BORDERLINE MADNESS

The City Of Nogales, Ariz., Struggles As Narco Violence Spills In From Mexico

Allison Moore says drug violence is slowing the flow of Mexican produce
into the Untied States. Gunshots can interrupt even the deepest slumber,
burrowing into the most remote reaches of the tender subconscious. But
down on the border, gunshots merely accent what the subconscious already
grasps. Fear has pulled up a chair, settled in, refused to go.

Once fear has arrived, it never fully departs. This, Maria Tapia already
knows.

Mexico reported nearly 5,500 drug-related deaths in 2008, and many of
those murders touched very close to the border. The annual body count in
Nogales, Sonora, alone more than doubled over the past year. Consider the
shootout there in October: 10 narcos dead, after a long and vicious
firefight among themselves and with police.

The state police chief was shot dead in November. Executions are routine
and point-blank. Locations are erratic. Sometimes the gunshots echo
through schoolyards. In Tijuana, a human body was liquefied in a vat of
acid, then left on the curb.

And the beheadings. Don't forget those. An ultimate insult to thoughtfulness.

These things are fact. All of them. Although she can't recite details,
Maria Tapia lives just a stone's throw from the steel border wall soaring
above her home. Beyond that wall, she now knows that all things are
possible. A resident of Nogales, Ariz., she might as well live in Mexico,
for they actually do throw stones: Next to her address on Short Street,
the roadway is rubble: rocks hurled over the wall, and sometimes concrete,
in chunks.

Three grandchildren live in her home. This, she tells me through her
fence. Except for school, she says, they do not go beyond the yard,
wrapped in chain link. Before talking further, or succumbing to a photo,
Maria Tapia must unlock the gate to that yard. This takes time, because
she does so reluctantly, and because there are two locks and a latch. Her
world, on the trembling cusp of Mexico, is a world of rocks and locks.

Maria Tapia refuses to let me photograph her face. On Short Street, one
necessarily does not wish for recognition.

The borderline has always held civilization at arm's length. But even
amidst the smuggling and the Border Patrol and the petty crime, people
still carried on as if this wasn't such a tough ribbon of real estate. And
in a way, it is not.

As smallish Arizona towns go, Nogales holds much more charm than most. It
is a real community with roots and a rollicking history and parks and
sprawling hometown parades. I recognize many of these things, because I
also come from such a place, and because I worked at the Nogales newspaper
for two years in the mid-1990s.

Its relationship with Nogales, Sonora, once evoked a patient resignation,
like the sighing rapport between indulgent parent and troublesome child.
In the 1990s, tunnel kids were the symbol of this relationship. They were
Mexican street kids who'd sneak north under the border, through the
violent drainage tunnels, popping up in downtown areas and shocking
pedestrians and diners. Church's Chicken was a favorite target.

No one cared much about these children, nor was anybody inordinately
terrified by them. Still, they sparked a remarkable slew of headlines.
Ultimately, it seemed, the real fear resided from whence they came--those
dank tunnels renowned for their half-lit ferocity. Tunnels which, for most
Nogaleans, remained an unseen but dreaded abstraction.

But by and large, Nogales people simply ignored the border's dark side.
Besides, there were perks. If you were rooted here, you benefited from
binominal family ties. If you arrived from elsewhere, the ease of slipping
into Sonora for cheap booze and chow could be enough. For their part,
border Mexicans returned that favor by dropping cash at downtown retail
shops on this side of the line.

But that's before evil began battling itself. As narco combat ripped
across northern Mexico last year, many thought this stretch of border was
immune. They were dead wrong.

Tony Estrada feels the shifting wind more than most. He's been a lawman
down here for more than 40 years, and he's served as the Santa Cruz County
sheriff for much of that time. He says this drug war between cartels, and
between cartels and police, has changed the flavor of his town, perhaps
forever.

"We never thought it was going to come to Nogales," he says. "All the
other border towns have been having that violence to one degree or
another, but we weren't. Or the violence was up in the backstreets where
nobody noticed."

Not any longer. Just across the line in Nogales, Sonora, "it's erupting in
the malls; it erupted out in the street. I have never, ever seen anything
like this."

According to the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force,
recent violent flare-ups are due to a turf fight between rival drug
syndicates--the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Federation--for control of
Nogales, Sonora. As it happens, this is a prime staging area for smuggling
drugs into the United States.

Estrada predicts the carnage will subside when one gang finally exhausts
the other. But for peaceful residents, that might remain a Pyrrhic
victory. "Things will get better," he tells me. "But it will never be the
same."

