patrol, or if they were art pieces, but they were so disturbing and haunting.

[Strings being scratched]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: I had a lot of clothing, immigrant’s clothing, and what I did is I designed this wooden cross that symbolized a human standing. And it's all hollow, it's made of wood, it’s all hollow so that it resonates. And I had a friend of mine that is a fashion designer carefully sew all of the clothing into this cross, and then I installed strings from one arm to the other, and in the chest of this figure, this human figure.

[Drum stroke]

[Strings being scratched]

RICHARD MISRACH: One thing that I found was a single boot and an old copy of Doctor Zhivago, a library copy that was bound in leather. This was by the San Diego-Tijuana border. Clearly whoever jumped the fence lost both the book and the boot. I photographed them where I found them. I brought them back and I started looking at the Doctor Zhivago and then it was you know, the Spanish version, a beautiful beautiful old version. And I found in the boot a single bus ticket of like a college student's bus ticket. So clearly this was a college student that had done this.

[Drum beat]

[Mexican language]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: This is a large structure, and it’s made all of wood that we found on the border. It's based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Martello that was a machine made to produce, it had a hammer. So it's a crank that you crank around, and the hammer hits the nail or whatever you're hammering. But instead of the hammer, I used a shoe and a glove that are hitting a drum that is made out of one of these tires that Richard was talking about, these tires that they drag around the border.

[Hollow beating sound]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: And this tire has rawhide on top, and it has become like this big Native-American drum.

[Hollow beating sound]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: It’s a very deep low frequency sound. Low frequency sounds we feel them more than we hear them, and it's very striking. It really gets, when you hear it live it really strikes your body, particularly your abdomen, you can hear it in your abdomen. And it also has all of these very very small little sounds that are about the machinery. Creaks and cracks and little things that complement the sound.

[Shaking grain sound]

RICHARD MISRACH: The Doctor Zhivago, I got an English copy to reread it and every page of the Doctor Zhivago in English, even though it's from the Cold War and Russia and all that, it was completely relevant to the issues that migrants are facing today. I thought it profound.

[Spanish language]

RICHARD MISRACH: So Guillermo's taken that book and the Spanish volume and has begun to get recordings by people reading each of the pages from Doctor Zhivago.

[Spanish language]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: I came up with this idea based on the pre-Columbian beliefs. Where pre-Columbian societies and the native people of the Americas believed that there wasn't intimate connection between any sonic device and the material which is made of. So I think that there is a very intimate connection between the object, the person that brought it there, and the sound that that instrument produces.

[Hollow drum strokes]

RICHARD MISRACH: People often talk about them, Guillermo says this a lot, they talk about them as trash.

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: They are not trash because of the context.

RICHARD MISRACH: A tennis shoe found in the trash is very different than a tennis shoe found on the moon. And then there’s a tennis shoe found on the border. I mean, these tennis shoes have come as far you know, sometimes four year old children have walked all the way from Central America across the border and you find their tennis shoes on the border. I mean, I get chills when I think about it.

[String music playing]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: We trace photographs. I can see them graphically as very beautiful compositions. I think a key image is one of the border wall sort of transgressing the landscape. And it you know, I'm sort of at a high perspective and you see way down in the desert you see this small little wall that goes and bifurcates the landscape, and basically the US from Mexico. And the absurdity of that wall.

[String music playing]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: At the same time I see the death of the soul that is inside of them. I hear music when I see them.

[String music playing]

RICHARD MISRACH: It's a wall that 15 year old girls can scale in 15 seconds, and yet we we spend all this money on this wall. So that picture for me both shows in a sense the beauty and power of the landscape, but also the sort of funny human intervention that's really all about politics.

[String music playing]

RICHARD MISRACH: There's another photograph of a woman that I met through the wall near San Diego and Tijuana. Her name is Veronica. I was photographing at a place called Friendship Circle, which is a place where families on both sides of the border are allowed to meet for four hours on weekends on Saturday and Sunday between ten and two. And a woman on the other side called to me and we started talking and I couldn't make her out. You know, I can make out her eyes and her mouth and she is really sweet and smart and interesting and we just started talking. So I did a portrait of her and it was amazing because her identity is obscured completely by this mesh which is supposed to be you know, euphemistically the friendship circle where people can meet. That image is really powerful to me.

[String music playing]

RICHARD MISRACH: Since working with Guillermo I hear the landscape now in ways. You know, I'm always sensitized when I'm seeing, but now I hear things in a way that I've never heard before so that the sound of this landscape is very powerful. And Guillermo has sensitized me to all those nuances that I think impact the way I take pictures.

[String music playing]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: We became indispensable to each other.

[String music playing]

RICHARD MISRACH: You wonder why are people leaving so much clothes and food and money. I mean, I find pesos and dollars.

[String music playing]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: We see a lot of numbers and we see a lot of statistics and we see a lot of things, but we don't realize that each of these numbers is a human life and is as important as any other human life.

[Water drizzling]

RICHARD MISRACH: That is part of the issue, which is that you find these artifacts and I don't know what's become of them.

[Strings being plucked]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: It's called the [Spanish language] and it’s made out of wood.

[Flute sounds]

RICHARD MISRACH: A lot of times when migrants come across the desert they’re so filthy and dirty they actually throw away their clothes, put on a fresh bit of clothes so they don't have a tell, you know, if they're walking along the border and they're in really dirty clothes it’ll draw attention to the border patrol. So I think sometimes that that's intentional, but in these instances with Bibles and things like that, it didn't make any sense.

[Flute sounds]

GUILLERMO GALLIDO: It’s based on the Japanese koto. It makes a very very oriental kind of sounds.

[Strings being plucked]

RICHARD MISRACH: Some probably have been caught by the border patrol and sent back. Some have perished. I’ve recently been going out with humanitarian groups that look for bodies. They literally go to the most remote places of the desert just to find bodies that they believe are out there to get them and return them to their families in Mexico.

[Strings being plucked]

RICHARD MISRACH: It's a mess and it is a humanitarian crisis.

[Flute sounds]

[Strings being plucked]

CW: We've been listening to Gone With A Trace. It was produced by The Currents documentary editor Joan Webber and it won a Dick Smyth Award for creative use of sound at the RTDNAs in June. Both Richard Misrach and Guillermo Gallindo are based in the San Francisco bay area. Since the documentary first aired, the duo have published a book called Border Cantos, and their art exhibition by the same name is currently touring the US. To see some of Richard Misrach’s photos including pictures of some of the instruments Guillermo has built, go to our website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. While you're there you can watch a version of the documentary interpreted into American Sign Language. An estimated one to three million Canadians are unable to listen to public radio. This is an initiative to make The Current available to everyone. I'm Connie Walker, thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 12, 2016 full episode transcript

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