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.

One warm afternoon late last year, I swam over to Mexico. It took about 20
seconds. I changed out of my clothes on the shoulder of Texas Farm Road
170, then walked across a cluster of boulders to the Rio Grande. Ducks and
dragonflies skimmed the greenish-black water, and when I climbed up on the
other side, coated with a film of mud, I was completely alone.

There is a lot of solitude to be found along the 2,000-mile border that
separates the United States and Mexico. There are long stretches of desert
nothingness, mountains that fill up the horizon, thousands of bends in the
Rio Grande. There are 38 official border crossings, and more are certain to
be built, but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of places where people
slip across to buy a shovel, to work for the day, or to have lunch with
their mother.

In many of these quiet places, the border is almost imaginary - an obstacle
rather than a barrier. But that is changing, and it is changing rapidly, as
the fallout from some of the most explosive issues ever to hit the two
countries spreads along the historic frontier. ``We are at ground zero,''
says a rancher from San Benito, a small Texas city about 25 miles from the
Gulf of Mexico.

What happens on the border has forecast trends in US-Mexico relations since
the current boundary was established after the 1846-48 Mexican-American
War. And these days, the signals emanating from the borderlands are
increasingly ominous - nothing like the images of an orderly, vanishing
border that dominated debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement
four years ago.

Mexico has become a drug-trafficking superpower much faster than it is
becoming a first-world nation. The result has turned the border into a
2,000-mile-long front in an escalating war by both countries against
illegal narcotics. Cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez - hubs for the
two major cartels that control the drug trade - have become killing fields,
while, in the United States, the drug cartels are recruiting a growing army
of ``mules,'' or carriers, hit men, and corrupt law-enforcement officials
to keep their businesses humming.

At the same time, the border is the scene of a widening conflict over
illegal immigration. With 40 million Mexicans mired in poverty, the annual
rites of migration show no sign of slowing down, except that undocumented
workers now can often run into a fortresslike defense. Steel fences,
human-tracking heat sensors, thousands of new Border Patrol agents - all
reflect changing attitudes in the United States toward illegal immigration.

In the national capitals of Mexico City and Washington, D.C., managing the
border is the focus of renewed attention. The budget of the US Immigration
and Naturalization Service, for example, has grown 158 percent since 1990,
to $878 million. The size of the US Border Patrol has doubled in three
years. But on the border, drug trafficking and immigration are neighborhood
issues, along with bake sales and droughts and high school football.

Carlos Ogden, the dappoer mayor of Columbus, New Mexico, says that drug
runners operate along his part of the border like Amway salesmen -
distributors looking for distributors. ``When your neighbor starts showing
signs of prosperity down here, that means he's smuggling dope,'' Ogden
says. ``Only a few times have I been wrong.''

He then shifts to the big picture: ``To me, this drug war is lost. It's
like when Vietnam was lost, and it went on for another two years, and the
soldiers start taking care of themselves, because they know it's a lost
cause, and some of them get kind of mean. And the government keeps putting
more and more resources into it and saying it's still winnable.''

Late last year, I rented a car for a month and drove along the border from
the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, drifting between the two
countries, stopping at places in and out of the news, talking to farmers
and academics, illegal immigrants and Border Patrol agents, customs
inspectors and small-town mayors, human-rights advocates and musicians -
the people who make up the strange borderland culture. What I discovered is
a world in dramatic transition? These are a few of its stories.

DONNA, TEXAS

Clemente Garza Jr., the Donna police chief, had a simple plan, according to
authorities. When a shipment of marijuana was expected through his town, he
would assemble his officers for a meeting in the police station. This
ensured that the police were off the streets when smugglers ferried the
drugs across the river from Mexico and through the town to a safe house.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, tipped off to this alleged scheme,
nailed Garza in a sting in September. Arrested with him were six former
police officers from Donna and the surrounding area. Most people in this
community of 14,000 in the Rio Grande Valley were stunned. Garza, after
all, was not only Donna's chief law-enforcement official but also had
worked as an elementary school aide. One suspect was an editor for The
Drumbeat, the school district's newspaper. Another was a faithful
churchgoer. Still another was Donna's dogcatcher.

``You'd look at them and say, `These were moral citizens,''' said Juan
Gonzalez, a member of the Texas National Guard, as we sat inside the
Central Barber Shop, on Main Street. ``They joined the PTA, they went to
the same church as us, they had their kids in Boy Scouts with your kids.
You'd never think of them committing this horrible crime.''

At press conferences in Mexico City and at congressional subcommittee
hearings in Washington, the focus of the drug war is on the huge Mexican
cartels. Headed by elusive kingpins - the savage Arellano Felix brothers,
for example, or the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, also known as ``The Lord
of the Skies'' - the cartels are portrayed as having carved up the border
into well-organized fiefdoms.

