EAGLE PASS, Texas — For the second time in a week, an unlikely group huddled in a conference room at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters here--not far from what has become one of the most porous spots on the U.S. border.
They were from the United States and Mexico. Some were former policemen, others lifelong cattle ranchers. But most were now cowboys with a deep mistrust of government, residents of what they call "The Free State of Maverick County." And they came to see Uncle Sam, they said, as a last resort before they're simply driven out.
Each owned a slice of land on the Rio Grande--the border between Mexico and the U.S. Each was a recent victim in the war that the United States is losing here to Mexican smugglers who are flooding the U.S. with cocaine, heroin, marijuana and illegal migrants.
Even the DEA officials in the room said that May morning that they were surprised by the number of ranchers who showed up--about a dozen--and alarmed by their message.
The ranchers said their problems began a few years ago when migrant-smugglers started cutting through their fences at night. But now, they said, heavily armed Mexican drug gangs were taking the smugglers' place--terrorizing the ranchers in broad daylight as they smuggle record quantities of drugs and migrants through their property and into the United States.
Even the nearby riverfront Moody Ranch--where the CBS miniseries "Lonesome Dove" was filmed--was being victimized by smugglers, the ranchers and federal officials asserted.
Some of the ranchers already had sold out to smuggling gangs or their front men--a decision almost all in the room agreed was on their minds. But neither the U.S. Border Patrol nor any other law enforcement agency said it has the manpower to protect the ranchers--or this desolate frontier.
A 62-year-old federal-agent-turned-rancher, who, like the others in the room, refused to be identified for fear of reprisals, summed up the desperation. After months of digging surveillance bunkers, plotting aerial maps and patrolling his property by pickup, he concluded: "It's we private citizens who have upheld the integrity of the border . . . and we can't do it anymore. We're losing America."
Compromised Border
Based on the accounts of the Rio Grande ranchers, court documents, intelligence assessments by federal agencies and interviews with landowners, The Times--after an extensive tour north and south of the line--has found that drug-smuggling gangs have quietly compromised hundreds of miles of the United States' southern border.
Using intimidation, bribery and murder on both sides of the Rio Grande, the smugglers have opened a route through Texas for billions of dollars of Mexican marijuana--and, increasingly, heroin and cocaine--destined for U.S. cities.
Equipped with night-vision equipment, cellular telephones, border sentries and their own intelligence network, the smugglers have outmanned, outgunned and out-planned the U.S. Border Patrol, Customs Service and DEA at strategic points on the Rio Grande--particularly in Maverick County and its seat, Eagle Pass.
They have threatened owners of riverfront property, forcing them to remain silent or even move out; they have corrupted several dozen local officials in about half of the 14 Texas counties along the Rio Grande in the last four years; they are increasingly combining their drug trade with the lucrative smuggling of illegal immigrants.
Statistics for drug seizures and illegal migrant arrests by the Border Patrol here in the first half of this fiscal year tell part of the story: In just six months, they more than exceed the totals for all of 1995 in both categories. And federal agents estimate they're catching just 5%--at most--of the drugs and migrants moving across the river, day and night.
For example, between Oct. 1, 1995, and April 1, 1996, just on a 55-mile stretch of the river that includes Eagle Pass, the Border Patrol seized 41,382 pounds of marijuana; that compares with 33,291 pounds nabbed in all of the previous year and just 15,763 pounds stopped in the year before that. In the same period, 67,278 undocumented migrants were arrested here--almost double the 35,604 arrested in the entire year before.
Cocaine Bust
Evidence that cocaine is moving across the border in large quantities in this area came on May 25, when customs agents seized more than a ton of the drug--worth an estimated $100 million--in two Rio Grande arrests. Those hauls were followed a week later with a 1,018-pound cocaine seizure during a routine customs inspection of a tractor-trailer at the border.
In January, customs agents seized 55 pounds of heroin at the border crossing in nearby Del Rio--the largest shipment of that contraband ever detected in the region.
"There are so many little roads, back roads, side roads coming out of here that it's impossible for us to stop it with the manpower we have in this sector," conceded Benny Carrasco, the U.S. Border Patrol agent in charge in Eagle Pass.
