Commerce Yields to Security Along the Border

LAREDO, Texas —  All eight lanes of the giant World Trade Bridge are packed, Mexican truck drivers honking and cutting around one another in an hourlong traffic jam to clear the U.S. checkpoint.

Many of the downtown stores are closed, and police seem to be everywhere--at the water plant and the tiny airport, at the four river bridges where federal agents are seizing record amounts of drugs.

Before Sept. 11, Laredo and the other major U.S.-Mexico border crossings seemed headed for an era of unprecedented openness, born of a mandate from the top levels of government to integrate the two countries politically and economically as never before.

Instead, the security crackdown triggered by the terrorist attacks has dramatically changed life on the border--even though none of the terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center entered the United States from Mexico.

“The problem with U.S. Customs and the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] at the border is that, after Sept. 11, they felt there was some kind of terrorist problem here too,” said Rene David Mejia Quintana, the Mexican consul alternate with offices in Laredo.

“So right now everything is much more difficult. We are never going back to Sept. 10.”

The silver lining, most agree, is that tougher law enforcement and greater security should pay off in the long run for border towns whose history of lawlessness is legendary. Laredo, for example, has begun advertising to tourists that its border is much safer now.

But to prosper, towns like El Paso and Laredo depend on an open border. Community coffers and merchants thrive on the free flow of tourists and shoppers and cargo traffic. Now these communities are adapting to a new reality that prosperity takes a back seat to security.

In El Paso, for instance, Veronica Callaghan, who helps run Casco Ventures, an international warehouse operation, said lost revenue from bridge tolls has cost her city about $80,000. About 70,000 Mexicans holding day jobs in El Paso have been laid off. Crime is up, she said, and tourism is down; profits at her own company have slumped 13%.

“It has been economical, social, psychological, cultural. . . . Everybody has had to make some significant adjustments,” she said.

Industry is struggling. In San Diego, Stephen Gross has seen profits at his Border Trade Services warehousing company fall 15%.

“The new focus is on the safety of our country. That’s a mind-shift for us all,” he said. “This is not a short-term issue. This is now the way it’s going to be.”

Tougher security is not alone to blame. The whole U.S. economy has sputtered since Sept. 11, posing unique consequences for businesses and jobs along the border. Fewer American tourists can afford vacations, for example, and those who can have been further dissuaded by the unusually mild winter in the northern United States--causing a drain on local revenue. Meanwhile, falling U.S. demand for consumer goods, many of which come from Mexico, has cut into long-haul cargo traffic back and forth across the border.

That helps explain another post-9/11 phenomenon on the border: a dramatic falloff in arrests of illegal immigrants bound for the United States. With fewer U.S. jobs available, and improvements in the Mexican economy under President Vicente Fox, apparently many migrants are thinking twice before journeying north to the U.S. in search of work.

City officials in Laredo and elsewhere insist that the economy is improving and that enhanced law enforcement ultimately will be good for tourism and trade. But frustration still hangs heavy over the border, much like the thick gray exhaust from the belching trucks.

“Everybody honks,” said Joe Villarreal, a customs supervisor surveying the trucks trying to maneuver past the increased U.S. police presence on the World Trade Bridge.

The Mexican drivers carry goods to local warehouses and, earning $20 a haul, they are in a hurry to clear customs and hopefully return for two more runs before the day is out.

But since Sept. 11, customs is conducting more inspections, more dogs are sniffing out drug traffickers and trucks are being picked at random for special X-ray examinations. All of this ties up traffic, which ties up nerves.

“They honk because they get angry, and they are angry,” Villarreal said. “They honk all day. There could be two trucks on the bridge and they would still be honking at each other.”

In the last three months of last year, customs officers seized 392 pounds of cocaine in Laredo, a ninefold increase from a year earlier. Marijuana seizures doubled, to more than 42,000 pounds.

Recently arrested were a 72-year-old man with a load of marijuana hidden in a propane tank in his pickup truck and a middle-age woman with 41 pounds of cocaine in the spare tire and back door panels of her Ford Explorer.

For the U.S. Border Patrol, charged with arresting illegal immigrants, the last three months of 2001 saw the number of apprehensions drop 22%. “Our numbers are down, but we’re still going out. We’re still looking, we’re still busy,” said Supervisory Agent Louie Wayne Collins.

George A. Gunnoe, assistant chief patrol agent, expects the apprehension numbers eventually to slide back up. “We will always have a job.”

Quintana at the Mexican consulate said that border towns on the Mexican side have also hit hard times. Drugs that cannot get to the U.S. are piling up there, and drug lords are fighting one another. And for many of the same reasons as on the U.S. side, tourism is slumping--down 35% since Sept. 11 in Nuevo Laredo, for instance.

“Either side of the border is vulnerable,” Quintana said.

Many migrants still come north, but most are poor and uneducated, and seem oblivious to how America was transformed on Sept. 11.

“I don’t watch the news,” said Jose Guadalupe Rodriguez, a 27-year-old from Guanajuato apprehended here while headed to Florida.

“I saw the news reports when the buildings fell,” said Julio Bonilla, 36, from Mexico City, also detained after trying to make his second trip to Milwaukee. “But I was coming back here whether or not it happened.”

Meanwhile, local boosters take the only position they can: that it will get better.

Michelle Romani, project coordinator for the Laredo Convention and Visitors Bureau, said her city lost about 30% in revenue when tourism fell and hotel rooms stood empty. But some of that revenue is slowly picking up again, she said.

She and others note with irony that it took a foreign terrorist attack to help solve some of the problems with drugs and illegal immigration on the Southwest border.

“Security comes first; we all accept that,” Romani said. “This is our way to show that Laredo is as patriotic as anybody.”