Pubdate: Thu, 11 Aug 2005
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2005 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Ralph Blumenthal
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Laredo

TEXAS TOWN IS UNNERVED BY VIOLENCE IN MEXICO

LAREDO, Tex. - The killings and kidnappings across the Rio Grande 
have kept Marco A. Alvarado and his wife from visiting her kin in Nuevo Laredo.

William Slemaker and Pablo Cisneros haunt the border searching for 
clues and awaiting news of their kidnapped and long-missing daughters.

Carlos Carranco Jr. and other teachers are spending vacation days in 
school, wresting blue plastic guns from one another and learning how 
to detect drug problems and subdue violent students, lessons that 
will be followed by a mock siege this fall.

Such is life these days in Laredo, the trading powerhouse and major 
border crossing point of 225,000 people who have been spooked by the 
drug wars and escalating violence in their Mexican sister city.

On the surface, the city remains almost absurdly quaint, a 
frontierlike outpost of steepled churches, shaded plazas, vintage 
warehouses, ironwork galleries, and narrow, wild west streets, where 
hot-rodders cruise on Sunday nights and the high point of the year is 
Washington's Birthday Celebration, a debutante pageant dedicated to 
the nation's first couple, George and Martha.

But the anarchy of Nuevo Laredo has cast a pall over two communities 
long accustomed to regarding each other as neighbors across the way, 
united, not divided, by the border.

Nuevo Laredo's grim record includes more than 100 unsolved killings 
in the last year, downtown crossfires, brazen assassinations (a new 
police chief on his first day in June and a city councilman on Aug. 
5), sending in federal troops to replace local police officers who 
were thought to be in league with criminal gangs and the kidnappings 
of at least 43 Americans in the last 12 months.

[On Wednesday, a Nuevo Laredo police officer was shot to death and a 
former officer was wounded on a busy street in broad daylight, 
Tamaluipas State police officials said.]

Some others may, but the people of Laredo do not dismiss the rampage 
as a challenge just for the overmatched Mexican authorities.

"It's not their problem - it's our problem," said Alan Jackson, a 
Laredo insurance executive whose family roots go back two and a half 
centuries to the Spanish colonization.

Laredo's mayor, Elizabeth G. Flores, whose forebears were also 
original ranch settlers, said Los Dos Laredos has always been one big 
place. When people visit the other city over one of two international 
bridges, "they cross the street, they don't cross the river," she said.

Though trade continues, casual crossings have declined as fears have 
risen of catching a stray bullet or running afoul of Mexican police 
officers in league with criminal gangs. A recent series of calls to 
prominent Laredans demanding money for protection from kidnapping did 
nothing to ease the anxiety.

Assurances of safety from the Laredo Chamber of Commerce 
notwithstanding, the Alvarados are staying closer to home. "My wife's 
family is from Nuevo Laredo, but we haven't gone in a year," said Mr. 
Alvarado, a spokesman for the Laredo Independent School District.

Mercurio Martinez Jr., a former judge, is curtailing his forays 
across the Rio Grande to his favorite Nuevo Laredo restaurant, Mexico 
Tipico, for its kid-goat specialty, cabrito.

Those who do venture over the border for business or family ties "are 
looking around their shoulders - you can sense the nervousness," said 
Antonio Rodriguez, associate dean of the college of business at Texas 
A&M International University. "I hope I don't get into trouble on the 
other side with something I said," he added at the end of a telephone 
interview.

Young people long drawn to the liberal night life of Nuevo Laredo - 
where you were said to be of drinking age as soon as you could push a 
peso across the bar - are being kept home by worried parents. 
Instead, they throng Laredo clubs like Graham Central Station, their 
doings swelling the ?Que Pasa? section of The Laredo Morning Times.

Some shrug and live with the risks. Lynda Ramirez, 25, an art 
director for a large company in Laredo, has chosen to live in Nuevo 
Laredo with her family and future husband. "Yes, it's my home and I'm 
not going to hide," she said. "It's no different as if I lived at the Bronx."

In the end, Laredans say, geography is destiny. Astride Interstate 
35, funneling traffic from Mexico City and Monterrey through the 
American heartland as far north as Lake Superior, Laredo is a gateway 
for merchants on both sides of the law.

Laredo, whose population has doubled in less than 20 years, is 
bustling with Mexican shoppers and smugglers enticed by American 
appliances, electronics and fashions, and rumbling with nearly 10,000 
trucks and 1,800 loaded rail cars that pass daily through the border crossing.

Local officials worry not just about spreading drug violence but 
potential terrorism as well. "Our motto," said Norman A. Townsend, 
the supervisory F.B.I. agent in Laredo, "is if something bad were to 
happen, he didn't come through Laredo."