But the drug-trafficking explosion has also spawned an untold number of
mom-and-pop operations. The attendant corruption has penetrated deep into
impoverished US border communities with names like Roma, Candelaria, and
Pharr, setting off a series of small-town struggles between the traffickers
and good citizens.

Captain Enrique Espinoza, whose narcotics unit at the state's Department of
Public Safety built the case in Donna, said: ``It's almost like there's no
longer a stigma to be a convicted drug trafficker.'' Espinoza, who went
into narcotics work after a member of his family was ruined by drugs, said
he sometimes feels ``like the Dutch boy plugging the crack in the dike with
his thumb.''

``What settles in is that so many people are getting caught; it's like a
common thing down here,'' said Dan Castillo, a member of the Donna Town
Council. Trafficking has become so pervasive, he said, that when a new
house goes up in Donna, people often wonder: ``How many pounds [of drugs]
went into that?''

``And if someone disappears,'' he said, ``it's like: `Oh, he must have got
caught.'''

I met up with former police chief Garza at his yellow-brick home, on
Tranquility Street. It was 2:30 on Halloween day, and a cheerful-looking
dummy with a basketball for a head was propped in a chair on his porch.
Garza wore jeans and a Dallas Cowboys cap and did not seem surprised that a
stranger would turn up in the middle of the afternoon to ask why he faces
120 years in federal prison and $3.5 million in fines for alleged narcotics
offenses.

``All I can say,'' he remarked pleasantly, ``is I'm not guilty, and I'll
have to leave it at that.''

EAGLE PASS, TEXAS, AND PIEDRAS NEGRAS, MEXICO

The day I arrived in Eagle Pass, it had just been named the worst small
city in the United States by a national publication. A Border Patrol agent
pointed this out to me in the local newspaper, The Gram, an unfortunate
name, considering the basis of Eagle Pass's growing reputation.

Last July, retired Army general Barry R. McCaffrey, the nation's drug czar,
came to Eagle Pass and declared: ``We are going to ensure the rule of law
along the border.'' His choice for this proclamation wasn't accidental: The
city, with a population of about 25,000, is to the border what Dodge City
was to the Wild West. Local ranchers carry assault rifles and Glock
pistols; they escort illegals back to Mexico by the scruffs of their necks.
Border Patrol agents wear bulletproof vests, in part because people
sometimes take potshots at them from the other side of the river.

Thomas A. Constantine, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration,
cited Eagle Pass in an address to Congress last year. He said the mayhem in
the city was so bad that local law-enforcement efforts had to be bolstered
by extra US Border Patrol agents, DEA special agents, and officers from the
Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard.

Indeed, by the time I rolled into town, Eagle Pass seemed as if it were
under an occupation force. Dozens of green-and-white Border Patrol vehicles
were spread out through the streets and the back roads. Some agents
patrolled on mountain bikes. Clearly, the federal government was in charge
here, an issue that seemed worth taking up with the mayor.

Rogelio Flores, wearing snakeskin boots, was sitting at his desk. A
6-foot-long rattlesnake hide was stretched out on the wall behind him. A
used-auto-parts salesman, Flores was born and raised in Eagle Pass. For
years, he said, the border had been mostly ignored. ``Those of us who live
here don't see two different countries,'' he said. ``We just see a bridge
that you go over.''

That made the federal presence in town all the more disturbing. ``McCaffrey
came in with the national news media, and it was like a dog-and-pony
show,'' Flores said. ``We weren't even advised that he was going to be in
town, and our local media weren't invited. Sometimes, you feel like it is
beyond our grasp, and a mixture of outside factors are affecting the image
of Eagle Pass. A lot of this seems to be fueled by the federal government -
politics, the budget, the DEA, the Border Patrol. Everybody has to justify
their budget increases.''

After talking to Flores, I drove across the bridge to Eagle Pass's sister
city, Piedras Negras, to see whether the enhanced law-enforcement presence
on the US side of the river was deterring crime here.

One of the local reporters, Juan Pablo Alderete, a former water-treatment
analyst for the national oil company, Pemex, offered to take me on a tour
of the city. In an interesting twist on the famous tours of movie stars'
homes, Alderete wanted to show me properties believed to be owned by drug
traffickers. ``You see that one over there?'' he said, pointing out a house
directly across from the municipal building. ``One of the Arellano
Felixes's uncles owns that one. We've written about it, but nobody does a
thing.''

I was curious whether the massive Border Patrol presence had put a dent in
illegal immigration, so we went down to the riverbank.

About a quarter-mile from the main bridge joining Eagle Pass and Piedras
Negras, two dozen men stood in clusters near the water. We walked up to one
man, and he cheerfully admitted he was preparing to cross. After working
for five years in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, he said, he had
been deported three months ago to his native El Salvador. As soon as he
arrived, he turned around and headed back for the border, even though it is
much harder to make it across to the United States these days.

``Why would you come back?'' I asked.

Alderete quickly rephrased the question: ``How are things in your country
these days?''

``They're [expletive],'' the man replied. ``There's no jobs.''

