Borderline Insanity
In what is shaping up to be the deadliest year in Nuevo Laredo’s history, 77 people have died in Mexico’s drug cartel turf war. Now the violence is seeping into Texas.
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THE BUSINESS OWNERS I spoke with in Nuevo Laredo were deeply frustrated over their city’s deteriorating image. While they agreed that the drug war violence had wreaked havoc on their lives, they argued that it had not affected any tourists. They blamed the U.S. government and the media for scaring away visitors and demanded nuanced news coverage, reports that would help outsiders understand the issue of security on the border in all of its complexity. “We’re not saying, ‘Don’t say what’s happening,’” said Jack Suneson, a perfectly bilingual Mexico native who sells high-end handcrafted furniture, clothes, jewelry, and pottery out of a 24,000-square-foot downtown store called Marti’s. “It’s how you say what’s happening that really makes a big difference.” Suneson pulled out an advertisement that he had clipped from the San Antonio Express-News, which touted a news report on Nuevo Laredo done by one of San Antonio’s television stations. The teaser declared the border city a “Kidnapper’s Hunting Ground.” Suneson became irate as he recalled how he’d sent copies of the paper all the way to the Tamaulipas governor’s office. “The way the news is being sensationalized is really having an effect on the livelihood of many people,” he said. “This is not open season down here on Americans, where they’re being kidnapped right and left. It’s curious that the people missing are all from the border area. They’re all local people.”
On that point, Suneson is right. But there are still serious problems that the drug enterprise has created for the entire border region that remain unresolved. The most glaring of these is the freedom with which the criminals prowl through their communities, even when many people know who they are. Ironically, the many jurisdictional boundaries that have been constructed on either side of the border create a porosity that enables crime. Even if Laredo residents suspect a neighbor—someone like Miguel—of being involved in the drug trade over the border, neither the DEA nor the Laredo police can pursue him until they can implicate him directly in a drug deal or some other crime carried out on American soil. And the DEA, the agency whose mission is to fight drugs, is tied up targeting higher-level traffickers and processing confiscations in the region’s various checkpoints. “They’re not going to take one of their high-paid DEA agents and go work this guy, this little insignificant guy,” said James Kuykendall, a retired DEA agent who appraises real estate in Laredo.
Once in a while, when the crime spreads to American soil, U.S. authorities get a glimpse of how bad the situation is on the other side of the border. Last November, four young men found themselves in a stare-down at an intersection in Laredo during the early hours of the morning. Their Lincoln Navigator was shot twice by men in another vehicle. After giving up on trying to track down their assailants, the young men taped up the bullet holes and drove across the bridge, venturing into Boystown. But once they were there, a security guard saw the tape and stopped them. Unconvinced by their answers to his questions about what had happened to their car, he called his boss. Soon, two Suburbans arrived, delivering a squad of men dressed in black. The Laredoans disappeared.
Their relatives publicly denounced their kidnappings. Four days later, the four men were released, and they returned home wide-eyed, with stories to tell the Laredo police. “All that is very confidential, because they gave us a window into what’s going on in Nuevo Laredo,” a Laredo police detective said. “All the way from the corruption of the police department, working with the drug cartels, to what their activities are with kidnapping victims. I can’t tell you more than that. If I ever tell you more, you can’t print it. Because all that we learned out of that is, like, man. If somebody makes a movie of this—man, it’s incredible to see what’s going on over there.”
In May a group of fed-up Nuevo Laredoans initiated a peace campaign, walking the streets with white balloons and holding forums trying to find local solutions to the continuing violence. Some remained hopeful that this wave, like those of the past, would turn out to be episodic. But the death toll continued to rise. Domínguez’s murder in June shook the nation, raising the difficult question of whether the government had any authority left over the traffickers. President Fox responded directly to his death, launching a program called Safe Mexico that put more than a thousand federal soldiers, special agents, and police officers in the drug-infested states of Tamaulipas, Baja California, and Sinaloa. The program, Fox promised, would specifically seek better cooperation in resolving organized crime among all three levels of government. Nuevo Laredo mayor Daniel Peña Treviño reacted too. He pulled all 760 of the city’s municipal police officers off the streets to screen them for drugs and look into pending criminal records. Ten days later, after the first stage of screening, only 319 cops were left on the force. Forty-one had been sent to Mexico City to be investigated for shooting a convoy of arriving federal agents. Eighty-nine had failed the drug tests. The rest—311 police officers—had simply quit. Meanwhile, the city was left without anyone to answer emergency calls, and the criminals, again, seemed unfazed by the presence of the army. Domínguez had been victim 61 in 2005; three weeks after his death, the toll was at 77.
