October 2001
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.
He was a favorite child of two nations, though Jesus Manuel "Junie" Herrera didn't see it that way at all. Not as he was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on April 29, sandwiched in a leisurely procession of members of the Hotter Than Hell Drag Race Club, Presidio's goodwill ambassadors. Wives and kids and vintage cars in tow, Herrera and his friends did not think of the short drive to Ojinaga as a venture into another country, a foreign republic with foreign people and customs and, especially, a foreign justice system. All their lives they had crossed that boundary. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Out in the torrid Chihuahuan Desert in a place fittingly called Pista Caliente, or Hot Track, men from both sides of the Rio Grande raced each other monthly on a skinny, two-lane asphalt track. They had a common goal: a gaudy, three-foot-tall trophy that when Herrera won, he would showcase in the grocery store he owned with his father, whose patrons were mostly from Mexico. Afterward, the whole group would stop at La Estancia, a popular Ojinaga watering hole where they'd park their trucks and down some beers in good company.
The people of Presidio and Ojinaga were aware that they lived on the edges of their two countries, but except for bureaucratic nuisances like paying taxes or electing some distant government leader, here the Rio Grande had always seemed irrelevant. Because of the two towns' isolation—two and a half hours to the nearest Wal-Mart in Fort Stockton or Chihuahua City—they had come to depend on the border economy. Social life and even family life here was profoundly international: Often, one's mother, best friend, or significant other lived on the opposite side of a tollbooth. Sure, residents watched as U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents wrestled with a steady stream of drugs and illegal immigration. But that was another world, one from which they considered themselves immune. In theirs, the two towns nurtured each other more than they caused each other headaches.
That changed dramatically on April 29. Twenty minutes after the racers had gathered at Pista Caliente, as Herrera was completing his second trial run, he noticed a group of six men approaching him. They were judiciales—state police. "What I thought was maybe he didn't pay a speeding ticket or something," said Herrera's friend Tiburcio "Butch" Acosta, a Presidio councilman and an assistant store manager at a duty-free shop who had been watching from a distance. The police swarmed around Herrera's 1955 Chevy Bel Air; Herrera, as usual, offered his hand. The judiciales shook it. Then they brought out the handcuffs. Dryly, they informed him that they had "un orden de aprehensión por homicidio" and that he was under arrest. Herrera was so astonished that he asked for an explanation. "Don't you know what homicide is?" the judiciales barked. Bewildered, he turned to look at his friends, but no one could explain what was unfolding as the agents walked him away to one of their trucks.
As his astounded family and friends soon discovered, Herrera had been arrested for the February 19 murder of José Luis Ortega Mata, the 37-year-old editor of the weekly newspaper El Semanario de Ojinaga. Ortega had been shot twice in the head with a .22 pistol and found a few blocks from his home, next to his minivan. To the racing club, and to almost everyone else in Presidio and Ojinaga, the charges were preposterous. Herrera was an immensely popular figure, a prominent, highly visible citizen with hundreds of friends on both sides of the border. The details behind the charges were even more absurd. The arrest warrant the state police had used when they handcuffed him carried someone else's name. The government's sole witness, a heroin addict and prostitute who habitually robbed her clients, was in jail for theft the day she said she saw Herrera shoot the journalist. The description she gave of the murderer—short, dark-skinned, with sideburns and a mustache—did not fit the fair-skinned, six-foot-one Herrera at all.
Then there was the victim himself, whose gutsy journalism in one of the most drug-infested corners of Mexico had seemed almost to invite reprisals. Four days before his death, Ortega had published a front-page story about the government's investigation of a drug-trafficking operation near the state's capital. In it, he claimed that traffickers from the city of Aldama were hustling drugs through Ojinaga into the United States, and he detailed their storage places, smuggling routes, and even the type of truck driven by the alleged ringleader. Recently he had reported that the fugitive drug trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, allegedly the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, might be hiding out near Ojinaga. There were odd circumstances in Ortega's personal life too that suggested other motives. Investigators found videotapes that he had made while having sex with married women.
Despite all these facts, on May 4 Ojinaga judge Ramón Everardo Estrada Rascón declared that Herrera was a probable suspect in the assassination, launching what in Mexico is a lengthy process of collecting evidence for a final judgment. Because the charges involved murder, Herrera would have to wait behind bars.