I heard some rustling behind me and turned to see nine men stripping to
their underwear and stuffing their clothes into plastic bags. The men
joined hands in groups of four and five and waded across the river in broad
daylight. In most spots, the water reached only to their thighs. Even as
they made it to the United States, I could see them clearly, their red and
blue briefs standing out in the dull afternoon haze. Within moments, the
men had disappeared into the tall grass, like the ballplayers in the movie
Field of Dreams.

Before leaving town, I stopped to visit Bill Perry, a 71-year-old pecan
farmer who owns hundreds of acres near the border outside Eagle Pass. After
telling him what I had seen, I expected that he would nod and tell me that
that was exactly the reason why ranchers were taking up high-powered
weapons. Instead, he seemed mildly annoyed.

``To me, it's a lot of malarkey,'' he said. ``If I were making $3 a day,
like they do over there in Mexico, I'd try to come over here, too.''

REDFORD, TEXAS

His name was Esequiel Hernandez Jr., but most people called him Junior or
Quinone. He lived with his family, the sixth of eight children, in a
compound of adobe homes off a dirt road near the river. ``He always took
the same seat on the bus,'' said Rosendo Evaro, who drove Hernandez to
school every day. ``It was he last seat on the left side. He and his sister
were the only kids who always said, `Good morning.'''

Hernandez had just turned 18 when the drug war came to tiny Redford last May.

Each afternoon after school, Hernandez would grab his old hunting rifle and
take his goats down to the Rio Grande to feed. On this day, he circled back
to a windswept bluff near an abandoned house overlooking the river.
Residents believe he may have aimed his rifle at a rabbit or a snake or a
javelina. At that moment, one of four camouflaged US Marines hiding in the
desert opened fire with an M-16 assault rifle; Junior Hernandez bled to
death next to his herd.

The shooting led the Defense Department to suspend military surveillance
missions along the border for the first time since the forces began
operating there about 10 years ago. In August, a Texas grand jury decided
not to bring charges against the Marine corporal who shot Hernandez, but
the incident has lingered as a symbol of how the federal government's zeal
for fighting drugs is changing life along the border.

``It was inevitable,'' said Enrique Madrid, a town historian who had helped
Hernandez with his school papers. ``If it didn't happen here, it would have
happened somewhere else.''

When I arrived in Redford (population 90) one Sunday morning, I thought it
had been abandoned. There wasn't a soul in sight. Finally, a toothless old
man appeared and directed me to a trailer, back off the main road, in the
desert. When I knocked, someone yelled for me to come in, and I found the
Rev. Mel La Follette - Father Mel, as he is known - standing amid a riot of
pots and pans, baking cookies, and watching the Jets game on television.
Father Mel's outrage over the killing and the grand jury's decision led him
to form the Redford Citizens Committee for Justice and to consider a run
for Congress.

It would be naive to believe that Redford has never been touched by drug
trafficking. One of Mexico's most notorious drug lords, the late Pablo
Acosta, operated just across the river, in Ojinaga. Six years ago, a former
county sheriff, Rick Thompson, was sentenced to life in prison for
conspiracy to smuggle more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United
States. One Redford resident confided that the traffickers' latest trick
was to drive old tractors across the river, fill up their tires with drugs,
then drive them back and load the tractors onto trailers for shipment north.

I found no one in Redford who even remotely suspected that Junior Hernandez
was dirty. Father Mel told me he had hoped the young man would eventually
become president of a cooperative to market gourmet goat cheese, to bring
additional income into the poor community.

``They killed the most innocent person on the entire border,'' said Enrique
Madrid. ``Everybody in Redford knew he was innocent, because we were the
ones who raised him.''

If Hernandez was involved with drugs, it didn't show in his lifestyle. His
family is so poor that his wooden grave marker was donated by a local
carpenter, who misspelled his first name. His grave, located less than 300
yards from where he was shot, is covereod with plastic flowers and a
miniature version of his favorite cowboy hat.

Madrid wanted to show me the exact spot, so we drove out in the afternoon
with his wife, Ruby. There was still something ghastly about the bluff;
bits of yellow police tape clung to prickly pear cactuses, flapping in the
wind. The river, as usual, was calm and empty and glistened in the
afternoon light. We walked up to the abandoned house, a former US cavalry
post. Then, Madrid sent Ruby about 150 yards into the desert to show me
where the Marines had beeon hiding.

He picked up a long piece of wood and, as if it were a rifle, aimed it at
his wife, who was crouching behind the cactus and mesquite. ``Junior was
here,'' he said. He showed me why he believed it was impossible for
Hernandez to have pointed the gun at the Marines, as the military claimed.
Then we walked to the spot where the young man had staggered and fallen and
bled to death, surrounded by rocks and garbage and his goats.

We stared at the ground for a while, silent, the wind whistling over us,
and I imagined Hernandez lying there, and that we were the Marines standing
over him.

(continued in Part 2)