BORDER IS NO BARRIER ON RIO GRANDE

Cities Caught In The Center Of Drug Trade

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- On a map, this sprawling city and El Paso are
on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, the natural border between Mexico
and the USA.

But as searchers dig ever deeper on a Mexican ranch this weekend for
more victims of drug violence, the boundary is virtually invisible to
the more than 2 million people who inhabit this vast metroplex of
face-to-face cities.

On the El Paso-Juarez border, blood relationships are thicker than the
river water. The formal line might split this Mexican strip of the
Third World from the First World of the USA, but it doesn't divide the
people.

Families and friends who for generations have settled and spread
across both sides of the border now worry and wonder together. Each
day, what are likely the bones of ''disappeared'' loved ones --
Mexican and American citizens caught in the secret cross-fire and
retribution of narcotics mobsters -- are being dug out of the dry,
drab soil of Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert.

As if life on this forbidding landscape weren't tough enough,
residents share the misfortune of living in the path of the worst
corridor of illegal drug smuggling on the entire 1,833-mile
U.S.-Mexican border, and perhaps in the entire world. By one estimate,
70% of America's illicit narcotics pass north through here.

Sam Ponder, assistant U.S. attorney and chief drug prosecutor for west
Texas, says a ''smuggling culture'' has always existed here: ''liquor
in Prohibition, aliens for the last three or four decades and now drugs.''

The drug traffic, and attempts to combat it, only grow. Ponder says
that the U.S. attorney's office secured about 225 drug indictments in
1993. For this year, the number will be about 1,080.

The cities' coexistence ''is an accident of geography, and so is their
violence,'' says Charles Bowden, a Tucson journalist. His 1988 book,
Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future, chronicles the harsh, daily struggle
for many in this teeming border town. ''It's not that these people are
corrupt, but (the drug trade) is everywhere.''

He suggests that El Paso and Juarez were overlooked because they sit
in the middle of the long border, far from either nation's center of
power or influence. They also sit at the hub of major transportation
corridors, providing easy distribution for tons of illegal drugs.

Tourism officials on both sides fear the discovery of mass graves will
unravel efforts to boost the local image and economy.

Jose Luis Gutierrez, who owns restaurants in both cities, told the El
Paso Times this week that the discoveries give the community an image
of ''a region of terror.''

Mario Castano, who owns a liquor and cigar store in Juarez three
blocks from the border, says the revelations give his city ''a black
eye, even with the millions and billions of pesos'' that the drug
lords donate to civic and church causes. ''This black money covers up
the immorality'' of how they made the money, he says.

Retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent Phil Jordan, an El Paso
native, says there are still plenty of honest people on both sides of
the border, but the problems are beyond their control.

''You end corruption, and you'll end a lot of the killings,'' says
Jordan, former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, a joint
anti-drug effort of the DEA, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies.

Thomas Constantine, who retired earlier this year as head of the DEA,
says that the huge amounts of money in the Mexican drug trade have
been used to entice authorities, such as the police and military, to
participate.

''And it's not the traditional type of corruption where police were
paid to look the other way,'' Constantine says. ''Now we have officers
there who have gone from looking the other way to acting as security
for shipments, and some of them are directly involved in the narcotics
trafficking, kidnapping and murders.''

Arturo Gonzalez Rascon, attorney general for the Mexican state of
Chihuahua, which includes Juarez, says the revelations are having a
terrible impact on the community.

''We need and will work with whomever we can to keep the reputation of
this community clean,'' he says.

Rascon visited the suspected killing field of the infamous Juarez drug
cartel on Thursday.

''The drug network is huge, and it overwhelms us,'' says Juarez native
Arturo Palma, 34, a spectator Thursday outside police lines during the
continued digging at the ranch.

Miguel Sanchez, 26, standing with Palma, has a solution. ''Maybe if
the U.S. stops buying (drugs), the traffic will cease here,'' he says.

With a sarcastic laugh, Palma replies, ''Do you believe that?'' Both
men laugh again, without humor.

''The cartel is just too strong, and they generate too much fear,''
Palma says. He likes to quote a grim Mexican saying about the only
choice available in the drug world. ''Oro o plomo -- gold or lead,''
Palma says. Riches or bullets. ''Gold or lead works around here. It's
very effective.''