BOOK REVIEW

Corruption on the Border
Intrigue and chaos in Tijuana

TWILIGHT ON THE LINE
Underworlds and Politice at the
US.-Mexican Border
By Sebastian Botelia
W.W. Norton; 320 pages; $25

On California's southern frontier drug cmuggling has become a
multibillion-dollar business, corrupting officials on both sides of the
border and spawning violence that has severely destabilized the Mexican
government.

It's heady material for a writer, and Los Angeles Times reporter Sebastian
Rotella rises to the occasion. In "Twilight on the Line" he exhaustively
and eloquently describes the intrigue and chaos of the area on and around
Tijuana, Mexico.

In recent years, Rotella shows, Tijuana has grown from a backwater for U.S.
tourists to a sprawling metropolis of 1.5 million. It is an industrial
powerhouse and the most important crossing-point for drugs and migrants
along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rotella's investigation of the complicated webs of conspiracy surrounding
the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio
contains many tantalizing scooplets. He traces the plot through the
long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the Arellano Felix
brothers' drug cartel and across the border to the gangs of San Diego's
Barrio Logan. He finds no smoking gun and is careful to distinguish between
fact, rumor and disinformation. But the story is made all the better- and
all the more shocking-for his caution.

Rotella describes in telling detail how drug money has permeated nearly
every level of government and law enforcement. In Tijuaua the dividing line
between cops and crooks is often fuzzy, and their philosophy is invariably
the same: "A beefy veteran detective of the Baja state police- thick gold
chains around a thick neck, a gold bracelet, a steady stare-described the
semiotics of murder to a cross-border visitor as he drank beer and ate lamb
in the wood-paneled booth of a spacious restaurant. 'You shoot someone in
the back, it means they betrayed someone. You shoot them in the face, it
means they talked. It all has meaning. It's like a language."

Rotella never descends to hectoring or condescension toward Mexicans, as
many U.S. reporters do. Nor does he resort to parple prose. Some of his
most insightful writing is about the people caught in the border
immigration faceoff: the Border Patrol agents, the migrants and Mexico's
Grupo Beta, an elite police squad that helps protect the border crossers
against thieves and rapists.

Rotella is surprisingly sympathetic to all three sides, and he shows how
many honorable people are doing their best within the confines of the
system. Yet he is decidedly skeptical about U.S. immigration politics. The
periodic crackdowns on the border in the mid-1990s merely helped drive
honest immigrants into the hands of the border mafias, he says. The results
were "no fast solutions, no easy answers. Immigration had been slowed, but
the trade-off was that the smuggling mafias were becoming a bigger, tougher
business. The lines between transporters of drugs and immigrants started to
blur."

A blind spot in "Twilight on the Line" is that it ignores the kind of
organized crime that probably affects more people along the border than any
other: the labor mafia controlled by the government, large corporations and
unions linked to the PRI. For most of Mexico's 900,000 workers in border
assembly plants, or maquiladoras, this oppressive system blocks any
independent organizing and keeps wages at rock bottom. Those who make the
mistake of dissenting are fired by.management and beaten by PRI goons.

Of course, this sort of crime is not as cinematic as drug smuggling,
assassinations or hordes of immigrants sprinting across the desert. It is
more humdrum and it rarely gets press attention.

Nor does Rotella address how drug lords have taken advantage of NAFTA to
smuggle their wares. Because of vastly increased volumes of trade crossing
the border, traffickers are able to hide drugs in legitimate shipments that
are rushed through customs. In fact, many drug lords are believed to have
invested heavily in legitimate import-export businesses as a means of
obtaining cover.

Rotella's greatest strength is the spare beauty of some of his prose. His
description of the scene at the Tijuana line as the Border Patrol sends
back a group of illegal crossers is typically bleak yet affectionate:
"Shaven headed U.S. Marines, tattooed homeboys in baggy pants, high school
girls in shorts and halter tops, ambling tourists in serapes. The revelers
and the released prisoners flowed together obliviously, their worlds
intersecting without seeming to touch. They drifted into the crowd of taxi
drivers hustling for fares, the vendors and beggars and smugglers, the
smoke from the taco stands, the dance music and cantina neon."