NICE GUYS FINISH DEAD a review of:

TWILIGHT ON THE LINE

Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexican Border. By Sebastian Rotella.
320 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $25.

By Richard Rayner

EARLY in this vivid study of immigration, crime and graft at the Mexican
border, Sebastian Rotella makes the point that the headlong growth in the
l990's of the drug trade in Mexico, and in Baja California in particular,
was spurred by an American success story. When the Drug Enforcement
Administration blocked Florida as the prime highway for cocaine, the
Colombian cartels responded by expanding their partnership with some of
their old friends in Mexico, who offered not only a network already
established through their traditional traffic in heroin and marijuana, but
a long and vulnerable land border with the United States.

The Mexican drug barons began receiving payment in cocaine instead of
cash, and the Colombians were forced to cede sales turf in Texas, along
the East Coast and especially in California itself. "Soon the Mexican
mafias were supplying 70 percent of the cocaine consumed-yearly in the
United States," Rotella writes, "were earning between $10 billion and $30
billion a year in profits and, according to a study by the University of
Guadalajara, were spending $500 million a year exclusively on the bribery
of public officials in Mexico. That figure was roughly double the entire
budget of the Mexican federal attorney general's office and federal
police."

There, in brute outline, is the ecology of an illegal marketplace that at
times has turned a country's entire social order into anabsurd theater of
murder: "The state police, in league with drug lords, were accused of
killing a federal commander in a shootout. An assassin had killed the
presidential candidate, whose own campaign guards were suspected in the
assassination. The federal police, in league with drug lords, were
suspected of killing the city police chief. The federal police had arrested
the deputy state attorney general and charged him with corruption."

Yes, there are men honest and true in Mexico, but they tend not to' live
very long. Nice guys finish not last, but dead. Rotella, the Los Angeles
Times bureau chief for Latin America, reprises in detail two of the more
famous cases, the assassination of presidential front-runner Luis Donaldo
Colosio in March 1994, and the surreal and furious firefight that left a
Roman Catholic cardinal bleeding his life away at the Guadalajara airport
in May 1993, a crime for which a group of San Diego homeboys, in way over
their heads, became the fall guys. The leader of that group, David Barron
Corona---a trusted associate of Ramon Arellano FeLix, one of two brothers
who control the Tijuana cartel, whose life he saved in a gunfight in a
Puerto Vallarta disco---was killed only a few weeks ago, not by the the
strong arm of justice but accidentally by one of his own crew during an
attempted hit on a Tijuana journalist.

This is a world that uncannily resembles an American gangster movie
because, to some extent, it imitates one. Al Pacino's white-suited Tony
Montana, the hero of Oliver Stone's remake of "Scarface," is a role model
to many of these guys, a poster on the bedroom wall, an icon along with
others that Rotella lists here: the AK-47, the HarleyDavidson and the
Virgin of Guadalupe (the patron saint of Mexico, but so popular in
California, the joke goes, that they've given her a green card).

Rotella delves into some less familiar material. Hodin Gutierrez Rico---a
special prosecutor appointed to investigate the assassinatit)n of Federico
Benitez, the inexperienced, crusading, honest and therefore short-lived
Tijuana director of public safety---tells Rotella he's fighting three
enernies: the state police, the federal police and the criminals. It would
be Monty Python were it not so tragic. Gutierrez returns home one night
with his wife and daughter, and his investigations are brought to an abrupt
and familiar close: "There were four of them; apparently they were ordered
to physically destroy their victim, not just to murder him. They fired more
than 120 rounds with automatic rifles. Then they climbed into a van and ran
over the corpse, mangling it in the street beneath the wheels."

Rotella offers no prescriptions. It's not clear that there are any in a
country where violent fact far outstrips the grossest fiction and the truth
is as elusive as one of those desirable black Chevrolet Suburbans that tend
to get stolen in San Diego for use in murders south of the border, after
which they are dumped back in El Norte. There's even a ranchera song
engagingly titled "The Suburban of Death," the equivalent of gangsta rap:
"The Suburban of Death is what they call it everywhere / And Customs and
soldiers can't stop it / When the federales see it, they better beware."

In Mexico the political system has been subverted as well as corrupted.
That happened not only because organized crime has the support of
politicians but because, as the political scientist Jorge Castafieda
observed, the former President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari,
"refused to substitute the old ways with new, democratic ones," and the
Mexicans "are faced with the worst of all possible worlds: the old system
in place but out of sync and no new system around to keep things rolling."
Mexico's current desperate fight is against becoming what he calls "a
narcocracy."

Intertwined with all this is the struggle of emigrants who wish to leave a
bad place and go to a better one---the always seductive America, which
continues to need and demand their cheap services, whether as fruit
pickers-, day laborers, gardeners, busboys or even as the teen-age or
preteen prostitutes who still haunt Balboa Park in downtown San Diego.

Rotella accurately observes that while the Border Patrol in the United
States has been to some extent successful in stemming the flow of illegals
at some of the easiest and most-used entry points, like Imperial Beach or
Smuggler's Canyon near San Diego, the effect has been to push would-be
border-crossers farther east, where the terrain is much more difficult to
negotiate and where they fall into the arms of organized criminals who
offer better, and more expensive, facilities for the journey. The
consequences of tHis will play out in the years to come. Tecate, not long
ago a small border town, is already transforming itself into a new Tijuana.

THE border is big and strange news these days, and while Rotella has an
occasional tendency to write as if he's working up a head of steam for the
bad Hemingway competition ("Hunt, an Air Force veteran of Irish-Portuguese
descent, had a Rhode Island accent, the build of a linebacker, and the
mustache of a genial walrusi'), he brings its story alive with dense and
concrete detail. His Aast and most extraordinary chapter, "The Little
Village of Alberto Duarte," paints a picture of life in the Baja California
state penitentiary in Tijuana. It is "a penal institution invented jointly
by Dickens, Kafka and Garcia Marquez," where inmates live with their wives
and children. That is an odd but pragmatic arrangement, and it works until,
almost inevitably, the liberal prison governor, Alberto Duarte, is murdered
by two heroin-high former inmates, one of whom then falls asleep at the
scene Rotella describes the border as a "magical place.'? I guess it can
be. He also makes a convincing case that it's a hellish one.