Mexico at War

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:00:00 -0500

Enlarge Photo The end of the line: A Mexican federal police officer on the border as it meets the Pacific Ocean. TIJUANA, Mexico -- We drove the rental car to the end of the line, where the border fence disappears into the Pacific Ocean, and there we found a cadre of Mexican federal agents. They were just hanging, like tourists taking postcard pictures. The beach town is called Playas de Tijuana, and it looks like a more colorful, more dodgy version of Imperial Beach to the north. The seaside neighborhood has traditionally been popular with the upper class of TJ, which includes both managers of assembly plants and some well-to-do narcos. On the U.S. side, the Border Patrol earlier this year closed Friendship Park to make way for the new triple fence. The park plaza was dedicated by First Lady Pat Nixon back in the 1970s as a symbol

A Dangerous Route North

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:00:08 -0500

TECATE, Mexico -- The migrant shelter named in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe is spotless, though the men who come are dusty. Their clothes are streaked with sweat, their hands and faces burned by sun, scratched with thorns. They look as if they have been wandering the desert. The free meal they eat is simple but wholesome. The nuns serve beans, cactus, boiled eggs. The men take second and third helpings. The nuns console their guests, but it is not easy. “You see them very sad, for they have with no illusions left, and I believe they feel like losers,” said Sister Maria Elena. The men are ashamed because they have failed. A few years ago, migrants heading north would stop at the shelter in Tecate, where the big Mexican brewery is, for a night or two before they crossed illegally into the United States. They were hopeful,

Narcocorridos and Nightlife in Mexicali

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

MEXICALI, Mexico -- This used to be a swell city for binational cantina crawling, but the violence of the drug war has quieted the nightlife down. The tourists are spooked. Still, the locals are keeping the lights on. We swing by the Plaza de Mariachis, where dozens of bands have pulled their vans up to curb to await customers looking to hire some musicians to make a party. Manuel Delgado of Los Zorros tells us “the town is dead.” We ask where we might hear some music, especially the ballads about drug lords, and he points us to La Conga. The intersection of Mexico and Reforma in Mexicali is a lively spot. There’s El Miau-Miau (The Meow Meow), a strip joint; El Leon de Oro (The Golden Lion), an “antro” club, which is the Mexican twist on a disco; and a dubious establishment called Kaoz. The bars keep changing

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Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Virtual Fence Gets a 'Do Over'

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:11:00 -0500

Enlarge Photo A newly constructed tower in the "virtual fence." SASABE, Arizona -- After years of frustration, controversy and delay -- and some maddening technological glitches -- the first link in the federal government’s new $6.7 billion “virtual fence” is being erected here along the border. We visited a newly constructed detection tower, out in the middle of Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. Contractors were still plugging in the off-the-shelf components. The concept is simple. The execution is not. A previous test of the virtual fence concept was so plagued with snafus that the Department of Homeland Security scrapped it and announced a “do over.” “We created a set of expectations that were unreasonable, and unfortunately it didn’t work as well as we would have liked,” says Mark Borkowsky, director of the project in the Customs and Border Protection agency. According to Borkowsk, this is the basic idea: In

Tunnel Network Sends Border Patrol Underground

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Enlarge Photo Tom Pittman, a Border Patrol supervisor, exits the massive drainage tunnels that are located directly under the Nogales port-of-entry. Border Patrol agent Mario Escalante looks on. NOGALES, Arizona -- Tom Pittman lifts a manhole cover open, turns on his flashlight and climbs down a ladder into a dangerous warren of drains and tunnels, a literal underworld where spooky bandits and illegal migrants and drug smugglers move around in the dark. "Hold on a second," Pittman says. "Let me see if anybody's down here first." They call themselves the Tunnel Rats. Trained in close-quarter combat, certified to work in confined spaces and armed to the teeth, these four-person teams of Border Patrol agents have been busy lately. In the last nine months, they discovered 16 new tunnels dug by smugglers under Nogales. The number of tunnels sets a new record. "It's swiss cheese under there," said Brooke Howells,

