The Texas-Mexico border

Scenes from la frontera

Fence politics in Texas

Monday

IN A tiny town at the very bottom of the United States, a little old lady is sassing the Border Patrol about Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“You’ll find out that Chertoff and I don’t see eye-to-eye,” says Eloisa Tamez.

“Yes, ma’am,” says the agent.

“Your boss. My enemy,” she says.

That attitude is common down here. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 calls for 700 miles of fence to be built along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. When the DHS started building the fence in Arizona, there were few direct complainants, but that border is mostly uninhabited.

Eloisa Tamez

The Texas border, conversely, is studded with twinned cities, from Brownsville-Matamoros at the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso-Ciudad Juárez at the western tip of Texas. More than 2m people live in the El Paso-Juárez conurbation alone.

And Texas, unlike the other border states, already has a physical border with Mexico—the Rio Grande. In some places the river is barely a trickle, but it’s there. Construction on the fence is supposed to start in Texas in July, but DHS has to deal with some lawsuits first.

The Border Patrol agent shifts awkwardly. He seems embarrassed and aggrieved: “I don’t know why you’re upset with me. I’m just seeing how you’re doing.” He is a recent recruit, a big blond kid from Oklahoma, and this is his first encounter with Ms Tamez.

They will probably meet again. She can often be found along this dirt road, which covers the levee. The Border Patrol dislikes people coming this close to the border, but it’s her property. She lives in a modest house in El Calaboz, perhaps 50 yards from where we’re standing, and lately she’s been giving a lot of tours of her backyard.

Ms Tamez’s family was given this land in 1767 as part of a Spanish land-grant programme. She thinks that only the King of Spain should be able to rescind her rights to it, but over the years the original porcione has been hacked away for various reasons. She retains claim to only three acres, and plans call for the fence to go right through it.

She is suing the Department of Homeland Security, saying that they did not follow correct procedure in asserting the government’s eminent-domain claims. “I saw my father and grandfather working hard to get this land to give fruit. So it's not about how much money they might give me, which is nothing,” she says.

Most property owners down here are not suing. Some are too poor for legal help; others quail at the prospect of taking on the government. But several are. Pamela Taylor sailed from England to Texas after the second world war because she had married a soldier from Brownsville, a nearby town. She has been living here for more than 50 years. Once she came home to find a man who had just crossed the river sitting in her rocking chair. Her home will be entirely behind the fence.

Paul and Tim Loop, a pair of farming brothers, don’t know how they are going to access their crops. Residents of Granjeno, a tiny town with just one business, worry that their community will be entirely obliterated.

“We get so concerned about the animals that are about to be extinct," Ms Tamez continues, “when by doing this they are extinguishing a culture and a population that’s going to be gone forever.” She is a member of the Lipan Apache tribe, but she is referring more generally to the culture of la frontera, a strip of land that has switched hands often and has a blend of Anglo, Spanish, and Native American traditions.

The animals are also a point of concern. The border is home to obscure species like ocelots and green jays. Mr Chertoff has been given special dispensation to waive certain laws to get the fence built quickly, and he has used this power to ignore several environmental regulations.

On June 23rd the Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by the Sierra Club focusing on the impact of a section of fence in Arizona. The court may have reasoned that since the fence was already built the damage was done. There is another lawsuit pending focusing on the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Maybe the jays still have a chance.

Tuesday

In 2004 and 2005, Keith Bowden travelled the length of the Rio Grande by bicycle and raft. In “The Tecate Journals”, his excellent account of the trip, he writes that he has reservations about Matamoros, which is just across the river from Brownsville. In 1989 a student was kidnapped and killed by drug traffickers. They put his brain in a kettle with blood and scorpions. “I love the border and am a hard guy to intimidate,” writes Mr Bowden. “But I can never think of Matamoros without thinking of that kettle.”

A mural in Nuevo Laredo

Tourism is an important part of the border economy, especially on the Mexican side. But over the past few years, Mexico’s increasingly fierce drug wars have made things harder for the public-relations people. My plan for the week is to travel along the border from Brownsville to El Paso, reporting a few stories along the way. This strikes some people in Austin, where I live, as foolish. “Please do me a favour,” said my mechanic. “Bring someone with you. Someone with a gun.” His colleague counselled vigilance: “Pretend you’re in ’Nam.”