Call it a doorway or call it a fence. In 152 years the United States has not figured out what to make of its border with Mexico—whether to open it or close it. (Sometimes, it tries to have it both ways.) Mexican president Vicente Fox's vision, as he has told his Cabinet, is more explicit: Punch as many holes in it as you can. But residents of the U.S.-Mexico borderland often ignore the fact that they live in such high-stakes terrritory. For them, the border's economic lessons—education is free in the U.S., health care is affordable in Mexico—are more important than the precariousness of traveling between two jurisdictions. Culturally they are more like their neighbors than they are different. That is why Junie Herrera's imprisonment was like a loss of innocence for Presidio and Ojinaga, a stark betrayal of the old notion that crossing the border was not a political act. If Herrera—a symbol of the easy cohabitation of the two cities—could be thrown in jail for no reason, who was safe? It's a frustrating reality for the Ojinaguenses, who see injustice all the time and who are visibly fed up with their leaders. But on the opposite bank of the Rio Grande, the residents of Presidio now took refuge in their Americanness.
"We thought it was the same thing to be here or over there in Presidio, but then you find out it's a whole other ball game," Herrera said one July afternoon in a sweltering Ojinaga jail just three miles from his American home. Sometimes, the Texas-Mexico border feels less like a ribbon of water and more like a stone wall.
Look who came to visit, your cousin from El Paso!" Marta Brummett tells her younger brother, Junie, as he greets her by the green bars of the Ojinaga state prison doors. Then she reaches up and says into his ear, desperately, in English this time, "Hug your cousin! Hug your cousin!" Junie Herrera looks only briefly confused when he turns to me. He catches on and leans down for a tentative hug and kiss, the same as he gives his mother, Lucia, and his other sister, Chely Baeza. I hand him a bundle of warm food his family had brought in a plastic grocery bag. The guards nearby don't suspect a thing. As far as they know, at five feet four, with dark hair and brown eyes, I make a credible cousin.
Wednesdays and Sundays are family days at El Cereso, as the prison is called, and early in the morning the inmates mop up their cells in anticipation of the two hours they'll spend with their mothers and wives and children—all squeezed together in a baking concrete building that reeks of urine. Sixty-six days after Herrera's arrest, his family is fed up. They want me, they tell their brother once we arrange a messy circle of upside-down buckets just outside his cell, to show the world where he spends his days. They want me to describe what life has been like for this family since April 29. Plopped atop an ice chest, Herrera nods in agreement and says, "This is a good place to start."
Herrera's world is small, tightly circumscribed, and brutally hot. He lives in a six- by eight-foot cell, into which he has crammed a twin bed given to him by a family friend so that he will not have to sleep on a dingy sponge mattress like the other prisoners. Next to it, he has barely fit a small wooden table where he keeps his cigarettes, dental floss, and a pack of Breath Savers. On his bed is a pile of books, topped by Chicken Soup for the Soul in Spanish. The place had been inhabited by huge, flying roaches when Herrera moved in, but he has obsessively scoured every corner with Lysol and insecticide. On the table a small air conditioner the family had brought sputters a dry, warm breeze that doesn't circulate. There are no windows in this place.
For Lucia Herrera, visiting her son in prison is, strangely, like mothering again at 68. She brings him food twice daily and picks out his clothes every morning, carrying them in a plastic grocery bag tied with a knot, then departs with his dirty jeans, shorts, and sweat-stained shirts. Knowing well the jail's 100-plus temperatures from her visits, every night she freezes bottles of water for him. Though sometimes she breaks down after he waves good-bye from inside the jail, in front of him she is all steel. "You have to have courage because I don't want you getting sick," she says in her raspy voice, making two fists with her hands. "You have to have courage because I don't want them to see you like this. That's what they want, to see you look discouraged. No, sir, you walk out with your head up high."
But Herrera looks anxious and worn today. His leg shakes constantly as he absently traces circles in the center of his forehead with his index finger. Raising Junie's spirits is a family project. "We make it a big deal so he can eat," Marta said before the visit. Today the family has brought brisket burritos with guacamole and chips, which we all eat together in an ironic Fourth of July picnic. They have also brought him letters, stacks of notes that his customers drop into a big basket at the store. "Hey, Junie, how are you?" one of them begins in big, awkward print. "Here Presidio is lonely without your smile."
It is a strange, almost surreal situation in which he finds himself. In both towns Herrera is known as an exceptionally friendly, happy-go-lucky person, a 42-year-old who is still growing up. It was Junie who introduced people from both sides of the border to one another at annual Super Bowl parties in his home, Junie who could persuade a group of men aged eighteen to seventy to buy a lottery ticket together. Although he has a thirteen-year-old daughter with whom he is very close, he has never married (her mother lives in Presidio and has married). His brown-paneled bedroom in the tidy brick home where he still lives with his parents has all the trappings of the archetypal single guy: a computer for late-night Web surfing, stacks of paperback mysteries, Selena and Dale Earnhardt posters, and a glass-covered collection of Zippo lighters.
