NOAH LANARD
APRIL 3, 2019 9:56 AM
... While welcoming the Apollo 11 astronauts to Mexico in late September 1969, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz said that a “bureaucratic error” had raised a “wall of suspicion” between the two countries. A Mexican businessman told the New York Times, “Operation Intercept is just a spectacular stunt which gives the absurd idea that everyone in Mexico is a suspected drug trafficker.” A left-wing Mexican congressman called it a “racist trick.” Mexicans on the border responded by organizing a boycott on travel to the United States.
Americans in border towns weren’t happy either. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a Democrat from Texas, dubbed it “Operation Inept.” The owner of a Nogales, Arizona, department store argued, “You don’t burn down your barn just to kill a couple of rats, and that is what our government is trying to do.”
... On October 10, Operation Intercept was replaced with a more lenient plan called Operation Cooperation that the Nixon administration unconvincingly spun as a victory.
The postmortems of Operation Intercept were withering. “I think it was just a poorly planned operation out of somebody’s hat,” said an official with a chamber of commerce in Texas. Raúl Héctor Castro, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Bolivia who was later elected governor of Arizona, called it “one of the biggest boondoggles in history.” The Times editorial board wrote that it was “a massive political blunder” from “every conceivable standpoint” ...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/nixon-closed-the-border-to-sow-chaos-trumps-shutdown-could-be-even-worse/
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