According to tourism officials in Matamoros, the city used to get as many as 30,000 students during spring break; this year they had about 1,000. When I returned to the hotel last night after meeting with Ms Tamez, my (unarmed) companion had gotten worked up reading State Department travel advisories about Matamoros. There is some activity at the base of the bridge in Mexico—perhaps a dozen people waiting for the bus and several soldiers with machine guns. Past that, the streets are empty. We walk in uneasy silence until we find a restaurant with some signs of life. Tacos, guacamole, mushrooms and Dos Equis improve our spirits. Everything is normal in the restaurant, except that when the Los Angeles Dodgers, LA’s baseball team, hit a home-run the waiter plops a helmet on the nearest patron and take a few celebratory swings at his head.

More Americans are crossing the border as health-care tourists. For someone without medical insurance, hospital visits and pharmaceuticals are considerably cheaper in Mexico. But nobody is going for fun. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, 200 miles up the river from Brownsville and just a few hours down the interstate from San Antonio and Austin.

The two Laredos are a busy port, with 13,000 trucks crossing each day and more than $100 billion in trade a year. It also used to be a festive destination for Texans, full of bars, restaurants and considerably seedier pursuits. But in 2005 a crime wave in Nuevo Laredo mostly killed the tourist industry. In 1990 the Republican nominee for governor, Clayton Williams, cheerfully volunteered that he had spent some time in the Boys Town district of Nuevo Laredo because it was the only place a young man could get “serviced” in those days. (Mr Williams was also famous for a joke comparing rape to bad weather: “If it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” He was too much of a meathead for Texas, and narrowly lost his election to the Democrat, Ann Richards, who was later unseated by George W. Bush. If not for Mr Williams’s indiscretions, Mr Bush may never have become president. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, got in trouble earlier this year when his campaign planned to hold a fundraiser with Mr Williams.)

International Bridge No.1 in Laredo leads to Avenida Guerrero, a typical tourist corridor, apart from the fact that it has no tourists. It’s an easy walk, and crowds of locals stream back and forth all day. A man trots alongside us for a minute offering us anything we want—a dentist, a doctor, a farmacia, a hotel with a pool, a marriage, a divorce. But the effort is half-hearted and he soon peels away. No one else even tries.

We stroll over to Señor Frog's, once a monument to ridiculous behaviour. It's closed, but I’m surprised to see signs of life at the other end of the block, as men are scrubbing and painting El Tropical Bar & Grill in preparation for a July 4th opening. Robert Candelaria, the owner, remembers Señor Frog’s (“Also called Mr Frog’s”) fondly, but boasts his place will be classy, with beer on tap. He says that since the military arrived in Nuevo Laredo—there are tanks and machine guns here, too, mostly around the bridge—the tourists have been coming back. I haven't seen any, but I hope he’s right. Only then can El Tropical avoid the sad fate of Señor Frog’s.

Back on the Texan side, we stop in at the Museum of the Rio Grande Republic. There we learn about a swathe of land between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River that had declared itself independent of Mexico in 1840. It spent only 11 months that way, while both Texas and Mexico laid claim to it. Rick Villareal, who runs the museum, grew up in Laredo before the streets were paved. He is “totally opposed” to the fence. Among other things, he says, it will dissuade Texans from using the river. He recently trapped some opossums on his property and went down to the riverbank to release them, where he was confronted by Border Patrol agents and asked to explain himself.

The belief that the fence will effectively put the river in Mexico rather than the United States is a common concern. On the drive to Laredo we stopped to stretch our legs in Roma, which has a mostly empty downtown full of abandoned wells and scary-looking sheds. On the Mexican side of the river, in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, a large group was picnicking on the riverbank, swimming, fishing and listening to music. There was no one on the American side, except a Border Patrol agent in an elevated perch, staring at the party on the other side.

Wednesday

THE Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also being sued by the Texas Border Coalition, a group of mayors and other bigwigs from both sides of the border. Its head is Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass, about 125 quiet miles north-west of Laredo. He is an enormous man with a grey moustache and a cowboy hat. He smokes continuously and his office is full of empty cans of caffeine-free soda. In photos displayed on the wall, he’s cornering Al Gore and Vicente Fox, hands spread wide, to tell them about something. He forces me to take an extra-large T-shirt featuring a snarling bald eagle bursting over a fence frosted with barbed wire. “LET THE EAGLE PASS,” it says.