Meanwhile, the federal government is certainly taking the fighting
seriously. For the first time, the U.S. State Department has issued a
travel alert for Nogales, Sonora. And speaking to The New York Times two
weeks before he was replaced as Homeland Security secretary, Michael
Chertoff described emergency strategies, recently drafted by his
department, which include a rapid and daunting law-enforcement pushback if
violence were to spill over from Mexico.

"We completed a contingency plan for border violence, so if we did get a
significant spillover, we have a surge--if I may use that
word--capability," Chertoff told the Times.

Such a surge could include everything from armored vehicles and aircraft
to military personnel if civilian forces were inundated. Chertoff said he
also informed his successor, then-Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, that
"helping Mexico get control of its borders and its organized-crime
problems" were among his top security priorities.

The Nogales Police Department is hunkered along the ground floor of City
Hall, and from its crisp lobby, you can gaze upon a tranquil lawn scene:
lush grass, smiling workmen, a shimmering penny pool. But glance the other
way in that same lobby, and you'll see warning posters filled with meth
heads and mouths full of rotting teeth.

The dichotomy is familiar to any modern city working to become a better
place. Yet how many cities are bounded by a rusting wall, reaching angrily
to the sky? How many cities of 22,000 people share their streets with this
remarkable intensity of law enforcement, from the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency and the Border Patrol to Customs and Border Protection agents
stationed at two overflowing ports of entry?

Police Chief William Ybarra is soft-spoken and polite, pure law
enforcement, eyes scanning everything but pretending otherwise, as I'm
ushered into his windowless office. He's flanked by the ubiquitous
computer screen and a lush plastic plant. A stout coffee mug sits at the
front of his desk, lacquered with gold handcuffs and the words "Chief
Ybarra."

Calm and controlled, he seems the very antidote to fear. Here on the edge
of a cartel battlefield, he describes his department's coordination with
the feds as nearly seamless.

"We share protocols and strategies, should we have any spillover. But
we've also been lucky that none of the actual violence, such as homicides
and things like that, has bled over to our side. We've had a few
kidnappings, narco-related, and you know, pistol whippings. But no actual
murders on this side."

Ironically, Chief Ybarra says violence is somewhat sparse here, precisely
because Nogales sits right on the border. "We're kind of lucky that we're
a city where (traffickers) want to get through and out as quickly as
possible with their goods. They don't want to hang around because of the
large quantity of law enforcement that we have in Santa Cruz County."

Still, his folks have adopted a heightened sense of alert, and several
officers are routinely dispatched on calls, where one might have sufficed
in the past. The NPD has also beefed up its tactical arsenal. For
instance, officers are now equipped with long, high-caliber rifles.

"Just little things like that," the chief says, "and making sure that
everyone has enough ammunition on them in case they encounter some type of
violent situation, because it could happen."

Nogales has always been an edgy place. You first sense this at the pinched
pass bringing you south into town. People have stumbled through this cleft
for centuries, and their restless spirits likely linger there, starting
with the early natives who trekked through some 2,000 years ago. Later
came Europeans--explorers, traders and an endless stream of Catholic
troublemakers.

Among those fidgety papists was Fray Marco de Niza, who in 1539 plodded
all the way up from Mexico City, crossing the desert a few miles east of
present-day Nogales. Reports to his superiors are peppered with hints of
great wealth lurking just around the next bend. That notion fired
imaginations overseas, and De Niza could be blamed for the arrival of
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado a year later. Coronado immediately began
sniffing out the Seven Cities of Gold. Thousands of miles later, he was
still sniffing.

A few centuries later, this pass was equally popular with itchy 49ers,
bound for California's gold fields. Many of those prospectors would return
by the same route. They were failures coming and going. But some stuck
around here long enough to swing a pickax. Speculation and investments
followed. Strapping operations soon began gouging ore from these hills.

American surveyors marked the Mexican line in 1855, one year after the
Gadsden Purchase. And in 1880, San Francisco merchant Jacob Isaacson built
a trading post on the site of Nogales. An old article quotes a local
gadfly from that time, talking about Isaacson's humble enterprise. "The
building was made of ocotillos," recalled Mrs. Ada E. Jones, "the crevices
being plastered with mud. The roof was low, so one could not stand erect
inside. There were several other shacks of the same kind, and a few
tents."

