United States Borders Mexico

Border agent Jose Luis Maldonado raises his binoculars and scans the desert horizon, looking for would-be migrants making the perilous crossing into the United States. When he finds them, he doesn't arrest them. Rather, he makes sure that they know what dangers they face and lets them go their way. If they're in trouble, he helps.

President Bush vowed Thursday to create a "smart border" with Mexico, saying he wants to speed the flow of people and goods across the frontier but target would-be terrorists and those who smuggle drugs and immigrants into the United States.

In the midst of the worst electoral showing in 68 years by this nation's long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party last week, Vicente Teran Uribe is a bright spot--a clear winner and possibly a symbol of the future PRI. The landslide victory of the 41-year-old businessman, who funded his own campaign for mayor of this border town, came despite--and even with the aid of--a recent U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report that named him as one of Mexico's 20 top narcotics traffickers.

A Mexican man was sentenced Friday to 16 years in prison for smuggling illegal immigrants across the southern Arizona desert, where 14 of them died in the extreme heat. Jesus Lopez-Ramos pleaded guilty in October to 25 smuggling counts--14 for the men who died and 11 for men who survived the trek in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. Lopez-Ramos, 21, expressed remorse before U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton imposed the sentence.

In another place, it might have passed for simple murder. Maybe in a different family, it could have stayed a single tragedy. But when a car thief killed prelaw student Bruno Jordan five years back, he did it in this desert city on the edge of Mexico. And he killed the darling of a prominent El Paso clan, famous for both its closeness and its two sons in law enforcement.

The discovery of an elaborate 270-foot tunnel built under the Mexican border by drug traffickers to haul large quantities of cocaine to an Arizona warehouse was revealed Friday by federal officials. Flabbergasted Customs Service agents described the million-dollar passageway as "something out of a James Bond movie," replete with electric lighting, concrete reinforcement and a hydraulic system that raised a game-room floor in a Mexico hide-out to provide entry to the secret border crossing.

Attacking a vast cocaine trafficking network that was allegedly camouflaged by U.S. and Mexican import-export companies, federal prosecutors charged the owners of a prominent Mexican foods business Thursday with conspiring to use a cross-border tunnel to smuggle drugs into California.

With a practiced eye, Arturo, a Tijuana taxi driver in an open-necked, baby-blue silk shirt, sizes up the tourists trudging off the footbridge from the United States. "Taxi, lady? You want pharmacy? I get you good pharmacy," he urges, stepping from a line of beckoning taxi drivers in big belts and straw cowboy hats. "Good prices! No prescriptions!" Soon he is nosing his long yellow Oldsmobile through scruffy streets choked with pharmacies.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. --Donna J. Haraway, "Symians, Cyborgs, and Women" The sun is setting in fierce Mt. Pinatubo reds outside Jimmy Armstrong's Saloon, a "trans-cultural" Scottish pub in 20th-Century America's Babel-on-the-Hudson.

U.S. and Mexican authorities Friday announced the seizure of $4 million in property and the freezing of more than $10 million in Mexican bank accounts as part of a joint effort to break up a large cross-border drug conspiracy. U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin said four people were indicted on suspicion of organizing the drug smuggling operation between Mexicali, Mexico, and Calexico, Calif., and of laundering proceeds by buying property in Southern California.

In the hopes of politicians, it has emerged as one answer to the challenge of international terrorism: keeping tabs on foreigners as they enter and exit the United States. "It's important that we have good information," President Bush said recently, "so we can secure the homeland." Yet an array of obstacles still stands in the way of a comprehensive "entry-exit" system as called for by many members of Congress and endorsed by the White House.

Seizures of illegal drugs along the nation's southwest border have skyrocketed in recent months, as Mexican smugglers run up against the concentrated effort of U.S. law enforcement officials to police the region after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Drug seizures from South Texas to Southern California have climbed beyond pre-Sept. 11 levels, rebounding from the sharp decline seen in the weeks immediately after the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, officials said.

Arrests of undocumented immigrants on the U.S. border from Southern California to the tip of Texas have fallen sharply since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in some areas dropping more than 50% as officials report remarkably fewer people trying to slip into the United States. Authorities in Washington and along the nearly 2,000-mile-long border say that, while the sputtering U.S.

For decades, untreated waste has poured from a sieve-like system in Tijuana and flowed downhill through the Tijuana River into the United States, where it eventually dumps into the Pacific Ocean. Officials from the U.S. and Mexico are preparing for talks this month that many hope will solve the problem, which has beset generations of residents along the border.

By one measure, at least, life on the border is back to normal: The drugs are flowing again. Narcotics seizures by U.S. authorities along California's border with Mexico plummeted during the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, but have bounced back to levels of a year earlier and even gone much higher.

The border crossing looks like the finish line of a curious bike race in which riders compete in street clothes. Seeking to avoid the long waits that have bedeviled U.S.-bound vehicular traffic since Sept. 11, Tijuana residents who work on the American side have taken to two wheels in unprecedented numbers. Bicyclists are allowed to move to the front of the line, sparing them waits that can reach two to four hours for those entering by car or on foot. U.S.

The letter from the San Diego Police Department arrived in Benito Hernandez's mailbox last week. Others in Hernandez's business--currency-exchange houses, or casas de cambio-- also received the correspondence in recent days. Many did not like what they read: A new city law will require the city's money-exchange houses, mostly concentrated in the U.S.-Mexico border community of San Ysidro, to comply with a host of new regulations, including police licensing and supervision.

Nick Inzunza, scion of a prominent border family, did not speak more than a few words of Spanish until he was an adult. But not long ago, Inzunza stood up before dozens of his Mexican fiancee's relatives and solemnly asked for her hand in an emotional Tijuana ceremony that seemed worlds away from the freeways and strip malls of Southern California.

Merchants along the U.S. side of the Mexican border say tightened border controls since Sept. 11 have scared away their usual customers and left many businesses on the brink of collapse. In much the way Tijuana souvenir vendors watched their American clientele wither after the attacks, dozens of U.S. businesses near the border crossing in San Ysidro have now seen sales tumble, some as much as 75%.

The Mexican government will propose to U.S. homeland security czar Thomas J. Ridge a coordinated approach to border security, which could include harmonizing visa requirements for visitors from third countries, Mexican officials say. In meetings scheduled today in Washington, Mexican officials want to explore ways to share information about visitors arriving in their nation so that potential terrorists can be spotted quickly, a senior Mexican official said.