The Border Fence, Brownsville 
A Tale of Two Cities
To residents of Presidio and Ojinaga, the international border that separated them had always seemed irrelevant. They crossed it easily, spoke the same language, and considered themselves part of the same community. When Mexican authorities wrongly imprisoned a Texas grocer in April, that relationship changed dramatically—and it hasn't been the same since.
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Throughout his twenties and thirties, Herrera helped around the H&H Supermarket, which his father then owned with Junie's uncle, and cashed in bags of coins he collected from a small car wash he had bought. On long weekends he might have gone shopping in El Paso or hit the bars in Mazatlán. He often made a pilgrimage to the Tejano Music Awards in San Antonio. But Herrera finally buckled down last February, when he borrowed $250,000 to buy out his uncle's share of the store. His grandfather had founded the business in 1929, and when Junie, the third generation, joined his father, Jesus "Chuchi" Herrera, in management, the local paper commemorated the event with a front-page shot of the two men shaking hands in front of the produce section. At age 41, it was the younger Herrera's first mortgage—enough, friends say, to make him tone down the partying. But he became even more popular in his new job, greeting his customers by name and offering a little informal credit when they needed it.
Junie Herrera had so many friends that if the Chihuahua government needed a scapegoat for Ortega Mata's murder, they picked the worst one possible. Within days, residents of both towns had painted their car windows with white shoe polish and plastered their buildings with fluorescent flyers written in indignant Spanish: "We've Had Enough. Free Junie." "Junie Is Innocent." "Justice for Junie." People mobilized on both sides of the river to raise money for Herrera's legal fund, and when reporters arrived from the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times, and Telemundo, they articulated their rage and posed for cameras with yellow ribbons, T-shirts, and posters. Some thirty to fifty people gathered every evening in the rose garden grotto at Santa Teresa de Jesus Church in Presidio to recite a tweaked version of the rosary they called a Rosary of Liberation. For every Hail Mary, they instead asked Jesus to free Junie. At the annual Onion Festival on May 19, the star of the parade was Junie's Chevy Bel Air, which was tugged on a flatbed and revved up when it rolled by the H&H Supermarket. Presidio tracked Herrera's absence in sunsets, on the store's marquee: "34 Días Sin Junie. Junie Come Home." Meanwhile Herrera measured his world in steps—30 if he walked the perimeter of the tiny courtyard he shared with sixty other prisoners; 27 if he cut corners.
The family also tried its best to enlist political help, but the most that American legislators could promise was that they would monitor the case. Every day, the Herreras made pleas to the Chihuahua prosecutors, to the media, to Jesus Christ himself. "Yesterday I was asking Him, '¿Qué pasa? Send us a sign also,'" Chely confessed one afternoon on the steps of La Iglesia de Nuestro Padre Jesús in Ojinaga's main plaza, pigeons fluttering about. "You begin to question. You do. I do."
"Welcome to the real frontier" reads a sign that greets visitors after they have passed Marfa and rolled down the Chinati Mountains on U.S. 67, bumping into the Mexican border an hour later. Presidio is a town of 6,000, ninety miles west of Big Bend National Park. Visually it comes as quite a contrast to the West Texas highlands: brown, bleak, and seemingly broke. Jobs are scant besides those in the schools, the government agencies, the ranches and the cantaloupe, onion, and alfalfa fields. Only the two main highways and a road linking them are paved. Mobile homes, unpainted cinder-block dwellings, and several dozen handsome brick houses all sit on dirt and rock lanes. But on the opposite riverbank, Ojinaga is basted with color and people—30,000 of them. Though its industry is similar to Presidio's, there are many more reasons to hang out there: the horse races, the cockfights, the drive-ins, the clubs, the restaurants, the pretty plaza between the church and the city hall. Compared with other Mexican border towns, Ojinaga is cleaner, more orderly—almost, one is tempted to say, uncorrupted.
In December 1913 the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked Ojinaga; by January he was in control. "Everybody was expecting a massacre, and that's what occurred," said Ojinaga mayor Víctor Sotelo Mata. "All the refugees ran to Presidio, where their relatives gave them shelter." Thus began the marriage of Presidio and Ojinaga, a pragmatic commitment based on the realization that only they could help each other in bad times. A unique social structure exists here too. In other border cities people of the same skin color will group themselves by citizenship and class. That would be a luxury in tiny Presidio and Ojinaga. Here, melon pickers and teachers and accountants from both sides of the border mingle.