A business friend of Domínguez’s in San Antonio, who sends bulletproof vehicles to Iraq, Nigeria, and Mexico, later told the Mexican press that the chamber president had called him six days before his execution asking for a bulletproof vest. His friend tried to persuade him not to take the police job, but Domínguez assured him that his duties would be entirely administrative. “What you need is a bulletproof truck,” the associate said. Domínguez had bought dozens of these from him through his import-export business. He replied, nonchalantly, “We’ll see. Maybe later on.”
LYDIA AND HECTOR STOOD IN SILENCE as the man continued to point his gun at them.
“I’m sorry, Hector,” she whispered to her nephew, blinking back tears.
Then Hector clutched her hand and said, “Vámonos, Tía.” They ran “like crazy people,” Lydia recalled. She was wearing two-and-a-half-inch heels, but she doesn’t remember feeling anything on her feet. They heard shots, several of them, as one of their assailants emptied his semiautomatic pistol into the night. They ran in the only direction they knew: toward the international bridge to Laredo.
Lydia’s white blouse was soaked with blood. “Check me!” she yelled at Hector, so full of adrenaline that she thought she’d been hit. She screamed as she approached three policemen on the Mexican side of the bridge. She grabbed the back of her head with her hand, which was trembling.
The men looked at her curiously. Lydia explained the sequence of events to the three policemen, who stood facing her with their hands on their hips. “You have to come with us to file a police report,” they told her. But there was no way she was turning back. She grabbed Hector’s hand and they ran again, across the bridge, over the river, to the customs agent who stood on the other side. She smiled when she recounted that. “I don’t even remember if we said we were American citizens or not.”
The law enforcement authorities on the American side of the bridge had been as useless and indifferent to her pleading as those on the Mexican side. “They just looked at us like we were weirdos,” she said. They told her that they couldn’t help her because the crime had occurred in Mexico; she’d have to go back to Nuevo Laredo and file a report. In Laredo, only the FBI would listen to her story, and an agent informed her that their biggest priority was to investigate kidnappings. For three days Lydia remained in her bedroom, unable to eat, certain in her nervousness that the assailants, some of whom knew where she lived, were going to return to finish the job. She popped pills to sleep and lodged a chair under the knob of the back door. It was still there when I visited her nearly three months later.
One day, Lydia was crawling through bumper-to-bumper traffic in front of a Laredo middle school when she spotted Miguel, who was driving in the opposite direction. “I noticed him right away because he’s got big ears and a big nose, and he’s mother-ugly,” she said. She did her best to act defiant. She rolled down her window and motioned for him to do the same. When he could hear her, she declared: “You stole my car. Why did you do this to me?”
“The police put a gun to my head,” said Miguel.
“Follow me to the police department,” Lydia replied, “and tell that to them.”
Miguel sped away. She never saw him again.
In March, Lydia was still borrowing a car from a family member. Her insurance company argued that there was nothing she could do to recover the $10,000 that made up the difference between what she had paid for her car and what she would be receiving from the bank for her loss. She was debating what kind of car to get next. “Not another Mercedes,” she shuddered. “It would be too traumatizing.”
She had not returned to Nuevo Laredo since her incident, nor did she plan to. “Believe me,” she said, and I believed her. “I’ll never go to Mexico again, not even to the beaches. You think I’m going back into Mexico? Hell, no! And when I say I’m not going back into Mexico, I’m not going back into Mexico. Why are they not putting in the news that you can’t go into Nuevo Laredo? You need to put that: Do not go to Nuevo Laredo, period. Do not go unless you want to die.”
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