Show and Tell With the New U.S. Border Czar

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

NOGALES, Arizona -- The newly appointed border czar Alan Bersin landed at the Mariposa Port of Entry here in a Black Hawk helicopter owned by the Department of Homeland Security. Bersin was on a quick inspection tour, to rally the troops and show the locals that the feds were here to spend some serious cash money. The helo was a nice touch. Funds are pouring into border security these days through a fire hose of federal spending. Fear of drug violence, coupled with concerns over terrorism and illegal immigration, have sent budgets for the Customs and Border Protection agency into orbit. Bersin was in Nogales to tout the soon-to-be remodeled port of entry, which is receiving an injection of $200 million from the Congressional economic stimulus package. Construction to begin almost immediately. In a bus tour, Bersin listened to James Tong, assistant director of the Tucson field office for

The End of the Road

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:53:04 -0500

Panoramic Composite: Click to view. LOS CORRALES, Mexico -- The Mexican border is dotted with tiny towns at the end of the road, where Mexico meets the fence and there are no legal crossings. The dots on the maps have names. El Gato, the cat. Las Palmas, the palms. We drove over a rutted gravel road to reach Los Corrales, the corrals, just to see what is there. Just two families are left in Los Corrales. More ranch than town, it is poor and quiet and beautiful, sitting on a rise above a desert valley. Blanca Romero greets us. She lives in a one-room adobe house with her son and husband, beside a creaking windmill and a rattlesnake skeleton dangling from a tree. Years ago, this was the crossing where cowboys from a dozen big ranches in Mexico brought their cattle to sell to the Americans. “It was a lively

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Restoring Natural Life on the Border

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Cajon Bonito, Mexico -- The directions to the ranch are basically as follows: Leave problems of Ciudad Juarez behind. Cross Chihuahuan Desert. Climb Continental Divide. Hit Sonoran Desert. When you see some of the prettiest country in the west, slow down and watch out for the migrating hummingbirds. The ranch is on the left. “This is as wild as you can get,” Valer Austin told us at her cattle gate, and she didn’t mean the usual kind of bad wild you could stumble into along the border -- but the good wild. There are bear, antelope, coyote in these borderlands. There are lions and bison. There are 400 species of bees, the rare black hawk and endangered Mexican stoneroller, which is a fish. In the video, you can meet Valer Austin, a visual artist from New York City who moved to the desert southwest with her husband Josiah, a

Comment Box: Legalization and Life on the Border

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:11:06 -0500

We're about halfway through our trip, so we thought it would be a good time to go through some of the questions and comments you've left on the blog. As with any story about drugs, there have been many questions about legalization or decriminalization. "Laheadle" and "am2233" tweeted about this topic using the #mexborder hashtag. Many others have left comments in the blog suggesting legalization is the only solution. In Mexico, there is a similar movement among policy wonks and activists to decriminalize small amounts of drugs. People who make their money from drugs--smugglers, dealers and law enforcement--tend to be against any such plans, preferring to keep the status quo. Drug consumption in Mexico is tiny compared to the United States, so among average people on the streets, the legalization argument doesn't come up much. In general, drug use here is viewed more as a health issue, not a legal

A Small Town Cop, Out-Gunned by Traffickers

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Ascension, Mexico -- The violence got so scary that hundreds of citizens occupied the town hall in May to demand that the Mexican army come protect them. Soldiers now rumble through a couple of times a week. Then they leave. Jaime Antonio Chacón was on the beat here just three months when the rookie police officer stumbled upon an assassination in progress. A couple of hitmen, known as sicarios in Mexico, were going after a local hoodlum when Chacón in his municipal police truck rolled into the middle of a gunfight last month. One of the sicarios took aim at Chacón’s forehead and squeezed off a single round. In the video above, Chacón talks about how it feels to be a small town cop seriously out-gunned by drug-trafficking heavies with superior weapons and good aim. There are more than 400,000 police officers in Mexico and the vast majority are