But Isaacson had bigger plans. Namely, he wanted to stoke trade between
Tucson and the Mexican port town of Guaymas, situated a few days south on
the Gulf of California. He was shrewd, and he knew about railroad plans to
link Nogales with another rail line from the east. There was money to be
made. It sure wasn't easy money, though. The frontier was treacherous, and
trailblazers like Isaacson were on constant alert for bandits and Apaches.
But the plucky merchant toughed it out. You could even say he thrived,
selling his stuff to Mexicans and the more peaceful Indian bands.

The town's second proper building was a saloon, hammered together by an
entrepreneur named Brickwood. Later, when a border survey team arrived to
place boundary markers, they discovered that Brickwood's masterpiece
actually abutted the international line. To make room for their survey,
they cut a slot from his building and squeezed in a border marker. That
proved a sweet boon; customers could dodge American tobacco taxes by
stepping out the saloon's back door onto Mexican soil to buy cigars from
the bartender.

Times change, and they don't change at all. Bracker's Department Store
stands just a few strides north of that line. The venerated family
operation began in the 1920s and evokes a rather sepia sensibility, with
shoes and suits and jewelry displayed in a comfortable shop spanning a
block.

From above the cash register gaze generations of industrious Brackers.
This is a dynasty of sorts, and these are portraits of an old and
venerated order, their images etched into the annals of Nogales. There's
Harvey Bracker, the patriarch who passed away in 1992. Or Charles, who
lived into the 1970s. And Robert Bracker, mostly called Bobby, a skilled
store manager and notoriously agile fundraiser for endless charitable
causes. He died in 1994, at age 64.

There have been good streaks and bad, of course. But Bobby's son Bruce,
now helping to carry the family mantle, has never seen times like these.
His store sits on old Morley Avenue in downtown Nogales. Over time, this
street has been a thoroughfare for Prohibition-era contraband and modern
day-commerce. Currently, it sits within earshot of drug wars.

Today, he leans on the counter, beneath that cluster of forebears.
Although the Bracker's downtown retail empire now includes three
stores--the original department store, along with the discount store La
Tienda, and men's-clothing store Charlie's--times have rarely been so
hard. He calls it an echo effect: The sharp decline in American tourists
shopping across the line has had a direct impact on shoppers coming to
Bracker's.

Tourists used to frequent the Sonoran curio shops, the pharmacies and the
restaurants, he says. "And the owners of those businesses are customers of
Bracker's. The employees of those businesses are our customers."

The result, he says, is a 20 percent drop at the department store, and 40
percent in the overall business. He recently had to lay off three solid
staffers in a single week. "People who had been here awhile," he says, his
voice dropping off.

Still, Bracker mostly blames the falling economy, which is exacerbated in
Nogales by the violence. Whatever the reasons, the impact is obvious as we
walk out to Morley Avenue. He glances north, and then south. Only a small
scattering of people dot the sidewalk.

"Look around," he says. "Have you ever seen Morley like this?"

To understand Bracker's point about the commercial boomerang between these
neighboring economies, one needs to look no further than Wayne and Arlene
Black, two middle-age Canadians from the tiny village of Cremona, in
Alberta. They're standing outside the duty-free shop Ueta, wondering
whether to attempt crossing that line into Sonora.

Even in Canada, this violent border is well-known, says Wayne Black. "It's
something we're not used to--Cremona only has about 400 people."

"It's a pretty quiet place where we live," adds Arlene.

Behind them, Ueta's folks are tidying the shelves and washing the window
of a glittering shop that features everything from opulent cigars to fine
wine, all available without import duties or taxes, and all watched over
by several beefy security guards. According to Bruce Bracker, these
duty-free shops are the hardest hit, since their clientele is primarily
tourists looking for a last-minute deal on the way back from Mexico.

If times are hard, the duty-free shops aren't saying. Inside Ueta, a
manager who only gives her first name, Leti, reluctantly says that, yes,
there have been a few layoffs, but, no, business isn't that bad. Then she
has to go. The security guards watch me tuck away the pad, and then eye me
out the door.

In 2005, researchers released a study of the U.S.-Mexico border showing
that some 240 million people cross into the United States from Mexico each
year by car, by bus or on foot. Of those, 34.5 million enter Arizona. The
No. 1 reason they come? To shop.

This data was compiled in 2002. That year, Nogales, Ariz., enjoyed retail
sales that were, per capita, 172 percent of the national average. More
than 60 percent of the city's sales tax comes from Mexican shoppers
crossing the border everyday.

Border-wide, such trade translates into roughly $9 billion in sales, and
generates 150,000 jobs.

