A LINE IN THE SAND

DRUGS AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS HAVE TURNED THE US-MEXICO BORDER INTO A WAR
ZONE, CATCHING INNOCENTS IN THE CROSS-FIRE.

CIUDAD, JUAREZ, MEXICO

One day later, at about 3:45 a.m., I was standing over the body of Cristina
Sanchez, 27. A sheet covered all but her chalk-white feet. A cockroach
crawled down her arm and off the bed in Room 25 of the Hotel Rex, the
flophouse where, according to a companion, she had begun to foam at the
mouth while watching television, then stopped breathing.

``Is she an addict?'' a police investigator asked.

``Yeah. She does a lot of coke,'' said her friend, chain-smoking in the
hallway.

``And you. You are a drug addict?''

``Just coke; nothing else.''

The police listed the death as an overdose, the 74th of what may prove to
be a record year in Juarez, a city of 3 million people directly across the
border from El Paso, Texas.

Juarez may well be the most dangerous place in Mexico, and no one knows its
face of death more intimately than Rafael Cota, the journalist who took me
to see Cristina Sanchez's body. With his brown leather cap, wire-rimmed
glasses, and a thin beard that wraps around his chin, Cota could pass for a
sculptor or a coffeehouse poet. In fact, he is either a heroic
photojournalist or the world's busiest ambulance chaser, or perhaps both.

Cota, 34, is the star of ``While You Were Sleeping,'' a segment that
appears each morning on the local Channel 5 news. He works exclusively in
the hours of la madrugada, the predawn, and his primary focus is death. He
has set out to record the madness of his city: the hundreds of massacres,
executions, stabbings, shootings, suicides, and overdoses that occur every
year. He broke down the violence this way: ``Probably 65 percent is what we
call pandillas, or gangs. Barrio versus barrio, fights over drugs. Another
15 percent is drug-trafficking executions, with the tiro de gracias in the
back of the head. Probably most of the rest is family disputes and car
robberies.''

Juarez is the hub of the empire once commanded by Amado Carrillo Fuentes,
Mexico's most powerful drug trafficker, until his freakish death after 8
hours of plastic surgery and liposuction last July. Many Mexicans - if not
most - believe Carrillo faked his death and is still alive, but just the
whiff of instability within his cartel has set off a bloody turf war in
Juarez, ratcheting up the violence even further. The city's medical
examiner, Enrique Silva, said wearily: ``I arrive at dawn, and sometimes I
don't get finished until midnight.''

It was 10 o'clock when I set out one night to see if I could find Cota at
the Channel 5 studios. He hadn't arrived. ``Don't worry, he'll be here,''
the station manager said. ``He's our vampire.'' I came back around 11:30,
and he still wasn't around, so I waited in the car. After about 45 minutes,
I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, it was 1 a.m., and the guard led
me down to the basement, where Cota, looking fresh and cheerful, was
developing prints for a newsletter.

``When you have violence on this scale, people begin to forget that these
are human beings,'' he said, as we talked by the red light of the darkroom.
``That's what I am trying to do: to prevent people from forgetting. These
people are not garbage; they are human beings. This is not for
entertainment. It is to show, to report.''

As Cota worked, three police scanners on a nearby table crackled
constantly. A cell phone, a beeper, and a pack of Marlboros were also near
at hand. Cota tried to teach me the scanner codes for the various crimes,
but my sorry Spanish made them difficult to decipher. As we were listening,
the report came over about Cristina Sanchez, and Cota, his two assistants,
and I piled into his pickup and sped off.

At 3 a.m., Juarez was dark and forbidding, a city inhabited by shadows. The
overdose had taken place in the red-light district, and a shuffling mass of
whores, pimps, junkies, and various other losers had gathered outside the
hotel. Inside the lobby, the daily room rate was posted: 55 pesos, or about
$6.85. There was also the usual telephone, often used for collect calls to
the United States, a convenience for illegals making arrangements to be
picked up on the other side of the border. Gang graffiti covered the walls
of Cristina Sanchez's room.

Cota stayed in his truck and let his assistants handle this rather mundane
case. He has seen so much death - 1,000 corpses, by his estimate - that he
seems like an addict who needs increasingly higher doses to be stirred. In
1995, he barely escaped injury in a shootout between the municipal police
and federales. People have destroyed his camera equipment and beaten him to
stop him from filming. Lately, he has taken to bringing his 5-year-old
daughter, Karen, along for an occasional ride. ``Sometimes she'll ask: `Is
he alive or is he dead, Papi?''' he said, as we were driving back to the
studio. ``Perhaps this is wrong. I don't know, but I want to show her
reality.''

