AT BUSY U.S.-MEXICO BORDER, `A REAL MESS'

While NAFTA has increased traffic at the ports of entry, drug searches
have slowed it.

JUAREZ, Mexico -- Trucker Ricardo Simental is on the road six days a
week, driving his route between Mexico and the United States.

Each trip takes up to five hours.

Each trip is only 10 miles long.

Simental, 32, hauls goods from factories in this city to their sister
warehouses across the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas. To cross the
river, he uses the Bridge of the Americas, a soaring concrete span
that dominates the desert landscape here.

He generally spends the better part of his day at the bridge, idling
in a line of exhaust-belching tractor-trailers that mark their
progress in inches, not miles.

The problem is even worse in the twin cities of Laredo, Texas, and
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, which handle a third of all U.S.-Mexico trade.
There, truckers wait so long at an international crossing -- up to
six hours, in lines that back up five miles -- that the Laredo City
Council once considered providing portable toilets for them.

In Juarez, said Simental, speaking in Spanish, "I wait three hours,
five hours. It's too much. It's crazy."

Simental is one of millions of truckers, commuters and tourists who
cross the border between the United States and Mexico each year, most
to or from Texas, which has 13 of this country's 24 highway Ports of
Entry into Mexico. A closer inspection

The number of motorists has increased dramatically since the North
American Free Trade Agreement, which lifted trade tariffs, went into
effect in 1994. Many of the vehicles are trucks carrying items made in
what are known here as maquiladora factories -- manufacturing centers
that employ Mexicans to make goods destined for warehouses across the
border.

Between 1993, the year before NAFTA, and 1997, truck traffic from
Mexico into Texas nearly doubled, according to the Border Trade
Institute at Texas A&M University.

But the added traffic has stalled in the face of another U.S. policy:
halting the flow of illegal drugs north across the border.

Just as Mexico is one of the United States' leading trade partners, it
also is a leading conduit for drugs. About 50 percent of all drugs
coming into the United States enters through Southwest border
crossings, said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Customs Service.

Looking for those drugs is laborious and time-consuming, involving
random searches of vehicles and their contents at the border
crossings. Each day, its effects can be seen on the Mexican side of
the Bridge of the Americas. Street vendors

At 11 a.m. one day last month -- with the morning rush over, and
hours to go before the afternoon crunch -- traffic from El Paso into
Juarez was sailing over the bridge, with only the occasional car being
pulled over so that Mexican authorities could peer into its trunk.

But it was another story for the Texas-bound motorists, where the
traffic backed up off the bridge and into the streets of Juarez, and
the wait time was about half an hour -- considered a breeze by locals.

In Juarez, street vendors wandered among 10 lanes of creeping cars,
hawking newspapers, trinkets and sticky-sweet confections. Trucks,
segregated into separate lanes, hardly moved at all.

Fifteen to 20 percent of all vehicles leaving Mexico are searched --
many more than are searched entering that country. Trucks are a

special target for U.S. agents, given their carrying capacity.

"There are inspections all of the time," Simental said of the Customs
Service drug checks that require the unloading of trucks' entire cargo
so that dogs can sniff through it.

The problem, said another driver who works for the same firm,
Transportes Herca, as Simental, is that drivers are paid per trip. The
more time they spend sitting on the bridge, the less money they make,
said the man, who did not want his name used.

"It's a real mess," said Duane Burdof, director of the Texas Center at
Texas A&M's International University in Laredo, which amasses
statistics on border trade. "Ultimately, we, the consumers, pay for
it."

Roger Maier, of the Customs Service's El Paso office, said his workers
were in a tough spot, given their dual mandates of intercepting drugs
and keeping traffic flowing.

"We can't just move traffic for the sake of having people cross the
border quickly," he said. "But we are doing things to expedite traffic
while still allowing us to do a good enforcement job."

In Laredo and in Brownsville, Texas, new bridges are being
built.

In El Paso, the agency recently added enough staff so that all 10
inspection lanes would be open during peak periods, he said. The
average wait has dropped from two hours to 25 minutes.

"But that's been a double-edged sword," he said. When word got out
that the waits were shorter, more people started using the bridge.

Another plan, promoted by the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce,
calls for a dedicated commuter lane on the Bridge of the Americas,
more commonly called the "free bridge" here because it has no toll.

Students and workers who commute daily between Juarez and El Paso --
and who pass criminal background checks -- will be able to purchase,
for a little more than $100, a pass that includes an electronic
device, allowing them to enter a single lane where the only stop will
be to declare citizenship.

That should keep the wait time to 5 minutes for commuters, said Sandra
Sanchez Almanzan, the chamber's director of public policy.

"You give people's time back to them," she said, "and you advance the
idea of a seamless border" -- a concept aggressively promoted in an
area where cities bordering both sides of the Rio Grande seem to have
more in common with one another than they do with the rest of their
countries.

Up to 5,000 people are expected to be approved for the commuter lane
when it opens in June, she said.

In addition, both El Paso and Laredo recently added huge, $3.5 million
X-ray machines for trucks. Looking something like car washes, the
machines can scan a truck's cargo without having to unload it.

A similar machine has been in operation in Otay Mesa, Calif., and
officials say it has helped to shorten the lines of trucks there.

Without such programs to ease the flow of business across the border,
Almanzan said, "it would be as if you tried to put a wall between the
suburbs of Washington and the District of Columbia itself. We have
worked long and hard to recognize that this is one area."