Mexico's drug war, my backyard

Updated 3m ago |

EAGLE PASS, Texas — For 30 years I've lived on the Texas-Mexico border overlooking the Rio Grande. My hometown and Piedras Negras, Coahuila, are more than sister cities. They function like suburbs to each other. There is no feel of an international border between foreign countries.

Piedras Negras is pushing close to a quarter-million inhabitants, while our sleepy little Texas town is about 23,000. Visitors from Mexico like our first-run movies and cheaper gas. We always take out-of-town visitors to their elegant restaurants for a taste of Mexico. (Or at least we did. More on that in a minute.) Our mayors dine together regularly and push for open borders.

A few months ago, El Restaurante Moderno in Piedras, known locally as "Modernos," closed its doors, another victim of Mexico's raging drug wars. Its quirky elegance and four-star menu had served four generations of luminaries and film stars. John Wayne dined there regularly in 1960 during the filming of The Alamo and was much revered, if you judge by the autographed photos in the bar. Nacho Anaya began working there not long after he invented his "specialty," which became known as the nacho.

The world that was

An easy stroll from the international bridge, Modernos provided an ambiance of tropical elegance and Old World charm. The rear entry opened on a floor-to-ceiling mirror that stretched forever. It was a place of whimsy. One could order anything from frog's legs to cabrito (roasted baby goat), then top off the meal with bananas flambeau, prepared tableside. It was entirely feasible to take a lunch hour to drop across the border and dine in elegance in a foreign country. A wandering photographer memorialized thousands of fiestas since its opening in 1918. Modernos characterized the otherness, the exotic charm that was México.

And I stress the word was. The Mexico I've known for most of my life is dying away, or rather slowly being killed. You might have read about it in this newspaper, or seen snippets on CNN: Drug wars, incessant violence, kidnappings and Al Capone-like retribution. So distant. So other-world.

Yet I live in the U.S., and my world is changing, too.

So far away from the fracas, our national media focus on drug smuggling or illegals entering our country and only sporadically cover the encroaching drug violence. Mexico's President Felipe Calderón marginalizes the murders by citing the 22,900 deaths since 2006 as 90% narcos, 5% law enforcement and, "only" in his words, 5% civil population, despite Mexican headlines so lurid as to be almost incredible. There have been multiple beheadings — the latest form of terror and intimidation.

In the USA earlier this month, President Obama gave a much-awaited speech about immigration, but he said not a word about the blood wars consuming a country just south of the border.

Yet the violence keeps inching closer.

In December, local officials — Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster and Piedras Negras Mayor Raúl Alejandro Vela Erhard, Coahuila state Attorney General Jesus Torres and other Mexican officials — were toasting one another in a restaurant in Piedras when it was sprayed with bullets. One of the diners, a woman who had gone out to her car for something trivial, was killed. In April 2009, the Piedras police chief was slain. Now armed gangs fight it out along the streets.

Piedras Negras seems to be catching up with Juarez — the northern city across the border from El Paso — as a focal point in the war between the Zetas and the Golfo/Sinaloa drug cartels for this smuggling corridor. (Just weeks ago, stray bullets from an AK-47 shootout in Juarez pocked the El Paso City Hall.)

What's difficult to explain to Americans who haven't lived in a border town is that those who do see Mexico's problem as our problem, too. Not just for fear that the violence will seep across this man-determined boundary (which I suspect it will), but the despair that as my Mexican friends lose their way of life, I'm also losing mine. As Piedras is lacerated, Eagle Pass winces in pain.

Violence and the economy

Terrorist violence continues to escalate in Piedras. A few weeks ago, an incendiary device was thrown over the fence into the parking lot of the Zocalo newspaper; the threatened newspaper has fallen silent. A Canadian tourist died in a carjacking a bit farther inland. These spasms of violence have all occurred after the Mexican military stepped up its presence. Just last year, the military deployed more than 3,000 troops in the state of Coahuila to assist federal, state and local law enforcement. But these youths are poorly paid and easily suborned.

The human toll is substantial, but the economic damage has been widespread, too. When the U.S. government began requiring its citizens returning from Mexico to carry a passport (unrelated to the drug wars), the economy took a hit. But when reports of violence began to percolate through U.S. media outlets along the border, tourism dried up. The feeling in the region is that if the totality of this strife gets out, Mexico's government will collapse without the tourism it subsists on. Yet unless the world takes note, and the United States treats this as the plague that it is, this war might never end.

The wider, grimmer world of terrorism and beheadings, of a populace held hostage by lawlessness and corruption, isn't half a world away in foreign deserts. It's here, just a few hundred yards from my backdoor. It's time the leaders in Washington and, yes, my fellow citizens understand that this isn't some distant problem in some faraway land.

An era of leisurely elegance has been slaughtered, and among the victims is my favorite restaurant.

Carol Cullar is executive director of the Rio Bravo Nature Center Foundation in Eagle Pass. Her short fiction and poetry appear in various literary journals.

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