The Town of Lonely Dentists

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Palomas, Mexico -- This is the little border town that discount  dentistry built. There are the usual liquor stores and curio venders, and even  a cantina with a Statute of Liberty on the roof. But mostly the streets are  lined with storefront clinics offering crowns, dentures, cleanings.  Walk-ins welcome! As the sign promises: “American standards at Mexican  prices,” where a porcelain filling and a shot of Novocain will set you  back about $60.  We went looking for dentists to talk about the hard times created by  the storms of violence along the border. In the video, you can meet Jesus  Jasso Salazar, who came here a decade ago to make his living with a drill  and learned to say “open wide” in English. Most of his patients were  Americans, until they got scared away by sudden surge in kidnappings and  killings. Jasso used to be busy all day long

A Drug Smuggler's Story

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- Along the Mexican border, people generally try to avoid drug traffickers. We went looking for one. With the help of a veteran journalist in Juarez, we meet Jose Lucio Hernandez, a former smuggler. Hernandez says he snuck drugs into Texas about 400 times by driving across the international port of entry between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. It is impossible to verify everything he says, but his rap sheet confirms he was in the business. Hernandez was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after being busted on July 22, 2005 with 185 pounds of marijuana in El Paso. He boasts that he was good at what he did. Hernandez says he always made it across the border undetected. It was only when he lived in the United States that he got caught. We meet Hernandez at a drug treatment center, where he was working

A Rare Night Out in Juarez

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Audio Panorama: Click to View Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- When the plane lands in Ciudad Juarez, you step into a clean modern airport out in the sunny desert. You rent a car from Hertz or Avis, and drive the main boulevard. It looks like Phoenix. Kentucky Fried Chickens and Payless Shoes and Wal-Mart Supercenters. Then at an intersection, vendors hawk the tabloids, and a front-page photo tells the story: a ribbon of yellow crime tape, a forensic investigator counting shell casings, and the corpse. There have been 770 murders here in 2009, according to the newspaper El Diario, 43 percent higher than last year. When President Calderon sent 10,000 Mexican soldiers and federal agents to Ciudad Juarez, the citizens accepted military occupation with resignation and exhaustion. There was a brief and hopeful lull. The army generals boasted that in the hot glare shone by their troops, “the cockroaches” – the

Addicts Latest Victims of Drug War

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- When you visit the drug rehab centers in Ciudad Juarez, what you notice are the arms. The addicts have arms that are purple with scars. The new guys have arms still raw from the needles. The counselors, former addicts themselves, have scars that are fading away, faint but still there. They have been killing addicts in Ciudad Juarez. It is the latest outrage, in the most violent city in Mexico. A few weeks ago, gunmen burst commando-style into a gray cinderblock building where 60 patients were bunking down for the night. The assassins killed five. Motive unknown. We visited the center and a young man reluctantly let us in. There was a cracked imitation leather sofa and image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The young man pointed to a spot on the floor, where we could still see the blood. That’s where his uncle died.

About this Project

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:43:12 -0500

Enlarge Photo Mexican children play in front the Rio Grande and an increasingly fortified U.S. frontier. (Travis Fox/The Washington Post) The border between United States and Mexico is the land where straight lines blur, and where two national cultures collide and collude. The writer Alan Weisman, author of "La Frontera", called the borderlands "the most dramatic intersection of first and third world realities anywhere on the globe." There is a lot of good on the border, and these days, plenty of bad. The border is a militarized hot zone, where tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers are fighting a vicious drug war against well-armed, rich and powerful drug traffickers, who smuggle across these desert highways 90 percent of the cocaine so voraciously consumed in the United States. On the U.S. side, the federal government is pouring taxpayer money into border, promising to stem the flow of cash and guns