The coalition’s complaint concentrates on legal matters—that the DHS did not properly negotiate with landowners for access to their property; that rich landowners (and George Bush donors) are enjoying preferential treatment, and so on. But Mr Foster’s antipathy for the fence is more sweeping. Like most border locals, he sees Mexico as a neighbour rather than an adversary. He crosses into Piedras Negras every day—to have lunch, to buy his cholesterol medicine or to run some other errand. Half of the retail business at the local Texas shopping mall comes from Mexico, and he reckons 80% of downtown’s sales are to Mexicans. He argues that a fence rarely sends a good message to a neighbour. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago when the United States was clamouring for Mikhail Gorbachev to topple such walls. At any rate, what is the point, he wonders: “To keep out housekeepers and yardmen?”

AFP

He is particularly irritated by his dealings with the DHS. They initially approached the town council with tempting plans to expand the small road that runs along the southern edge of the municipal golf course, and to clear the city's riverbank of fast-growing corrizo cane. Mr Foster was won over at first. “Those suckers are always running over our sprinkler heads,” he says of the cane. But when DHS officials came back with plans to build a “decorative fence,” he grew sceptical. “It’s hard to trust those boys,” he concludes.

Mr Foster has to be at a funeral by noon, but he bundles me into his SUV for a tour. Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras are relaxed border communities; no soldiers patrol the streets and I can return to the United States with little hassle (I left my passport at the hotel). He shows me the thick stands of cane running down to the river. “There could be a 500-pound elephant on fire down there and you’re not going to see it.” He asks whether I know that Piedras Negras is the home of the nacho. He insists that I visit El Moderno, the site of the invention, and then go to Ciudad Acuña, across the border from Del Rio, to sample some disgusting nachos. “I want you know the difference,” he says. We turn a corner and see something unusual: a gang of middle-aged Americans. “Now there are some happy tourists, in fear for their lives,” Mr Foster observes.

Border residents understandably feel like they are getting the run-around from the DHS. I sometimes feel the same way, although I think this has more to do with bureaucratic back-and-forth than anything else. In any case, complaints about the fence are mostly directed at Washington. Locals tend to support the local Border Patrol operations, and say they would prefer more agents than a fence. (One small point of friction in Brownsville is that the local police are having trouble recruiting, because starting salaries are higher for the Border Patrol.)

For their part, Border Patrol agents are frustrated, too. One agent complains that there are a lot of misconceptions about his work. He says that no one seems to grasp that the Border Patrol is meant “to stop a terroristic threat that is out there,” although they sometimes encounter undocumented aliens. Alan Langford of the Del Rio sector says that border locals usually support the fence after they learn that it is meant merely to discourage illegal crossings into downtown areas, where people can blend easily with the crowds. “We don’t want to perform law-enforcement activities in public areas because it puts the public at risk,” he explains. In his sector, there will only be a few miles of fence, around the two cities (Del Rio and Eagle Pass).

Del Rio is where the feel of the border changes from South Texas to West Texas. After work, I decide to do some sightseeing. My companion and I stop by a museum dedicated to frontier life. It features three inert prairie dogs in a pen, and a room-sized nativity scene. The pieces were carved by a local artist with an erratic sense of scale. Some of the pilgrims are leading camels by leashes like dogs.

Our drive to Lake Amistad for a swim is blocked by an enormous puddle—a mile across and knee-deep. The puddle is not connected to the lake. At the Amistad Fishing Lodge the waitress tells us that her boyfriend loves to fish in the puddle, and her kids go swimming there. Somebody at the lodge has kindly torn off the side of the pool table, so players can retrieve the balls for free.

The radio is full of Christian talk shows. A man describes how he came home one night and his wife was crying in the bedroom, saying she didn’t deserve such a good husband. He told her in no uncertain terms that she only had two choices: she could stay married to him, or she could stay married to him unhappily.

We go to Blockbuster to rent “No Country for Old Men”, the Oscar-winning thriller based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Parts of the film are set in Del Rio. I ask the video-store clerk whether Del Rio is so exciting in real life (ie, full of blood and found riches). Alas, no. He admits that on his days off he often ends up hanging out at the Blockbuster anyway. He is joining the Army in August. Things may get a bit more exciting then.