Source: Los Angeles Times Contact: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 Reviewed by Robert Collier on the Chronicle Staff Book Review Section, Page 9 BOOK REVIEW Corruption on the Border Intrigue and chaos in Tijuana TWILIGHT ON THE LINE Underworlds and Politice at the US.-Mexican Border By Sebastian Botelia W.W. Norton; 320 pages; $25 On California's southern frontier drug cmuggling has become a multibillion-dollar business, corrupting officials on both sides of the border and spawning violence that has severely destabilized the Mexican government. It's heady material for a writer, and Los Angeles Times reporter Sebastian Rotella rises to the occasion. In "Twilight on the Line" he exhaustively and eloquently describes the intrigue and chaos of the area on and around Tijuana, Mexico. In recent years, Rotella shows, Tijuana has grown from a backwater for U.S. tourists to a sprawling metropolis of 1.5 million. It is an industrial powerhouse and the most important crossing-point for drugs and migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Rotella's investigation of the complicated webs of conspiracy surrounding the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio contains many tantalizing scooplets. He traces the plot through the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the Arellano Felix brothers' drug cartel and across the border to the gangs of San Diego's Barrio Logan. He finds no smoking gun and is careful to distinguish between fact, rumor and disinformation. But the story is made all the better- and all the more shocking-for his caution. Rotella describes in telling detail how drug money has permeated nearly every level of government and law enforcement. In Tijuaua the dividing line between cops and crooks is often fuzzy, and their philosophy is invariably the same: "A beefy veteran detective of the Baja state police- thick gold chains around a thick neck, a gold bracelet, a steady stare-described the semiotics of murder to a cross-border visitor as he drank beer and ate lamb in the wood-paneled booth of a spacious restaurant. 'You shoot someone in the back, it means they betrayed someone. You shoot them in the face, it means they talked. It all has meaning. It's like a language." Rotella never descends to hectoring or condescension toward Mexicans, as many U.S. reporters do. Nor does he resort to parple prose. Some of his most insightful writing is about the people caught in the border immigration faceoff: the Border Patrol agents, the migrants and Mexico's Grupo Beta, an elite police squad that helps protect the border crossers against thieves and rapists. Rotella is surprisingly sympathetic to all three sides, and he shows how many honorable people are doing their best within the confines of the system. Yet he is decidedly skeptical about U.S. immigration politics. The periodic crackdowns on the border in the mid-1990s merely helped drive honest immigrants into the hands of the border mafias, he says. The results were "no fast solutions, no easy answers. Immigration had been slowed, but the trade-off was that the smuggling mafias were becoming a bigger, tougher business. The lines between transporters of drugs and immigrants started to blur." A blind spot in "Twilight on the Line" is that it ignores the kind of organized crime that probably affects more people along the border than any other: the labor mafia controlled by the government, large corporations and unions linked to the PRI. For most of Mexico's 900,000 workers in border assembly plants, or maquiladoras, this oppressive system blocks any independent organizing and keeps wages at rock bottom. Those who make the mistake of dissenting are fired by.management and beaten by PRI goons. Of course, this sort of crime is not as cinematic as drug smuggling, assassinations or hordes of immigrants sprinting across the desert. It is more humdrum and it rarely gets press attention. Nor does Rotella address how drug lords have taken advantage of NAFTA to smuggle their wares. Because of vastly increased volumes of trade crossing the border, traffickers are able to hide drugs in legitimate shipments that are rushed through customs. In fact, many drug lords are believed to have invested heavily in legitimate import-export businesses as a means of obtaining cover. Rotella's greatest strength is the spare beauty of some of his prose. His description of the scene at the Tijuana line as the Border Patrol sends back a group of illegal crossers is typically bleak yet affectionate: "Shaven headed U.S. Marines, tattooed homeboys in baggy pants, high school girls in shorts and halter tops, ambling tourists in serapes. The revelers and the released prisoners flowed together obliviously, their worlds intersecting without seeming to touch. They drifted into the crowd of taxi drivers hustling for fares, the vendors and beggars and smugglers, the smoke from the taco stands, the dance music and cantina neon."