BORDER TOWN SMOLDERS AFTER A LEADING CITIZEN'S ARREST IN MEXICO

PRESIDIO, Tex., May 15 -- In this quiet, remote border town of 4,000
people, nearly everyone knows Jesus Manuel Herrera Jr.

A third-generation grocer with an extended family, Mr. Herrera is active in
the Roman Catholic Church, sponsors local baseball teams and races cars
here on weekends.

In Ojinaga, across the Rio Grande, he is equally well known in the
restaurants and clubs. Mr. Herrera, 42, called Junie, contributes to
Ojinaga civic causes and is known as the only Presidio grocer who extends
credit to Mexican families.

He also races cars at a track on the outskirts of Ojinaga. There, on April
29, he was arrested by the Chihuahua State Police and charged with the
murder of a Mexican journalist, Luis Jose Ortega Mata.

"When they handcuffed me, I thought some of my friends were playing a joke
on me and I started laughing," said Mr. Herrera in a jail interview last
weekend. "It turned out to be not very funny at all."

For this southwest Texas agricultural community, nestled in a desert basin
and ringed by low mountains and mottled sun-browned buttes, Mr. Herrera's
detention across the border has become a citywide cause.

Yellow ribbons have sprouted on trees and lampposts, rosaries are recited
nightly at the Herrera family's H&H Supermarket, and the words "Junie Es
Inocente" -- hand-lettered in white shoe polish -- appear on windshields
and storefronts on both sides of the Rio Grande.

"This is a big deal for a town that is 150 miles from the nearest Wal-
Mart," said John T. Prewit, a local immigration official.

Dozens of Mr. Herrera's friends followed him to the Ojinaga jail when he
was arrested and waited outside overnight. On May 2, nearly 100 friends and
family members staged a protest on the international bridge between the two
cities, stopping traffic for about an hour.

And after a 12-hour detention hearing on May 4, more than 250 supporters
blocked the bridge for nearly four hours, leaving only when threatened with
arrest by the Mexican police, immigration officials said.

That day, Barry L. Sullivan, Presidio's city manager, sent a fax to Senator
Phil Gramm of Texas to warn that the city faced "major civil unrest"
because of the arrest.

Representative Henry Bonilla, whose district includes Presidio, asked the
State Department to investigate the matter, and last week a United States
consular representative met with Chihuahua State officials and prosecutors.
No public statements were made afterward.

The reasons for Mr. Herrera's arrest and detention are sketchy. The police
produced an affidavit from an Ojinaga prostitute, Guadalupe Valenzuela, in
which she described watching a "short, dark complexioned man with a
mustache and sideburns" kill the journalist. At the May 4 hearing, she
identified Mr. Herrera as the killer, although he is over six feet tall,
light skinned, and has no mustache or sideburns.

Mr. Ortega Mata, shot execution-style on the night of Feb. 19, ran an
Ojinaga newspaper that had accused Chihuahua State officials of
participating in drug trafficking. The local news media and the police have
linked his killing to either the drug cartels or a family matter.

Mr. Herrera, who maintains that he was home with his parents that night,
says he knew the journalist as a sometime customer in his store. No one has
found any other connection.

Prosecutors have also not proposed a motive nor offered additional
evidence. A call to the Chihuahua attorney general's office for information
was not returned. Last week, a spokesman for the office told The San
Antonio Express-News: "We don't yet have a motive for the killing."

Jail records introduced at the hearing indicate that Ms. Valenzuela was
incarcerated when Mr. Ortega Mata was killed, said Mayor Victor Sotelo of
Ojinaga, and could not have witnessed the killing. Ms. Valenzuela also
tested positive for heroin at the hearing, Mr. Sotelo said.

"The state's witness is simply not credible," he said.

But the judge, Ramon Estrada Rascon, ordered Mr. Herrera held for trial.
His lawyers have appealed that decision, but no one is sure when the appeal
will be heard, and meanwhile Presidio seethes.

Virtually no one in Presidio believes Mr. Herrera is guilty, and residents
seem as frustrated by the process as the charges.

"It wasn't a fair hearing, it was a joke," said Rafael Carrera.

Mr. Herrera says a struggle between the Institutional Revolutionary Party,
which controls the state government, which brought the charges, and the
National Action Party, which controls municipal offices, could be behind
his detention.

"I think the case has turned political," he said, "and the victim is
sitting right here."

But Mayor Sotelo said: "This is definitely not political. It's just part of
a normal judicial process that takes a long time."

For Mr. Herrera, a single father, the events have been most worrisome for
their impact on his family, friends and business.

"They have to run the store," he said. "They have to fret about what
happens to me. I just have to sit here and wait to get out."