While Presidio is known as the hottest place in Texas—the temperature routinely exceeds 110 degrees in the summer— Ojinaga's claim to fame is more dubious. It is known as a leading transshipment point for drugs headed for the United States, and the rugged mountains on both sides of the border serve to shield drug runners. In October three of Ojinaga's leading drug lords were charged in a 24-count Midland federal grand jury indictment that included murder, money laundering, and possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. The late Mexican drug lord Pablo Acosta headquartered his multimillion dollar operation in Ojinaga, smuggling some sixty tons of cocaine into the U.S. annually until he was gunned down by Mexican federal police in 1987. In 1990 American journalist Terrence Poppa published Drug Lord, an enthralling look at Acosta's life in which he argued that drug dealing in Chihuahua and throughout Mexico is controlled and protected top-down, involving state governorships, federal and state police, and the military. Presidio, though, is hardly immune to the lucrative border business. In 1992 Presidio County sheriff Rick Thompson was caught with a ton of cocaine.
With so much drug trafficking and death, the attorney general for the state of Chihuahua, which makes up fully one eighth of Mexico, has a big job. Arturo González Rascón, the current attorney general, has a long list of unsolved high-profile cases: the attempted assassination of Governor Patricio Martínez García, the slaying of dozens of maquiladora women in Ciudad Juárez, and most recently, the murder of two family members of the forensic scientist who was studying the women's killings. In a country known to repress the media, a murdered journalist like Ortega Mata only worsened González Rascón's image. State investigators initially questioned more than eighty people about Ortega Mata's murder, with possible motives morphing from politics to a crime of passion to a drug deal gone bad.
Then, a month before Herrera's arrest, Guadalupe Valenzuela Lozano, a prostitute and drug addict known as La Tecata, declared that she had witnessed Ortega Mata's murder from a vacant lot where she had stopped to urinate that cold February night. One of about twenty addicts who regularly beg for money in the Ojinaga plaza, La Tecata is apprehended two to three times a month for theft, public intoxication, or disturbing the peace, one jailer told a Mexican newspaper. On March 16, the day she testified, she was in jail for robbing an elderly man who had solicited her for sex. Though La Tecata didn't recognize the man that she allegedly saw shoot the journalist, she said that the following day she had described him to Arturo "El Fay" Molina Aguirre, a fellow addict who shines shoes for a living. El Fay then declared to the court that the man La Tecata had described was Otoniel Herrera Valdés, El Jimmy, a customer of his and, he thought, the son of a Presidio grocer. For reasons that will never be known—perhaps an error, perhaps a cover-up, perhaps a combination of both—the government proceeded to arrest a different Herrera.
Even before Judge Estrada Rascón made his ruling to bind Herrera for trial on May 4, the state's case had fallen apart. Two days before, Ojinaga police chief René Cardona Bejarano had presented jail intake records showing that La Tecata had been imprisoned on February 18 and not released until February 20, a day after she said she'd witnessed the journalist's murder (later in the trial, three jail employees and a woman who was incarcerated with La Tecata corroborated the jail records). Then things got worse. El Fay retracted his previous declaration, confessing that La Tecata had persuaded him to testify and that the two had been paid off by the state's investigators. El Fay, whose arms are lined with puffy pink scars where he slashes them when he goes through withdrawal, told me that he was offered eight payments, which he gladly took to buy his drugs.
Yet prosecutors pushed forward anyway. Judge Estrada Rascón, who appeared jittery during court proceedings and avoided eye contact with reporters, insisted that he had made his decision on his own. But he would not say what, in his view, incriminated Herrera enough to hold him for trial. "He's getting his due process according to all the formalities of the law," he said from his hot, bare office in the municipal compound next to the jail where Herrera sat behind bars. "I'm not getting any type of pressure from anyone. We're autonomous." Most people who know how the Mexican justice system works believed differently. "It's just that he feels pressure, not directly, but indirectly," said Valentín Escontrías Galindo, the jail administrator. "I don't know what words they [state prosecutors] use to suggest that Junie shouldn't be let out. But then the judge thinks, 'I could be fired.'"
There were other signs that law enforcement was breaking rank, nowhere more evident than at a July 5 hearing. The prosecutors had introduced a Mexican border-crossing video that was supposed to prove that Herrera had been in Ojinaga the night of the murder. It was obvious that the tape was worthless: The cars whizzed by so fast that license plates and drivers were indistinguishable. Slumped in a corner chair, Herrera remained silent throughout the proceedings. But when the room had almost cleared, he let out a loud sigh. Ojinaga district attorney Sergio García Gámez turned and his eyes met Herrera's. The attorney's face softened. "It's difficult, I know," he told Herrera. "Your lawyer is going to get you out. Don't worry."
Hearing this, Herrera's attorney, Adolfo Baca Magaña, exploded. García Gámez was the prosecutor who had prepared the statement in which La Tecata changed the suspect's name from Otoniel Herrera Valdés to Jesus Manuel Herrera. The statement is dated April 28—a day before Herrera's arrest—but the stamp that reflects the court's receipt of the document reads April 27. Baca Magaña believes that it was prepared only after the state discovered the mismatch in names, then slipped into Herrera's file. "Why don't you tell him [Junie] that?" Baca Magaña thundered.
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