By the time I left, around 6 a.m., I was contemplating whether Cota and his
crew had gone over the edge. With great enthusiasm, his cameraman, Jose
Gaytan, had shown me some of their work: unspeakable video footage of blood
spurting from the heads of homicide victims found in the trunk of a car; a
teenager lying dead in a pond; another victim found in a vacant lot with a
plastic bag over his head; a man with the back of his head blown off, his
attractive, well-dressed girlfriend, also dead, lying nearby.

``I don't have a solution for all of this,'' Cota had said as we drove
through Juarez's dark streets. ``That I do not have.''

NOGALES, MEXICO

During three weeks of driving, the song I heard most frequently on the
radio was a peppy number that sounds almost like circus music. The song
begins not with music but with the sound of a barking dog, traffic, and the
following exchange between a gringo border inspector and a Mexican driver:

Inspector: Buenos tardes, Senor. What are you bringing from Mexico?

Driver: I'm not bringing anything; I'm empty-handed.

Inspector: Will you please stop in lane number two. Numero dos, por favor.
Mike and John, get the dogs! Search the red Bronco! Please!

Then comes the whir of an accordion, and a bragging balladeer belting out
the celebratory news that, despite a thorough inspection and a sniff-search
by two dogs, the gringos no le encontraron el clavo a mi Bronco colorado -
they never found the secret compartment of the red Bronco.

The drugs had made it across.

This type of song is known as the narco-corrido, he says and it has become
the background music of the border. The polka-derived corridos have existed
for more than a century, telling the history of Mexico through musical
parables of heroism and death. But the heroes are no longer Pancho Villa
and Emiliano Zapata but drug lords like ``The Lord of the Skies'' and
``Guero'' Palma.

The narco-corrido has become so popular, it has now spread beyond the
border area, into much of the United States and Mexico. Los Tucanes de
Tijuana, one of the most notorious bands, hit the Billboard magazine Latin
charts last year with its latest CD. Recently, the band has had to deny
allegations that it was funded by the Arellano Felix brothers. The group's
most popular song is ``Los Tres Animales,'' or ``The Three Animals,'' a
tongue-in-cheek, thinly disguised ode to cocaine, marijuana, and heroin:

I live off three animals
That I love as much as
my life,
With them I make lots
of money
And never even buy
them food,
They are very fine
animals:
My parrot, my rooster,
and my goat.
In California, Nevada,
In Texas, and in
Arizona,
And also in Chicago,
I have many people
Who sell my animals
More than McDonald's
sells hamburgers.

The lyrics of narco-corridos are usually more subtle in their celebration
of crime than, for example, rap lyrics, but they have their critics. Some
corridos simply begin with the sound of a drug trafficker machine-gunning a
rival or a traitor. A ban on narco-corridos is in effect in the Mexican
states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua, which are huge drug-trafficking centers.

By the time I reached Nogales, I had listened to so much of this music that
I wanted to meet a band. Daniel Guzman, the 22-year-old programming
director for a Nogales radio station, said the two most popular local bands
are Los Zultanes del Norte and Eclipse. Los Zultanes's best-known song is
``The Corrido of the Monarch,'' a tale of the rise and fall of a local
trafficker named Lito Serrano. Eclipse recorded ``Cloud of Dust,'' a
corrido about traffickers who dump a planeload of cocaine over Nogales when
they learn that they are about to be captured.

The musicians make no apology for the images in their lyrics. ``What are we
supposed to do, write lies?'' Roberto Moreno, the bassist for Eclipse, told
me inside the offices of the local music union. ``Here on the border, this
is what it's like.''

Moreno invited me to a jam session he was having that night with the
members of Los Zultanes. It was held in the hills above Nogales, in a
freezing concrete room lit by a single light bulb. The musicians were from
several local bands, and while one group played, the rest of us listened
and drank Tecate beer.

Afterward, I tried to get the members of Los Zultanes to talk about the
social significance of the corridos. But they were reluctant. ``Corridos
are for drunks,'' one of the musicians said. I was confused until Moreno
explained the situation while we were driving back to town. ``Some of the
guys thought you might be CIA or DEA or something,'' he said.