Apparently, no one has put a dollar amount to this year's business.

Of course, not all the commerce in Nogales, or even the majority of it,
exists in retail sales. This city's biggest business resides among the
produce warehouses peppering the northern edges of town. It's a $2 billion
industry, and Nogales is the primary conduit.

Allison Moore is a spokeswoman for the Fresh Produce Association of the
Americas, a Nogales-based trade group representing 125 produce dealers,
brokers and distributors.

She says Mexico's law-enforcement crackdown on drug violence has slowed
northbound freight traffic. Much of that traffic originates further south
in the prime agricultural state of Sinaloa. As it happens, Sinaloa is also
quite well-known for its drug trade, which provides for a cumbersome
produce journey. "There are increased inspections along the corridor from
the growing regions to here," says Moore, "by the Mexican military,
Mexican customs, U.S. customs, just to try and stay on top of any
attempted smuggling. So that is definitely adding to some of the transit
times and crossing times."

At the same time, "people here realize there's a reason that these things
are happening. And so the increased inspections--looking more thoroughly
at things crossing the border--is something that's a given." The Nogales
International newspaper, my past employer, sits on a hill overlooking the
border, where one can peer down into a sky made murky by Mexican diesel
exhaust. To the north are squat produce warehouses, one after another,
windows and docks sporadically dark with winter hibernation. Harvest time
isn't yet here for tomatoes and melons and peppers and zucchinis, all
plucked in Mexico by cheap hands and shipped north by that army of trucks.
To the south is the border and the increasingly treacherous stretch of
Mexico. But to editor Manuel Coppola, it's just one of the many problems
unfairly plaguing this town.

He admits the violence has taken a toll. "It's not business as usual," he
says. "There is a fear. This stuff is happening in broad daylight, out on
the main streets. You know, 123 murders so far. It hasn't been a citizen
yet, so we've been lucky. But merchants are scrambling to calm the fears
and keep things moving like normal, to not panic people more than they
already are."

That trepidation is obvious on the newspaper's editorial pages, where
concerns about the crisis run deep. "How many more must be slaughtered in
the streets of Nogales, Sonora, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez before we come
up with a workable solution to the drug problem?" read one guest
editorial. "Do we have to wait until the carnage spills over to this side
of the border?"

In late December, Nogales Mayor Octavio Garcia-Von Borstel shared a podium
with his Sonoran counterpart, Marco Antonio Martinez Dabdoub, on a noisy
downtown street just north of the port. Against a backdrop of honking
horns, both men assured assembled reporters that the situation was under
control.

"We have a fully staffed police department," Garcia-Von Borstel said. "We
have great communications with Nogales, Sonora. Their police department is
working very diligently with our police department. ... Those are the
types of measures we are taking. ... You will see bike patrols patrolling
the border more frequently in partnership and in conjunction with the
Border Patrol."

A few days later, Garcia-Von Borstel sits in his roomy office on the top
floor of City Hall. The young mayor was a jock in school, and a UA banner
hangs behind him, as he reiterates that his city is safe for everybody.
Still, he admits to a slight shift in the collective consciousness.

"There's no doubt that Nogales, Sonora, in recent history has never
encountered this type of violence," he says. "And of course it affects
Nogales, Arizona, in the sense that it affects tourism. We survive by our
sales tax, which means that if people don't come here to spend money, it
affects our retail, our merchants and our business community."

But that's not all, he says. "People who for years have visited Nogales on
the holidays--to come and shop, and to visit family members in Mexico and
in Nogales, Arizona--the numbers show that people have not traveled here
as often as they were accustomed to in previous years."

Back on Short Street, Maria Tapia has retreated into her house. A few feet
away, at the base of the daunting border wall, flak-jacketed Border Patrol
agents are repairing a stretch that's been damaged by a blow torch. One of
them carries a pepper-ball gun, to disperse rock-throwers on the other
side.

"The balls hit the ground and then spread," the agent tells me, glancing
affectionately at his weapon. "It can clear things up pretty fast."

He looks at me holding my measly notepad. "You might want to keep your
head down around here," he says.

A few yards away, another neighbor is making a short trip to her mailbox.
Maria Leal lives in a tidy house on the corner where Short Street meets
East Street. She says the violence doesn't have much of an impact on her
life.

"It's quiet here," she says. "I never have a problem." She looks toward
the fence, at the Border Patrol agent and his pepper-ball gun. Then she
shrugs and walks back to her corner.

The madness, it seems, has become ordinary.