Smuggling Is Longtime Way of Life in Impoverished South Texas Town

By Sue Anne Pressley and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writers

FRONTON, Tex.—An army of federal agents swooped down in an early morning
drug raid late last year and arrested 15 of the 300 people who live in this
isolated border community a tiny island of poverty surrounded by acres
of farmland on the banks of the Rio Grande.

The authorities "came in here like it was the arrest of Noriega," said
store owner Luis Pena, referring to roadblocks and SWATstyle tactics that
he said seemed more befitting the 1989 capture of Panamanian strongman
Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Even Sheriff Gene Falcon was indignant, claiming the operation was a ploy
by federal antidrug agencies to impress Washington at budget time. "We've
gone overboard," he said. "We've made the border seem like it's a war zone."

In fact, with wellarmed Mexican trafficking groups smuggling more than
2,500 tons of drugs across the 2,000mile frontier every year, many people
believe the U.S.Mexico border is a war zone and riverfront barrios like
Fronton, where entire families have been involved in smuggling for
generations, are ground zero.

Federal law enforcement officials say this stretch of the south Texas
border especially Starr County, where Fronton is located is one of
the prime pipelines for smuggling drugs into the United States. Dubbed
"Little Colombia" by state and federal drug agents, it is land where miles
of rugged and desolate terrain surround tightknit communities cold with
distrust and suspicion, where longterm poverty and desperation exist side
by side with quick, easy money and seemingly unexplainable opulence.

"It's hard to get someone [undercover] into Starr County to do an
investigation because it's a very closed community and they recognize
outsiders when I show up at a crime scene, I'm followed," said a federal
drug prosecutor from the area. "You can't infiltrate the locals because if
you're from outside, you're assumed to be hostile, and like a lot of border
towns, there's only one entrance and exit."

The border region has long seen a fluid exchange of contraband in both
directions, and people have developed attitudes that seem more tolerant,
less quick to judge. During Prohibition, whiskey was the golden currency;
during the Mexican Revolution, guns and ammunition flowed freely; more
recently, drugs, cigarettes, fancy electronic equipment, small weapons and
illegal immigrants have been the contraband of choice.

What is striking about Fronton and dozens of communities like it along the
border is not just their current state of siege from drug traffickers on
the one hand and law enforcement on the other, but the fears of residents
that this is only the beginning that the war on drugs will be fought not
just rhetorically across America, but specifically in their streets and
schoolyards and pastures. Like it or not, their homes are the first
battlefield.

No one in Fronton (pronounced fronTONE) was particularly surprised when
the dust cleared and whole families had been carted off to jail. Here,
where everyone seems to be related, the drug trafficking that had been
going on for so many years was something of an open secret.

Seventynine people from Starr and neighboring Hidalgo and Zapata counties
were arrested last November during the threeweek roundup and charged in a
179count indictment with drug smuggling and money laundering. According to
the U.S. attorney's office in Houston, the suspects were part of a massive
marijuana ring supervised by the Riojas brothers of Fronton that, over 10
years, had smuggled more than 200,000 pounds of marijuana from Mexico to
Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and other U.S. cities. All have pleaded
not guilty, and the case is scheduled for trial next July.

"If we lived in a place where there were jobs, people would have no reason
to get into something like this," said Adrian Gonzalez, 57, a Starr County
commissioner and resident of Fronton. "If you don't have anything else and
your kids are starving, any parent would go to extremes. Someone living
where there are jobs might look at this as a crime, but here, it's
desperation."

Starr County, which is 97 percent Hispanic, for many years has ranked as
one of the most troubled and many believe, neglected counties in
Texas. In 1994, unemployment in the county was nearly 27 percent. The 1990
census found Starr to be the secondpoorest county in the United States; in
1993, according to census figures, per capita income was $6,306, barely a
third the national average.

Yet down dirt roads that snake through dusty farmland, walledin mansions
are sprinkled incongruously amid the shanties and trailers and dilapidated
houses, their driveways filled with latemodel trucks and cars. Drug
Enforcement Administration and Customs officials said they seized 33
properties, together worth more than $3.5 million, in Starr and neighboring
Hidalgo counties in the last year.

Fronton lies in a steamyhot region of melon fields, mesquite bush and
prickly pear cactus, 35 miles from the nearest U.S. Border Patrol station.
Like most communities along the south Texas border, its fortune is tied to
Mexico, and when the peso was devalued in 1982, the economy and real estate
market here crashed. With abundant cheap labor just across the river, there
is little industry. Agriculture has been strong, but a key segment, the
citrus industry, was decimated by freezes in 1983 and 1989.

A store called Cantu's is one of two small groceries in Fronton. There is
not much else: a pattern of narrow streets with an Old World look; a
Catholic mission church, painted sky blue and surrounded with darkred
roses; a small, lovingly tended cemetery, the graves dotted with bright
flowers and reflecting the same family names Guerra, Cisneros, Sandoval.
Outside one small, humble home, a statue of the Virgin Mary sits nestled in
the branches of a tree.

The Rev. Roy Snipes remembers delivering a eulogy at the cemetery about 15
years ago for a drug dealer who was killed in a shootout with federal
agents. He preached about how the beauty of Christ was degraded by drug
dealers, and afterward a member of the dead man's family complained that he
had hurt their feelings.

"I told him, `I have to preach the Gospel, and if you don't like it, you
can go to Hell, and if you don't start paying attention to the Gospel, you
will go to Hell!' " Snipes recalled.

A plainspoken Catholic priest who worked in the Fronton area from 1982 to
1992, Snipes now works at a church about an hour's drive south. He remains
alarmed by the debilitating effects drugs are having on frontier culture.

"The drug dealers have so much money that they set the tone for
everything," Snipes said while puttering around his cluttered office a
dog under the desk and a John Wayne poster tacked to the wall. "If a drug
dealer has a nice car, we want our kid to have a nice car, too. Those
values are soaking in; instead of Christian families trying to show the
drug dealers how to lead a good life, we are trying to live up to them. It
hurts the cultural system when you can make more money than the dentist
makes in a year with one trip to Houston with a load of drugs."

Drug traffickers, through intermediaries, "told me that if I quit picking
on them, I'd have all I could ever want," Snipes said. "I told them, `I'd
rather be saying Mass under a mesquite tree than take money from those
SOBs.' "

Not everyone sees things in such absolute terms. Many people resent
questions about their community and scoff at the idea that they might be
living in a danger zone; after all, most say their ancestors have lived
here for more than a century.

"Sunset, midnight, you can walk the streets of Fronton without fear of
getting shot or raped," said Rey Guerra, chief sheriff's deputy of Starr
County and a resident of Fronton, as he sipped a soft drink at Cantu's.

"We're educated people!" a woman shouted before retreating into her home.
"We're not all drug dealers!"

Still, said another woman who, like many residents, refused to give her
name, "there are no jobs, and we are desperate. They took so many jobs and
moved them to Mexico. If you don't have a job and you have kids, wouldn't
you do it?"

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company