TECATE, MEXICO, AND IMPERIAL BEACH, CALIFORNIA

We were standing beneath a full moon, on the Mexican side of the fence, on
a frigid November evening, but Carlos Silva wanted to tell me a story
before he set off on his three-day trek to the United States.

``Once, I was working in the hospital in Garden Grove [California], and the
manager gave a job to a gabacho,'' he said, using the Mexican slang for an
American. ``They assigned us to clean the bathrooms, and the toilets were
backed up. I said fine. I started working. This gabacho, he looked at these
toilets, all backed up, and you know what he said? He said, `Look at all
this [expletive]!' This gabacho wouldn't work.''

I came to Tecate, about 30 miles east of Tijuana, because of a memory I
couldn't shake about a woman I met here two years ago. Her name was Rosa.
She was perhaps 40 pounds overweight. She wore shorts, a sweater, hoop
earrings, and canvas tennis shoes. She was preparing to cross a mountainous
desert filled with rattlesnakes and mountain lions, a moonscape where
dozens of people have starved, frozen, and burned to death in galloping
brush fires. All for a job. To this day, I wonder whether she made it.

That night, Rosa had been joined by about 50 others who wanted to cross the
border illegally. Now, on a night two years later, there were just two:
Silva and a friend. The Border Patrol crackdown in San Diego, a buildup
unprecedented in the history of the US-Mexico border, continues to push
immigrants farther east into dangerous territory. Jose Luis Castaneda, who
runs a shelter in Tecate, told me that migrants are now crossing in a
mountain range even farther east.

``People don't cross here anymore, maybe because it's too dangerous,'' said
Silva, who had been working as a roofer near Los Angeles until he was
picked up without papers on Mexican independence day and deported. He left
a wife and two children behind in the United States. ``Me, I don't care.
I'd rather die on that mountain right there than live without my kids.
They're my responsibility. I have to be with them.''

For the next hour, Silva, his friend, and I talked about our families,
about Mexican politics and US immigration law, about baseball. Finally, I
began my goodbyes.

``Hey, why don't you put us in that trunk and take us with you,'' Silva
said. ``No problem. We'll be in San Diego in an hour.''

I didn't know what to say. If I were driving along a deserted highway, and
I knew it was a three-day walk to the nearest town, I certainly would pick
up a hitchhiker. But for three weeks, all along the border, inspectors had
been asking me to open my trunk, perhaps because I was carrying a Mexican
driver's license but was driving a rented car with New Mexico plates.

I thought about it for 10 minutes, then decided not to take Silva and his
friend along. I apologized and got into my car, leaving my new friends in
the dark. When I reached the border crossing, the inspector waved me
through. It was the same at another checkpoint about 10 miles down the
road. I was back in San Diego in an hour.

The next day, I walked down to the western end of the border, to a place
called Imperial Beach, about 20 miles south of San Diego. There, a rusted
fence runs between a park and the Tijuana bullring, down a bluff, and
across the sand, crossing, the inspector waved me through. It was the same
at another checkpoint about 10 miles down the road. I was back in San Diego
in an hour.

The next day, I walked down to the western end of the border, to a place
called Imperial Beach, about 20 miles south of San Diego. There, a rusted
fence runs between a park and the Tijuana bullring, down a bluff, and
across the sand, and shook hands with her husband, Victor, a Tijuana
Coca-Cola distributor, who said his entire family, including his mother and
father, live in Los Angeles. ``But I never wanted to go,'' he said.
``People change when they get over there.''

On this day, he and Guadalupe, along with their 16-year-old daughter,
Tanya, had decided to take their dog for an afternoon walk. I asked them
what they thought about the fence.

``It's not right,'' said Victor. ``We're all human beings. We shouldn't
have to live this way.''

Guadalupe disagreed. ``You have to have it,'' she said. ``It's like having
a party and inviting eight people and 50 show up. You have to have a way to
keep them all out.''

I saw them looking behind me, startled, and turned to see a Border Patrol
agent walking across the beach. He asked me what I was doing, and I said I
was conducting an interview. ``Be careful,'' he said. ``People pass drugs
through that fence.'' I said I would.

Victor handed me a piece of coconut.

``He probably thought you were a wetback,'' said Guadalupe, ``and that we
were seeing you off.''

© 1997 Globe Newspaper Company