Illegal immigration remains a tribute to human ingenuity, with one 
would-be infiltrator sewn inside an overstuffed van seat and 
discovered when he moved.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, 
said Mexican authorities were committed to restoring order and "have 
been making some progress."

Still, two recent killings on Laredo streets have been linked to drug 
gangs, said Chief John W. Montoya of the Border Patrol's Laredo 
sector. And on May 23, accounts of a local gang shooting caused mass 
panic at Lyndon B. Johnson High School, prompting 703 absences.

A high-profile carjacking in January showed just how vulnerable 
locals can be. Hector Bolanos, a leading Mexican customs broker with 
business and family ties on both sides of the border, had his new car 
taken at gunpoint in Nuevo Laredo. Mr. Bolanos, who uses a 
wheelchair, was hauled out and left in the street.

With good official contacts, he complained to the governor of 
Tamaluipas State and demanded his car back. The police delivered it, 
slightly battered, two days later. Mr. Bolanos confirmed the account 
on National Public Radio in February, declining to provide details, 
but did not respond to a message left recently at his freight 
forwarding company in Laredo. At a recent speech in Nuevo Laredo, Mr. 
Bolanos belittled the concern over violence and did not allude to his 
ordeal, people there said.

"Life on the border is unique," Chief Montoya of the Border Patrol 
said. "And life in Laredo is more unique."

Ardent boosters like Mayor Flores, who has infuriated some by 
insisting that all kidnapping victims were tied to the drug trade, 
are in the difficult position of playing down public concern while 
demanding that more be done to restore law and order in Nuevo Laredo.

Even before the latest mayhem in Nuevo Laredo, fears of terrorism 
growing out of last year's Chechen rebel attack on the Russian school 
in Beslan prompted the Laredo School District to become the testing 
ground for a security program developed by Texas State University in 
San Marcos with a state grant.

In July, more than 100 teachers and administrators gathered in a 
Laredo high school for demonstrations on how to detect drugs and 
control abusive students. "Do not approach from behind because the 
strongest kick a human being can deliver is a mule kick," cautioned 
Cullen Grissom, a former police officer now with the Texas 
Engineering Extension Service of Texas A&M, which is providing the 
training. He mimed a backward kick at a husky guinea pig who 
instinctively doubled over.

Afterward, Mr. Grissom and a partner handed out blue plastic 
automatics and showed the teachers how to safely disarm one another.

The sessions are continuing, with police officers responding recently 
to a mock mass shooting at the school. In September, school 
officials, teachers and public safety officers are to enact a daylong 
war game simulating another large-scale attack.

Anxiety over a drug threat in schools and elsewhere is well founded, 
Chief Montoya said. The value of drug seizures in the Laredo sector 
has risen only slightly, but while the amount of marijuana has 
declined, cocaine seizures rose to 4,126 pounds in the period from 
October through June, compared with 3,000 pounds in those months a 
year earlier.

In the view of some officials, the war on drugs in Laredo has been 
hampered by enmity between the Webb County district attorney, Joe 
Rubio, and the United States attorney's office for the Southern 
District of Texas, in Houston. Federal prosecutors convicted Mr. 
Rubio's father, brother, cousin and office employees in 2000 of 
taking bribes to fix cases. Mr. Rubio, 51, was never charged but, 
angry at the government, he ended his office's practice of 
prosecuting federal seizures up to 50 kilos in cooperation with the government.

"If someone did something wrong they have to pay the price, including 
members of my family," he said. But the government, he said, "made it 
a hell of a lot bigger than it was." Mr. Rubio, elected five times 
since 1988, said, "We're concentrating more on local drug cases."

To Laredans like Mr. Slemaker, the violence has struck with 
particular vengeance. On Sept. 18, his stepdaughter, Yvette Martinez, 
27, a mother of two girls, and Mr. Cisneros's daughter, Brenda, who 
was celebrating her 23rd birthday, disappeared after attending a 
concert by the Mexican pop star Pepe Aguilar in Nuevo Laredo. Witness 
accounts suggested they were stopped by the Mexican police after 4 
a.m. five blocks south of the international bridge, Mr. Slemaker said.

Nine others vanished that night, he said, for a total of at least 43 
Americans abducted in the last 12 months. Three were slain, 17 were 
released and 23 remain missing, he said.

Although the Mexican police turned away his inquiries, Mr. Slemaker 
said, he later found his stepdaughter's Mitsubishi in a Nuevo Laredo 
wrecker's lot used by the police, with dents indicating the car had 
been hit from behind. With little cooperation from American 
authorities apart from Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of 
Texas, he said, the two fathers regularly cruise Nuevo Laredo in 
their own investigation.

"Our pain is greater than our fear," said Mr. Slemaker, 43, a train 
conductor and trucker. "And we're past the pain - we're mad now."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake